Ardeshir Mehrdad is a comrade of Yassamine Mather <yasmine at eng.gla.ac.uk> an exiled Iranian marxist i kibbitz with on occasion. She was the person who gathered the signatures for http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/letter070706.html
Has written for Workers Liberty, the Weekly Worker of the CPGB, Critique (the neo-marxist journal of the former Soviet Union and Soviet type societies ed. by Hillel Ticktin, iranian.com and iran bulletin.
A piece she co-wrote with Ardeshir Mehrdad http://www.critiquejournal.net/islam.html . Political Islam's relation to Capital and Class
Ardeshir Mehrdad and Yassamine Mather
The last three decades have witnessed a relentless growth of Islamic movements, so that, today political Islam is an undeniable reality on the world scene. The events of September 11, 2001 and since have given it further prominence. From the Middle East to North Africa and South Asia, it has, in its various manifestations, become a major player that needs to be analysed both politically and theoretically. The contradictory nature of political Islam means that such analyses must deal with it not only in relation to the interests of capital, but also in relation to the challenge it poses to socialist ideas.
In many countries, the movements of political Islam raise their flag as that of 'seekers of justice' and aim their propaganda at the poorest and most deprived sections of society. They, thereby, present themselves as a rival to the forces of socialism and the left. The formulation of a strategy to respond to this challenge requires a deeper understanding of the background to, and reasons for, these developments. This article presents some preliminary theses, based on a necessarily limited and general outline of the characteristics and peculiarities of the Islamic movements.
Amidst the ravages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then, political Islam is on the rise, and its supporters portray it as the ideology of the poor and the dispossessed. They promise 'a better life' for the 'disinherited', 'less inequality', and the 'end of corruption' through the rule of 'sharia'a' (the religious state). Yet in Iran, almost twenty-six years after coming to power with similar promises, Islamic government has become synonymous with greed and corruption. Super-rich clerics and their immediate families have replaced the 'corrupt Royal court' and its entourage. The poor get poorer while the rich get richer. (Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the Islamic regime's previous president and likely to be its next president, is ranked the forty-third richest man in the world by Forbes Magazine.) <SNIP>