Chris Harman's article on Islam, 'The Prophet and the Proletariat', (International Socialism 64) has a strength but also several weaknesses. It spells out the contradictory character of what the writer calls 'Islamism', making particularly effective use of recent developments in Algeria to illustrate the point.1 It makes clear that at base Islamism is a petty bourgeois current whose leaders invariably direct its energies away from the expression of mass interests. But it also leaves some key questions unanswered, notably that of how such a vacillating current can draw support in many countries of the Middle East...
Joel Beinin's epitaph for the Egyptian Communists could serve for the left across the region. 'Caught up by the embrace of the national movement,' he comments, 'they [were] destroyed by it'.6
In 1967, when Israel and its Western allies defeated the Arab armies almost overnight, the nationalist project fell into crisis. The whole notion of building independent states which would be capable of contesting imperialism seemed to have collapsed. Michael Gilsenan comments that in the case of Egypt:
Here was a moment of political and ideological reversal of traumatic proportions... The terms on which 'the nation' had been ideologically constituted were abruptly revealed as false, illusory, lacking precisely the powers and capacities they were supposed to enshrine and realise in practice... The whole logic and symbolism of the nation-state, which had been developed as the only authentic language, was undercut and revealed as without substance in exactly those dimensions where it had claimed to be most powerful.7
Frustrated expectations were soon reflected in a wave of workers' and students' struggles against the Nasser regime. The prevailing mood was one in which former left wing activists and a new generation of militant youth looked for radical solutions--the 'moment of trauma' was also a moment of opportunity. But the Communist Party had dissolved into the regime and there was no alternative secular pole of opposition. In these circumstances even the discredited Islamist movement was able to make a comeback. Such events set a pattern to be repeated across the region.
Chris Harman's comment that during this period Stalinism was responsible for 'failure and betrayals' only hints at the massive reverse suffered by the workers' movement at the hands of the left.8 In fact, by the late 1960s communist strategy had evacuated the Middle East of any coherent secular alternative to nationalism--and had done so at a time when the region was about to move into a period of increased instability. This left an increasingly disillusioned population without a point of reference for change and opened a political space which religious activism soon started to occupy. Palestine
The left had already set out a practice that positively encouraged the growth of alternative political currents: it had prepared the ground for Islamism. A key issue was that of Palestine. One striking omission from Chris Harman's article is any reference to the importance of Palestine within Middle East politics. In fact, it has been a key mobilising issue for Islamism and one which has shown the left in an even worse light than the nationalists.
Even before the establishment of Israel, the left had failed to identify the Zionist movement as one inextricably linked to Western interests. In 1947, when Moscow declared in favour of a Jewish state, the bulk of the left in the region was hopelessly confused and when war broke out in 1948 it was the Muslim Brotherhood which provided concrete support for Palestinian guerrilla resistance. Even those communists who identified with the Palestinians eventually accepted Moscow's pro-Zionist stance: as Beinin notes, for Arab communists, 'Soviet support for the creation of Israel superseded their historic objections to Zionism'.9
It was only in the mid-1950s, when Moscow reoriented towards the Arab states, that Communist Parties began to talk of a connection between Israel and Western imperialism. Even this abrupt change was double edged: it was part of the swing into uncritical support for nationalist regimes that allowed Arab Communist leaders to declare, bizarrely, that nationalist dictators such as Nasser represented 'the [Communist] party in power'.10
In the early 1960s Nasser announced that he had 'no plan' for Palestine; the left did not dissent, nor did it oppose establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), set up in 1964 with the aim of containing the increasingly subversive Palestinian national movement. The question of Israel now became one of the key issues on which a weak and still marginal Islamist movement began to make headway. The leading Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, for example, attacked the regime and the left for betrayal of the Palestinian cause, portraying the Communists as 'the secret ally of Zionism'.11 There were particularly bitter criticisms of the Arab Communist Parties for maintaining closer links with the Israeli left, itself organically linked to the Zionist state, than they did with the Palestinian masses.12
In the wake of Arab defeat in 1967, the Islamists discovered that they had a huge new audience. They maintained that secular nationalists and the left were weak and corrupt; only by reasserting Islamic values could Arab society liberate Palestine. Walid Abdelnasser observes how these arguments 'religionised' the whole question of conflict with Israel and the West:
Arabs were defeated because they lacked piety, while 'Jews' won the war because they fought it on a religious basis... The Islamic movement was satisfied that the 1967 defeat brought to Arabs an element of religionisation of the conflict with Israel, and that it led to the decline of national and secular influences in the region and to the revival of the Islamic alternative.13 <SNIP Cont. @ http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/marshall.htm
other articles of note http://www.tidsskriftcentret.dk/index.php?id=173 Politisk Islam