There used to be distinctions between secular left and religious parties, but today distinctions are fast disappearing, it seems to me.
The secular left who used to be communist are no longer in favor of communism, and the secular left who used to be social democratic are no longer in favor of social democracy. On matters economic there is therefore convergence, rather than divergence, between religious and secular left parties. If anything, some religious parties are clearly to the Left of some secular left parties. The sad reality is that, if Iran's power elite succeed in imposing the Chinese Communist Party's economic model upon Iran's working people, as many of them yearn to do, that will mean Iran moving to the Right, not to the Left.
On the question of imperialism, too, some religious parties are to the Left of some secular left parties in the South, and in the North, all major secular left parties are part of the US-led multinational empire.
Most who are secular leftists, especially in the West, are essentially social liberals, as "Andie" says, whether or not they are still sentimentally attached to old names, and on this, the question of rights, there is still divergence between secular left and religious parties, secular left parties more in favor of individual rights and personal freedoms as they are conceived in political liberalism, and religious parties, even moderate ones, much less committed to them.
In the predominantly Islamic world, the two points of convergence and one point of divergence are both rooted in their respective political bases. Religious parties have become better at organizing the constituencies that secular left parties used to represent to a certain extent and still claim to represent though they no longer do so in many cases. Here's an example from Palestine:
Following the armed resistance of the 1970s in Gaza,
led, partly, by various socialist groups, there was no
truly popular left that appealed to a large segment of
the Palestinian popular imagination. Although some
of these groups held onto truly principled stances
opposing Oslo, for example, they remained largely
confined to university campuses, spotted in urban
centers as artists, academics, and middle class -- and
sometimes upper class -- intellectuals.
The bizarre twist is that Hamas, by a practical
definition, is much closer to socialist principles than the
urban "socialist" intellectuals. (Ramzy Baroud, "The
Palestinian Left: A Lost Opportunity,"
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/baroud110707.html>).
> Or have these parties, as you seem strongly to suggest, all shared the same
> commitment to "modernity" - that is, to the modern economies, political
> systems, and social values expressed most fully in the advanced capitalist
> countries? With the exception of some of the early Protestant sects,
> theocratic leaders and parties have historically resisted modernizing
> efforts by the liberal and socialist parties based in the cities.
Was Isaac Newton consciously committed to modernity? Oliver Cromwell?
John Milton? Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu? Not at all. They did not even know that they were helping create the foundations of what would become modernity in their respective countries (and the rest of the world in the case of Newton).
> I largely agree with your knowledgeable summary of the political errors of
> the Iranian and Afghan left, although I don't think these were inevitable,
> and believe these regimes could have survived by slowing the pace of reform
> to account for the the social weight of the conservative landed classes.
> With the power of hindsight, this what I, as an Iranian and Afghan leftist,
> would have proposed. But my political home would have remained on the left,
> in opposition to the religious parties, competing for the same popular
> constituencies. Would you say the same? It is no longer clear to me, and
> maybe to others who occupy our small political space.
In the United States, I have no political home. There is no organized left here, though there are individual leftists, some building their little individual cults of personality. Since there is no secular left political vehicle, it is not even possible to compete with religious organizations for the same popular constituencies, though I would try to get it to do so if there were one.
The popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theory, apparently growing numbers of liberals and leftists buying into it, and the rest of liberals and leftists more or less tolerating it, imho, is a sign of profound intellectual confusion or, rather, exhaustion on the Left. -- Yoshie