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The Left and the Jihad
Fred Halliday
8 – 9 – 2006
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.
Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and
visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies
(IBEI). His books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB
Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths About the Middle East (Saqi, 2005).
Copyright © Fred Halliday, Published by openDemocracy Ltd.