[LAF] The Left and the Jihad

[Echo of Freedom]

The Left and the Jihad
Fred Halliday
8 - 9 - 2006
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization/left_jihad_3886.jsp

The left was once the principal enemy of radical Islamism. So how did old 
enemies become new friends? Fred Halliday reports.
	

The approaching fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States 
highlights an issue much in evidence in the world today, but one that receives 
too little historically-informed and critical analysis: the relationship between 
militant Islamic groups and the left.

It is evident that the attacks, and others before and since on US and allied 
forces around the world, have won the Islamist groups responsible considerable 
sympathy far beyond the Muslim world, including among those vehemently opposed 
from a variety of ideological perspectives to the principal manifestations of 
its power. It is striking, however, that - beyond such often visceral reactions 
- there are signs of a far more developed and politically articulated 
accommodation in many parts of the world between Islamism as a political force 
and many groups of the left.

The latter show every indication of appearing to see some combination of 
al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbollah, Hamas, and (not least) Iranian 
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as exemplifying a new form of international 
anti-imperialism that matches - even completes - their own historic project. 
This putative combined movement may be in the eyes of such leftist groups and 
intellectual trends hampered by "false consciousness", but this does not 
compromise the impulse to "objectively" support or at least indulge them.

The trend is unmistakable. Thus the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez flies to 
Tehran to embrace the Iranian president. London's mayor Ken Livingstone, and the 
vocal Respect party member of the British parliament George Galloway, welcome 
the visit to the city of the Egyptian cleric (and Muslim Brotherhood figurehead) 
Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Many in the sectarian leftist factions (and beyond) who 
marched against the impending Iraq war showed no qualms about their alignment 
with radical Muslim organisations, one that has since spiralled from a tactical 
cooperation to something far more elaborated. It is fascinating to see in the 
publications of leftist groups and commentators, for example, how history is 
being rewritten and the language of political argument adjusted to (as it were) 
accommodate this new accommodation.

The most recent manifestation of this trend arrived during the Lebanon war of 
July-August 2006. The Basque country militant I witnessed who waved a yellow 
Hizbollah flag at the head of a protest march is only the tip of a much broader 
phenomenon. The London demonstrators against the war saw the flourishing of many 
banners announcing "we are all Hizbollah now", and the coverage of the movement 
in the leftwing press was notable for its uncritical tone.

All of this is - at least to those with historical awareness, sceptical 
political intelligence, or merely a long memory - disturbing. This is because 
its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all 
political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It 
is also one that underlies the US-declared "war on terror" and the policies that 
have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against "the 
west".

This claim is a classic example of how a half-truth can be more dangerous than 
an outright lie. For while it is true that Islamism in its diverse political and 
violent guises is indeed opposed to the US, to remain there omits a deeper, 
crucial point: that, long before the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis and other 
Islamic militants were attacking "imperialism", they were attacking and killing 
the left - and acting across Asia and Africa as the accomplices of the west.


A tortured history

The modern relationship of the left to militant Islamism dates to the immediate 
aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. At that time, the Soviet leadership was 
promoting an "anti-imperialist" movement in Asia against the British, French and 
Dutch colonial empires, and did indeed see militant Muslims as at least tactical 
allies. For example, at the second congress of the Comintern in 1920, the 
Soviets showed great interest towards the Islamist group led by Tan Malaka in 
Indonesia; following the meeting, many delegates decamped to the Azeri capital 
of Baku for a "Congress of the Peoples of the East". This event, held in an 
ornate opera house, became famous for its fiery appeals to the oppressed masses 
of Asia and included calls by Bolshevik leaders, many of them either Armenian or 
Jewish, for a jihad against the British.

A silent-film clip recently discovered by the Iranian historian Touraj Atabaki 
shows the speakers excitedly appealing to the audience who then proceed to leap 
up and fire their guns into the air, forcing the speakers on the platform to run 
for cover. One of those who attended the Baku conference was the American writer 
John Reed, author of the classic account of the Bolshevik revolution Ten Days 
That Shook the World. (On his return journey from Azerbaijan he was to die after 
catching typhoid from a melon he bought on the way.)

For decades afterwards, the Soviet position on Islam was that it was, if not 
inherently progressive, then at least capable of socialist interpretation. On 
visits in the 1980s to the then two communist Muslim states - the now 
equally-forgotten "Democratic Republic of Afghanistan" and the "People's 
Democratic Republic of Yemen" - I was able to study the way in which secondary 
school textbooks, taught by lay teachers not clerics, treated Islam as a form of 
early socialism.

A verse in the Qur'an stating that "water, grass and fire are common among the 
people" was interpreted as an early, nomadic, form of collective means of 
production; while Muslim concepts of ijma' (consensus), zakat (charitable 
donation), and 'adala (justice) were interpreted in line with the dictates of 
the "non-capitalist" road. Jihad was obviously a form of anti-imperialist 
struggle. A similar alignment of Islamic tradition and modern state socialism 
operated in the six Muslim republics of the Soviet Union.

Such forms of affinity were in the latter part of the 20th century succeeded by 
a far clearer alignment of Islamist groups: against communism, socialism, 
liberalism and all that they stood for, not least with regard to the rights of 
women. In essence, Islamism - the organised political trend, owing its modern 
origin to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, that seeks to 
solve modern political problems by reference to Muslim texts - saw socialism in 
all its forms as another head of the western secular hydra; it had to be fought 
all the more bitterly because it had such a following in the Arab world, in Iran 
and in other Muslim countries.

In a similar way to other opponents of the left (notably the European fascist 
movements), Islamists learned and borrowed much from their secular rivals: 
styles of anti-imperialist rhetoric, systems of social reform, the organisation 
of the centralised party (a striking example of which is Hizbollah in Lebanon, a 
Shi'a copy in nationalist, organisational and military form of the Vietnamese 
Communist Party). This process has continued in the modern critique of 
globalisation and "cultural imperialism".

The ferocious denunciations of "liberalism" by Ayatollah Khomeini and his 
followers are a straight crib from the Stalinist handbook. Osama bin Laden's 
messages, albeit clad in Qur'anic and Arabic poetic garb, contain a 
straightforward, contemporary, radical political messages: our lands are 
occupied by imperialism, our rulers betray our interests, the west is robbing 
our resources, we are the victim of double standards.

The hostility of Islamism to leftwing movements, and the use of Islamists in the 
cold war to fight communism and the left, deserve careful study. A precedent was 
the Spanish civil war, when Francisco Franco recruited tens of thousands of 
Moroccan mercenaries to fight the Spanish republic, on the grounds that 
Catholicism and Islam had a shared enemy in communism. After 1945, this tendency 
became more widespread. In Egypt, up to the revolution of 1952, the communist 
and Islamist movements were in often violent conflict. In the 1960s, Saudi 
Arabia's desire to oppose Nasser's Egypt and Soviet influence in the middle east 
led it to promote the World Islamic League as an anti-socialist alliance, funded 
by Riyadh and backed by Washington. King Feisal of Saudi Arabia was often quoted 
as seeing communism as part of a global Jewish conspiracy and calling on his 
followers to oppose it. In Morocco, the leader of the socialist party, Oman bin 
Jalloun, was assassinated in 1975 by an Islamist militant.


A canvas of conflict

There are further striking cases of this backing of Islamism against the left: 
Turkey, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria among them.

In Turkey in the 1970s, an unstable government beset by challenges from armed 
leftwing groups encouraged both the forces of the nationalist right (the "Grey 
Wolves") and Islamists, and indulged the assassination of leftwing 
intellectuals. In Palestine, the Israeli authorities, concerned to counter the 
influence of al-Fatah in the West Bank in the late 1970s, granted permission for 
educational, charitable and other organisations (linked in large part to the 
Muslim Brotherhood) in ways that helped nurtured the emergence of Hamas in 1987; 
Israeli thus did not create Hamas, but it did facilitate its early growth. In 
Algeria too, factions within the ruling national-liberation movement (FLN) were 
in league with the underground Islamist group, the National Salvation Front; its 
French initials, FIS, gave rise to the observation that the FIS are le fils 
("the son") of the FLN.

In Egypt, from the death of Nasser in 1970 onwards, the regimes of Anwar Sadat 
and Hosni Mubarak actively encouraged the Islamisation of society, in part 
against armed Islamist groups, but also to counter the influence of the 
socialist left. This was a project in which many formerly secular Egyptian 
intellectuals colluded, in an often theatrical embrace of Islam, tradition and 
cultural nationalism.

The trend culminated in the 1990s with a campaign to silence left and 
independent liberal voices: the writer Farag Fouda, who had called for the 
modernisation of Islam, was assassinated in 1992; Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel 
prize-winning author, was stabbed and nearly killed in 1994 (allegedly for his 
open and flexible attitude to religion in his Cairo novels); the writer and 
philosopher Nasser Abu Zeid, who had dared to apply to the Qur'an and other 
classical Islamic texts the techniques of historical and literary criticism 
practised elsewhere in the world, was sent death-threats before being driven 
into exile in 1995.

There were even worse confrontations between Islamism and those of a
socialist and secular liberal persuasion. The National Islamic Front in Sudan, a 
conspiratorial group that explicitly modelled itself on Leninist forms of 
organisation, took power in 1989 and proceeded to arrest, torture and kill 
members of the communist party, all this at a time when playing host to Osama 
bin Laden in Khartoum.

In Yemen, after the partial unification of the military north and socialist 
south in May 1990, the regime allowed assassins of the Islamist movement to kill 
dozens of socialist party members and army officers. This process precipitated 
the civil war of 1994, in which armed Islamist factions linked by ideology and 
political ties to bin Laden (most prominently the Abyan army) fought 
side-by-side with the regular army of the north to crush the socialist south. 
This was an echo of the war in Dhofar province in the neighbouring Arabian state 
of Oman during 1970s, when anti-communist government published propaganda by the 
British-officered intelligence corps denouncing the leftwing rebels for allowing 
men to have only one wife, and promised them four if they came over to the 
government side.


The politics of blood

The historical cycle of enmity reached an even greater pitch in two other 
countries where the anti-communist and rightwing orientation of the Islamists 
became clear. The first, little noticed in the context of Islamism, was the 
crushing of the left in Indonesia in 1965. There the independent and 
"anti-imperialist" regime of President Sukarno was supported by the communist 
party (PKI), the largest in non-communist Asia.

After a conflict within the military itself, a rightwing coup backed by the 
United States seized power and proceeded to crush the left. In rural Java 
especially, the new power was enthusiastically supported by Islamists, led by 
the Nahdat ul-Islam grouping. A convergence between the anti-communism of the 
military and the Islamists was one of the factors in the rampant orgy of killing 
which took the lives of up to a million people. The impact of this event was 
enormous, both for Indonesia itself and the balance of forces in southeast Asia 
at a time when the struggle in Vietnam was about to escalate.

The second country, Afghanistan, also had an outcome of great significance for 
the cold war as a whole. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the most 
fanatical Islamist groups - funded by the CIA, Pakistan and the Saudis to 
overthrow the communist government in Kabul - were killing women teachers, 
bombing schools and forcing women back into the home in the areas they controlled.



Such enemies led the first leader of communist Afghanistan, Nur Mohammad Taraki, 
to refer to the opposition as ikhwan i shayatin ("the satanic brotherhood", a 
play on "Muslim Brotherhood"). Bin Laden himself, in both his 1980s and 
post-1996 periods in Afghanistan, played a particularly active role not just in 
fighting Afghan communists, but also in killing Shi'a, who were, in the 
sectarian worldview of Saudi fundamentalism, seen as akin to communists. The 
consequences of this policy for the Arab and Muslim worlds, and for the world as 
a whole, were evident from the early 1990s onwards. It took the events of the 
clear morning of 11 September 2001 for them to penetrate into the global 
consciousness.

The true and the false

This melancholy history must be supplemented by attention to what is actually 
happening in countries, or parts of countries, where Islamists are influential 
and gaining ground. The reactionary (the word is used advisedly) nature of much 
of their programme on women, free speech, the rights of gays and other 
minorities is evident.

There is also a mindset of anti-Jewish prejudice that is riven with racism and 
religious obscurantism. Only a few in the west noted what many in the Islamic 
world will have at once understood, that one of the most destructive missiles 
fired by Hizbollah into Israel bore the name "Khaibar" - not a benign reference 
to the pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the name of a victorious 
battle fought against the Jews by the Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century. Here 
it is worth recalling the saying of the German socialist leader Bebel, that 
anti-semitism is "the socialism of fools". How many on the left are tolerant if 
not actively complicit in this foolery today is a painful question to ask.

The habit of categorising radical Islamist groups and their ideology as 
"fascist" is unnecessary as well as careless, since the many differences with 
that European model make the comparison redundant. It does not need slogans to 
understand that the Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically 
opposed to the left - that is, the left that has existed on the principles 
founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values 
of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience. The modern 
embodiments of this left have no need of the "false consciousness" that drives 
so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadis.




------
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