Leftists and jihad

The approaching fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States highlights an issue that is widespread in the world today, but which has received too little historically informed and critical analysis: the relationship between militant Islamic groups and the left.

It is clear that these attacks, like others before and after them on the United States and its allies around the world, have brought the Islamist groups responsible significant sympathy far beyond the Muslim world, including among those who, from a variety of ideological positions, vehemently oppose their main manifestations of power. What is striking, however, is that behind such often instinctive reactions are signs of a much more developed and politically articulated consensus in many parts of the world between Islamism as a political force and many left-wing groups.

The latter appear to view some combination of al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and (not least) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an example of a new form of international anti-imperialism, consistent with - and even complementary to - their own historical project. This supposed unified movement may be perceived by such left-wing groups and intellectual currents as being hampered by “false consciousness,” but this does not detract from their desire to “objectively” support or at least indulge them.

The trend is obvious. Thus, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez flies to Tehran to hug the Iranian president. London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Respect MP George Galloway welcome the visit of Egyptian cleric (and Muslim Brotherhood figurehead) Yusuf al-Qaradawi to the city. Many on the left (and beyond) opposed to the impending war in Iraq were not shy about their alliances with radical Muslim organizations, which have since evolved from tactical cooperation into something much more thoughtful. It is interesting to see, for example, in the publications of left-wing groups and commentators, how history is being rewritten and how the language of political argument is being adjusted to (so to speak) this new convention.

The latest manifestation of this trend occurred during the Lebanese war in July–August 2006. The Basque fighter I saw waving a yellow Hezbollah flag at the head of a protest march was just a small part of a much larger phenomenon. London anti-war demonstrators saw scores of banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now,” and left-wing press coverage of the movement was uncritical.

All this is alarming, at least to those with a knowledge of history, a skeptical political intellect, or simply a good memory. This is because it ends up reinforcing one of the most pernicious and incorrect political assertions put forward not by the left, but by the imperialist right. It also underlies the “war on terror” declared by the United States and the policies developed after September 11: Islamism is a movement directed against the “West.”

This statement is a classic example of how half-truths can be more dangerous than outright lies. While Islamism in its various political and violent manifestations is indeed opposed to the United States, maintaining this position misses a deeper and more important point: long before the Muslim Brotherhood began attacking “imperialism,” jihadists and other Islamic militants were attacking and killing leftists, operating throughout Asia and Africa as Western collaborators.

A painful story

The left's modern attitude toward militant Islamism began in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, the Soviet leadership was promoting an "anti-imperialist" movement in Asia against the British, French and Dutch colonial empires, and indeed viewed militant Muslims as at least tactical allies. For example, at the second congress of the Comintern in 1920, the Soviets showed great interest in the Islamist group led by Tan Malaka in Indonesia; After the congress, many delegates went to the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, to the “Congress of the Peoples of the East.” The event, held in an ornate opera house, became famous for its fiery appeals to the oppressed masses of Asia and its calls for jihad against the British by Bolshevik leaders, many of whom were Armenians or Jews.

Recently, Iranian historian Touraj Atabaki discovered a silent film clip that shows speakers excitedly addressing the audience, who then jump up and fire into the air, sending speakers on the podium running for cover. One of the participants at the Baku conference was the American writer John Reed, author of the classic work on the Bolshevik revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World . (On his way back from Azerbaijan, he died after contracting typhus from a melon he bought along the way.)

Over the following decades, the Soviet position on Islam was that, if not inherently progressive, it was at least susceptible to socialist interpretation. During visits in the 1980s to two then-communist Muslim states—the now equally forgotten " Democratic Republic of Afghanistan " and the " People's Democratic Republic of Yemen "—I had the opportunity to study how high school textbooks taught by lay teachers rather than clerics treated Islam as a form of early socialism.

The Qur'anic verse that "water, grass and fire are common to people" was interpreted as an early, nomadic form of collective production; while the Muslim concepts of ijma (consent), zakat (charitable giving) and adala (justice) were interpreted according to the requirements of the “non-capitalist” path. Jihad was obviously a form of anti-imperialist struggle. A similar combination of Islamic tradition and modern state socialism existed in the six Muslim republics of the Soviet Union.

Such forms of community in the second half of the 20th century were replaced by a much clearer position of Islamist groups: against communism, socialism, liberalism and everything connected with them, not least in relation to women's rights. In essence, Islamism—an organized political movement that traces its modern origins to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 and seeks to solve contemporary political problems based on Muslim texts—saw socialism in all its manifestations as another chapter of the Western secular hydra; he had to be fought even more fiercely, since he had many followers in the Arab world, in Iran and other Muslim countries.

Like other opponents of the left (particularly European fascist movements), the Islamists adopted and borrowed much from their secular rivals: styles of anti-imperialist rhetoric, systems of social reform, centralized party organization (a striking example of which is Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiite counterpart of the Vietnamese Communist Party in nationalist, organizational and military form). This process has continued in contemporary critiques of globalization and “cultural imperialism.”

The furious denunciations of “liberalism” by Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers are a direct imitation of the Stalinist textbook. Osama bin Laden's messages, although dressed in Koranic and Arabic poetic garb, contain a straightforward, modern and radical political message: our lands are occupied by imperialism, our rulers are betraying our interests, the West is plundering our resources, we are victims of double standards.

Islamism's hostility to leftist movements and the use of Islamists in the Cold War to fight communism and the left deserve careful study. The precedent was the Spanish Civil War, when Francisco Franco recruited tens of thousands of Moroccan mercenaries to fight the Spanish Republic, arguing that Catholicism and Islam had a common enemy: communism. After 1945, this trend became more widespread. In Egypt, until the 1952 revolution, communist and Islamist movements were often in a state of violent conflict. In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia's desire to counter Nasser's Egyptian and Soviet influence in the Middle East led to the promotion of the World Islamic League as an anti-socialist alliance financed by Riyadh and supported by Washington. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was often quoted viewing communism as part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and urging his followers to oppose it. In Morocco, the leader of the Socialist Party Oman bin Jalloun was killed in 1975 by an Islamist militant.

Cogconflict canvas

There are other prominent examples of Islamist support against the left: Türkiye, Israel/Palestine, Egypt and Algeria among them.

In Turkey in the 1970s, an unstable government faced with challenges from armed leftist groups encouraged both nationalist right-wing (Grey Wolves) and Islamist forces, and condoned the murder of leftist intellectuals. In Palestine, Israeli authorities, concerned about countering al-Fatah's influence in the West Bank in the late 1970s, authorized educational, charitable and other organizations (associated in large part with the Muslim Brotherhood) in ways that helped fuel the emergence of Hamas in 1987; thus, Israel did not create Hamas, but contributed to its early growth. In Algeria, factions within the ruling National Liberation Movement (FLN) were also allied with the underground Islamist group, the National Salvation Front; her French initials, FIS, gave rise to suspicions that the FIS were le fils ("son") of the TNF.

In Egypt, after Nasser's death in 1970, the regimes of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak actively promoted the Islamization of society, partly against armed Islamist groups, but also to counter the influence of the socialist left. Many previously secular Egyptian intellectuals participated in this project, often theatrically embracing Islam, tradition, and cultural nationalism.

The trend culminated in the 1990s with a campaign to suppress left-wing and independent liberal voices: the writer Farag Fouda, who called for the modernization of Islam, was assassinated in 1992; Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate, was attacked with a knife and nearly killed in 1994 (allegedly for his open and flexible attitude towards religion in his Cairo novels); The writer and philosopher Nasser Abu Zeid, who dared to apply the methods of historical and literary criticism practiced in other parts of the world to the Koran and other classical Islamic texts, received death threats and was forced to leave the country in 1995.

There were even more serious clashes between Islamism and adherents of the socialist and secular liberal persuasion. The National Islamic Front in Sudan, a conspiratorial group that clearly modeled itself on Leninist forms of organization, came to power in 1989 and began arresting, torturing and killing members of the Communist Party, all while hosting Osama bin Laden in Khartoum.

In Yemen, after the partial unification of the military north and the socialist south in May 1990, the regime allowed Islamist assassins to kill dozens of socialist party members and army officers. This process precipitated a civil war in 1994, in which armed Islamist groups with ideological and political ties to bin Laden (most notably Abyan's army ) fought alongside the regular army of the north to crush the socialist south. It was an echo of the war in Dhofar province in the neighboring Arab state of Oman in the 1970s, when the anti-communist government published propaganda from an intelligence force of British officers denouncing leftist rebels for allowing men to have only one wife and promising them four if they defected to the government.

Politics of blood

The historical cycle of hostility reached even greater intensity in two other countries, where the anti-communist and right-wing orientation of the Islamists became obvious. The first, hardly noticeable in the context of Islamism, was the defeat of the left in Indonesia in 1965. There, the independent and “anti-imperialist” regime of President Sukarno was supported by the Communist Party of India (CPI), the largest in non-communist Asia.

After a conflict in the army itself, a radical right-wing coup, supported by the United States, seized power and began the defeat of the left. Especially in the rural areas of Java, the new government was ardently supported by Islamists led by the Nahdat ul-Islam group. The rapprochement between the anti-communism of the military and the Islamists was one of the factors behind the rampant killings that claimed the lives of up to a million people. The consequences of this event were enormous both for Indonesia itself and for the balance of power in Southeast Asia at a time when the Vietnam War was on the verge of escalation.

The second country, Afghanistan, was also of great importance for the Cold War as a whole. During the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the most fanatical Islamist groups, funded by the CIA, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to overthrow the communist government in Kabul, killed teachers, bombed schools and forced women to return home in areas under their control.

Such enemies prompted communist Afghanistan's first leader, Noor Mohammad Taraki, to call the opposition "Ikhwan and Shayateen" ("Satanic Brotherhood", a pun on the Muslim Brotherhood). Bin Laden himself, both in the 1980s and after 1996, played a particularly active role not only in the fight against Afghan communists, but also in the murder of Shiites, who were seen as akin to communists in the sectarian worldview of Saudi fundamentalism. The consequences of these policies for the Arab and Muslim world, and for the world at large, have been visible since the early 1990s. Only the events of the morning of September 11, 2001 helped them penetrate the world consciousness.

Liars and the Righteous

This sad story needs to be complemented by attention to what is actually happening in countries or regions where Islamists are in power or gaining strength. The reactionary (the word was used for a reason) nature of a significant part of their programs dedicated to women, freedom of speech, the rights of gays and other minorities is obvious.

There is also anti-Jewish prejudice, riven by racism and religious obscurantism. Few in the West noticed what many in the Islamic world immediately understood: one of the most destructive missiles fired by Hezbollah at Israel was called Khaybar - not an innocuous reference to the pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the name of the victorious battle that the Prophet Muhammad led against the Jews in the 7th century. Here it is worth recalling the statement of the leader of the German socialists Bebel that anti-Semitism is “the socialism of fools.” How much of the left today is tolerant of this madness, if not actively participating in it, is a painful question.

The habit of classifying radical Islamist groups and their ideology as “fascist” is not only unfounded, but also careless, since numerous differences with the European model make such a comparison unnecessary. No slogans are needed to understand that the Islamist program, ideology and history are diametrically opposed to the left, that is, to the left that existed on principles based on classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values ​​of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848 and the experience of generations. The modern incarnations of these leftists do not need the “false consciousness” that drives so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadists.

Translation from English: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/left_jihad_3886jsp/