I suggest you try and follow some of the events in countries like Indonesia or Malaysia to get a better sense of what contemporary islamism is. It's not pretty. And these are societies in which, "traditionally", women have had a significantly better position than most places in the world, so that islamists can't even be looked on as trying to uphold some "tradition" when it comes to women's rights.
As for
> The problem is that, for too many of today's leftists in the West
> (notice I'm not talking about leftists in Indonesia today), Islamism
> is invariably BAD at all times in all places, and that's what needs to
> be reconsidered.
Indonesians, and not just Indonesian leftists, generally do not subscribe to the islamists. Not even in the relatively milder form of version 1 of the PKS, the one that put the adoption of syariah law at the top of its programme. The vote for the PKS version 2 was for a PKS that had muted that demand, putting social and economic justice at the top of its programme. Heck, even students in the Islamic colleges are opposed to the adoption of syariah law in those districts where it has been imposed -- at least in the form in which it has been adopted (muslims, in general, would be for syariah, but the islamists have a specific, pretty retrograde, version which they claim to come from god). But because the Indonesian state today, no matter the re-constitution of oligarchic power, is relatively democratic, and there are organisations like the Nahdatul Ulama who reject the imposition of syariah law, it is possible for people to debate these issues openly and publicly. In Malaysia, less democratic, but more importantly because religious identity is deeply implicated in ethnic identity, because there is no mass muslim organisation like the NU, because there is an established parallel legal system of syariah law, such debates are hugely restricted, or degenerate into the self-righteousness of all sides and always carries an ethnic edge to it.
As for what happens under syariah when pushed by the islamists -- well, in those areas of Indonesia where it has happened, women workers returning from the afternoon shift (10 or 11 at night) have been picked up by the self-appointed religious police for "immoral activities" simply because they were out on the streets at night, on their own, unaccompanied by a man; with protests, the women are now instructed to wear their work uniform if they don't want to get detained! In Malaysia, a woman, Muslim by birth was forced to separate from her Hindu husband, although she had converted to Hinduism, and made to undergo 6 months of religious rehabilitation, and although she was recently released, without recanting her conversion, she cannot co-habit with her husband -- and oh yes, they are a poor working class couple. Just to give some examples. Just now, a muslim woman, a singer in a nightclub, was detained for immoral dressing (she wore pants and a sleeveless blouse). OK, it doesn't help for some western power to then come along to lecture about freedom of religion and all that; but it also doesn't help if some leftists come along to lecture about the anti-imperialist character of the islamists.
> "Struggle against Pan-Islamism!" is not always
> everywhere the right position
That's a stupid slogan. But, yes, combating such matters as recounted above is, I think, right. But the who and how are difficult issues, very much subject to the exigencies of time and place, and we do need a way of wrapping our heads around a multi-cultural practice that has regard to both individual and collective rights. Needless to say, nowhere can it be through the intervention of foreign powers, much less invasion! Plus, of course, the way things are going in Europe, perhaps to a lesser degree in the US, make it absurd for them to pose as some model of the multi-cultural.
> so-called New Atheists among others is precisely the "militantly
> anti-religion stance" that, if adopted by leftists, would make it
Isn't this tilting at windmills? Although if the militantly religious go around trying to impose their positions on others, then shouldn't they be opposed?
> So would have the Soviet government if Malaka had ended up in the USSR
> at a wrong time, judging by what it did to Muslim national communists
> (see below) and others who fell out of orthodoxy (which was easy to
> do, as orthodoxy kept changing).
This is beginning to clutch at straws. The USSR was not a model of respect for rights. You might as well say that one could also get detained and tortured in the USA. So what? That makes it OK if islamists abuse civil and political rights? And as for that extract (snipped) you cited -- really, there's some kind of category mistake, no? The guys who were killed were muslims, yes, but were they killed because they were muslims? In one case, it sounds like the man was on his way to plead a national cause, in another, the man was campaigning against the veil and killed by a mob (now this one is a truly strange example to use to show the threat to muslims at the hands of the communists, unless you are saying that it was a communist mob which killed a muslim campaigning against the veil, which would make them strange communists, and the muslim, in the context of the 1920s in central asia, a strange muslim.)
One thing I do agree with -- just because a group has "islamic" or some other religious term in its name does not make it islamist. And to lump them all together, in today's circumstances, is likely to take on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I think just about everyone on this list knows that only too well.