[lbo-talk] Comrades and Brothers: Islamists and Socialists in Egypt

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Mar 14 07:45:49 PDT 2007


Yoshie writes:

"An ex-Muslim "insurgency" is like an "insurgency" of anticommunists who are former Communists. "

Wouldn't it be more true to say 'A Muslim "insurgency" is like an "insurgency" of anticommunists who are former Communists.'

I agree with you, though, when you say:

"Much of ambivalent attitude toward Marxist theory, especially in West Asia and North Africa, comes from a very mixed legacy of foreign policy of Soviet Socialism and nationalist governments to which many communist parties have been sometimes attached and by which they have been sometimes repressed. "

The situation in the north of Ireland was comparable. Many of the provisional Sinn Fein were explicitly anti-Communist, because the "Communists" had openly sided with the British occupation forces in their suppression.

I was only pointing out that the Islamist ideology that I came across was a hodge-podge of radical left ideas dressed up in a bit of Allahu Akbar - ignorant of its own debts to the left. I don't see anything authentic about it. If they had undertaken a rational critique of Stalinism and Third World nationalism they might have transcended its limitations. Instead they merely reproduce those limitations in an obscurantist religious garb.

I agree with Dilip Hiro and others who argue that Islamism is not an authentic religious belief, but a political outlook in the form of religion. I think it is pointed that the Taliban prospered in Afghanistan when the family-tribal organisation of Imams broke down. Also the superficial manner in which the Wahabbists in Chechnya prospered by opportunistically putting a more radical national struggle into the field indicates that this has precious little to do with religion (it was also a strategic disaster as Basayev and Khattabi had no programmatic principles to differentiate them from Dudayev, only more extreme acts of terror).



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