[...]
> Some religious believers who may be properly called fundamentalist are
> also politically quietist, living in the "quiet and private
> congregation mode," while others are political and some violent to
> boot.
>
> Some religious believers who are not only not fundamentalist but are
> opposed to fundamentalism take their congregations to be bases of
> political organizing for a variety of left-wing causes, while others
> refuse to do so.
>
> Fundamentalists are not all right-wing on all issues either. The best
> historical examples may be John Brown and David Walker.
[MG] But we haven't been discussing apolitical religious fundamentalists or messianic religious individuals who want to mete out the Lord's justice.
At issue is how to view political parties directed by clerics - Christian, Jewish, or Muslim - who want to use state power to impose their religious values and laws on society.
> [YF] In short, the political lines to be drawn for various purposes do not
> necessarily revolve around the question of whether or not religious
> believers are fundamentalist. They depend on the contents of beliefs
> (pro-labor or pro-capitalist, anti-imperialist or pro-imperialist,
> etc.), not on the modes in which beliefs are held.
[MG] In oppressed nations and in working class neighbourhoods, clerics who are close to their flock will often lead labour or anti-imperialist struggles and create social welfare networks where there is a vaccum created by the absence or the failure of secular left forces. Religious leaders and religious parties who exercise such popular leadership obviously deserve credit for doing so.
But other "political lines to be drawn for various purposes" - especially those which turn on the status of women and gays, leftists and other dissidents, independent labour unions and other civic organizations, secular education and scientific research - generally do "revolve around the question of whether or not religious believers are fundamentalist". That's because religious fundamentalists draw on doctrine derived from tribal times which is in contradiction to many of the appurtenances of modern urban society.
I don't have the same difficulty you do in accepting that Marxists and liberals can genuinely support nationalist and labour struggles led by religious parties as well as applaud their provision of social services to their communities, while at the seme time rejecting their suspicion and not infrequent suppression of the constituencies with which the left has historically been associated.
[...]
> [YF]...some fundamentalists, such as those of
> the Al Qaeda variety, are essentially _nothing but terrorists_ and
> _must be suppressed_, but exactly _how_? That is an issue that
> liberals and leftists have not politically and philosophically
> confronted head-on, but the failure to do so may destine them to
> political irrelevance, especially in countries where Islamists of many
> varieties, left or right or center, terrorist cells or mass political
> parties, have grown.
[MG] The left's "political irrelevance" is what prevents it from confronting the fundamentalists, including the terrorist bands - not the other way round. If it had the political and military strength to do so, it would simply quash them. But it doesn't and can't function independently, so badly outnumbered leftists necessarily now have to look for allies within the mass religious parties who share their hostility to their more reactionary features.
Whatever the subjective errors which explain the decline of the left - and I don't doubt there have been these - I don't think we should overlook that a major reason for the current imbalance of forces is the unremitting hostility to left-wing nationalism by Western imperialism and its more ambivalent posture, at least initially, to religious nationalists who they used as a counterweight to it. The CIA-sponsored overthrows of Mossadegh and Najibullah led to the triumph of the Islamists in Iran and Afghanistan and the the movement's subsequent prestige and influence - relative to that of the declining left - throughout the Muslim world.