Book Review: The Left and Political Islam
Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights by Meredith Tax (New York: Centre for Secular Space), 2013
Reviewed by Sumanta Banerjee
Historically, communists had a rather tenuous relationship with the Muslim right. In the first flush of the Bolshevik Revolution, the new Soviet state in the early 1920s, while resisting the western imperialist offensive, sought allies from among the pan-Islamic forces which were then smarting under the wound of the defeat of their Ottoman empire by the British forces at the end of the first world war, and were looking for a platform to retaliate against the British. M N Roy, who was in Moscow in those days as a part of the international Comintern leadership, gives us a fascinating account in his autobiography of the dilemma that Lenin faced. On the one hand, Lenin lent political support to his natural ally – the secular Kemal Pasha (who, following the collapse of the Ottoman empire, captured power in Turkey, abolished the feudal domination of the religious caliphate and introduced egalitarian reforms), on the other hand, he also grudgingly agreed to provide military aid to conservative pan-Islamic leaders and their followers (who had been opposed to Kemal Pasha, and wanted the revival of the caliphate), in the hope that they would fight western imperialist powers.
Reviewed by Sumanta Banerjee
Historically, communists had a rather tenuous relationship with the Muslim right. In the first flush of the Bolshevik Revolution, the new Soviet state in the early 1920s, while resisting the western imperialist offensive, sought allies from among the pan-Islamic forces which were then smarting under the wound of the defeat of their Ottoman empire by the British forces at the end of the first world war, and were looking for a platform to retaliate against the British. M N Roy, who was in Moscow in those days as a part of the international Comintern leadership, gives us a fascinating account in his autobiography of the dilemma that Lenin faced. On the one hand, Lenin lent political support to his natural ally – the secular Kemal Pasha (who, following the collapse of the Ottoman empire, captured power in Turkey, abolished the feudal domination of the religious caliphate and introduced egalitarian reforms), on the other hand, he also grudgingly agreed to provide military aid to conservative pan-Islamic leaders and their followers (who had been opposed to Kemal Pasha, and wanted the revival of the caliphate), in the hope that they would fight western imperialist powers.
One such leader was Enver Pasha, a member of the erstwhile feudal ruling clique, who after Kemal’s assumption of power in Turkey became a political destitute, and was given asylum in Moscow. While the Comintern agreed to supply him with arms to stage revolutions in the western-ruled Muslim countries, a sceptical Roy warned his Bolshevik comrades that the feudal landlords and priests who shaped the pan-Islamic ideology were basically counter-revolutionary in their beliefs and could never be trusted as allies of a socialist revolution. Predictably enough, Lenin’s hope of converting the Turkish leader to the international programme of anti-imperialist upsurge, was dashed when Enver Pasha ended up as a stooge of a British-backed anti-Soviet rebellion in Bokhara – his body being discovered by the Red Army after its suppression of the rebellion, as “dressed in a British army officer’s uniform”, according to Roy’s memoirs.
Repeating Mistakes
This rather long introduction to a review of the present book becomes necessary because it comes at a time when sections of the Left, both in India and abroad, are repeating the same mistakes in their understanding of political Islam. They hope to conflate the Islamic ideological opposition to the western neocolonial order (an opposition which is rooted to a great extent to the Islamic feudal and patriarchal resistance against democratic and social reforms, which they brand as “western”), with their own secular and progressive agenda of anti-imperialism. That such an alliance, born of immediate expediency, can never work for long should be evident from past experiences. But some among the Left (and also liberal bourgeois human rights activists) continue today to nurture the same illusion.
Consider, for instance, how the Indian Left – both the Maoist and the parliamentary – tries to cuddle up to the Islamic fundamentalist groups. Soon after the Pakistan government, prodded by the United States, swooped down upon Taliban supporters, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI(Maoist)) politburo bemoaned “the massive offensive on Islamic jihadist forces in Pakistan”. Its leader, the late Koteshwar Rao went a step further and said: “...we feel that the Islamic upsurge should not be opposed as it is basically anti-US and anti-imperialist in nature. We, therefore, want it to glow”. Under a similar delusion, another Indian Leftist commentator belonging to the parliamentary stream, Vijay Prashad, has come out with a theory of “principal contradiction...between imperialism and humanity...and the Lesser Contradiction...between the left and reactionaries who are not identical to imperialism”. Among these “reactionaries of the Lesser Contradiction”, he listed Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and others, about whom he said: “We are divided from them, but not against them in the same way as we are against imperialism”. Neither the Maoists nor the parliamentary Leftists notice the extremely dangerous and inhuman practices that these Islamic radical groups indulge in within their community – discrimination against and exploitation of women, imposition of shariat laws that violate human rights, suppression of art and culture through acts of vandalism, and killing of innocent citizens.
To come back to this important book, its author Meredith Tax meticulously documents how a gullible western Left, along with some liberal intellectuals, are being taken for a ride by these Islamic groups. A section of the western liberal sympathisers of the Muslim Right is influenced by the postmodernist analysis, which as pointed out by Haideh Moghissi inFeminism and Islamic Fundamentalism (1999) – quoted in the book – has a “curious affinity with the most reactionary ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. For, the two share a common ground – an unremitting hostility to the social, cultural and political processes of change and knowledge and rationality, originating in the west, known as modernity”.
Wrong Ideas
But the Islamic opponents of western modernity had no qualms in accepting the same western powers as allies in their military aim of overthrowing the socialist regime in Afghanistan. In this connection, the author not only exposes the false pan-Islamic claims of fighting western imperialism (in an important chapter entitled: “Five Wrong Ideas about the Muslim Right”), but also faults the Left for bending over backwards to support pan-Islamic groups and leaders with dubious reputation, under the illusion that they are the genuine anti-imperialist force (in a chapter entitled “The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”). The anti-imperialist credentials of the Islamic Right have already been exploded by revelations about how its leader Osama bin Laden and various outfits like the Taliban and mujahideens were trained by the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan to overthrow a socialist regime there. Their present onslaught against their past patron is not motivated by any anti-imperialist ideology (as the far Left would have us believe), but by the single-point objective of replacing US hegemony with the establishment of a shariat-based theocracy. Among the other “wrong ideas about the Muslim Right”, there is the tendency to equate their defence of their theocratic regimes and expansion of their control over other states (through armed insurrections against the US) on the one hand, with the secular national liberation movements of the past (e g, the anti-apartheid African National Congress, the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonial rule, the Vietnamese war against the US) on the other. In drawing such a parallel, the leftist supporters of the Muslim Right ignore the ideological roots that differentiate the Islamic insurrections (based on the regressive objective of restoring a feudal theocracy to replace modern western political institutions) from the national liberation movements (motivated by the progressive objective of replacing the colonial order with a secular nationalist and democratic egalitarian political system). Surely, no socialist worth her name can equalise the two – just because both oppose the US.. Read more:
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