Knowing nothing whatsoever about Sasha Simic I started reading this post of his and found the story he tells at the beginning of it rather amusing. See for yourself. It concerns an argument over why God should have anything against goats, and Simic uses the story to make a good point. People needn't let differences over religious belief - over whether or not God exists - get in the way of fighting for common political objectives.
But then look what he does with this point. It's an object lesson in the ways that people find of hiding inconvenient realities from themselves. Simic simply invents a reluctance on the part of the secular democratic left to work with Muslims. He refers to...
... the arguments we have heard from secularists in the UK [that] boil down to the question of how progressive atheists can work with Muslims.But there is no one from the secular left, to the best of my knowledge, unwilling to make common cause with others because they are Muslims or because they believe in God. This is a displacement of the real issue, as well as being a calumny. Many on the democratic left do most certainly draw the line at working together with Islamist political organizations, but this is not because of differences over religion except insofar as these are used to underwrite noxious moral and political viewpoints.
Simic himself is less picky in that regard. A partisan of 'democracy', he's happy to be involved in dialogue on common projects with such well-known democratic organizations as Hizbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Objections to these organizations from the secular left are not based on their believing in God. They have, rather, to do with programmatic and other statements of an openly anti-Semitic kind, a belief that civilians are legitimate targets of murder, the aspiration to make Sharia law the basis of government. These are not especially democratic objectives. But it doesn't trouble Sasha Simic when the fight is against 'imperialism'.