[DEBATE] : Halliday on the Left and the Jihad

[Russell]

Not sure where this was first published...

The Left and the Jihad
Fred Halliday
8 - 9 - 2006
The left was once the principal enemy of radical Islamism. So how did old 
enemies become new friends? Fred Halliday reports.

The approaching fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States 
highlights an issue much in evidence in the world today, but one that 
receives too little historically-informed and critical analysis: the 
relationship between militant Islamic groups and the left.

It is evident that the attacks, and others before and since on US and allied 
forces around the world, have won the Islamist groups responsible 
considerable sympathy far beyond the Muslim world, including among those 
vehemently opposed from a variety of ideological perspectives to the 
principal manifestations of its power. It is striking, however, that - 
beyond such often visceral reactions - there are signs of a far more 
developed and politically articulated accommodation in many parts of the 
world between Islamism as a political force and many groups of the left.

The latter show every indication of appearing to see some combination of 
al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbollah, Hamas, and (not least) Iranian 
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as exemplifying a new form of international 
anti-imperialism that matches - even completes - their own historic project. 
This putative combined movement may be in the eyes of such leftist groups 
and intellectual trends hampered by "false consciousness", but this does not 
compromise the impulse to "objectively" support or at least indulge them.

The trend is unmistakable. Thus the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez flies to 
Tehran to embrace the Iranian president. London's mayor Ken Livingstone, and 
the vocal Respect party member of the British parliament George Galloway, 
welcome the visit to the city of the Egyptian cleric (and Muslim Brotherhood 
figurehead) Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Many in the sectarian leftist factions (and 
beyond) who marched against the impending Iraq war showed no qualms about 
their alignment with radical Muslim organisations, one that has since 
spiralled from a tactical cooperation to something far more elaborated. It 
is fascinating to see in the publications of leftist groups and 
commentators, for example, how history is being rewritten and the language 
of political argument adjusted to (as it were) accommodate this new 
accommodation.

The most recent manifestation of this trend arrived during the Lebanon war 
of July-August 2006. The Basque country militant I witnessed who waved a 
yellow Hizbollah flag at the head of a protest march is only the tip of a 
much broader phenomenon. The London demonstrators against the war saw the 
flourishing of many banners announcing "we are all Hizbollah now", and the 
coverage of the movement in the leftwing press was notable for its 
uncritical tone.

All of this is - at least to those with historical awareness, sceptical 
political intelligence, or merely a long memory - disturbing. This is 
because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate 
of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist 
right. It is also one that underlies the US-declared "war on terror" and the 
policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement 
aimed against "the west".

This claim is a classic example of how a half-truth can be more dangerous 
than an outright lie. For while it is true that Islamism in its diverse 
political and violent guises is indeed opposed to the US, to remain there 
omits a deeper, crucial point: that, long before the Muslim Brotherhood, the 
jihadis and other Islamic militants were attacking "imperialism", they were 
attacking and killing the left - and acting across Asia and Africa as the 
accomplices of the west.


A tortured history

The modern relationship of the left to militant Islamism dates to the 
immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. At that time, the Soviet 
leadership was promoting an "anti-imperialist" movement in Asia against the 
British, French and Dutch colonial empires, and did indeed see militant 
Muslims as at least tactical allies. For example, at the second congress of 
the Comintern in 1920, the Soviets showed great interest towards the 
Islamist group led by Tan Malaka in Indonesia; following the meeting, many 
delegates decamped to the Azeri capital of Baku for a "Congress of the 
Peoples of the East". This event, held in an ornate opera house, became 
famous for its fiery appeals to the oppressed masses of Asia and included 
calls by Bolshevik leaders, many of them either Armenian or Jewish, for a 
jihad against the British.

A silent-film clip recently discovered by the Iranian historian Touraj 
Atabaki shows the speakers excitedly appealing to the audience who then 
proceed to leap up and fire their guns into the air, forcing the speakers on 
the platform to run for cover. One of those who attended the Baku conference 
was the American writer John Reed, author of the classic account of the 
Bolshevik revolution Ten Days That Shook the World. (On his return journey 
from Azerbaijan he was to die after catching typhoid from a melon he bought 
on the way.)

For decades afterwards, the Soviet position on Islam was that it was, if not 
inherently progressive, then at least capable of socialist interpretation. 
On visits in the 1980s to the then two communist Muslim states - the now 
equally-forgotten "Democratic Republic of Afghanistan" and the "People's 
Democratic Republic of Yemen" - I was able to study the way in which 
secondary school textbooks, taught by lay teachers not clerics, treated 
Islam as a form of early socialism.

A verse in the Qur'an stating that "water, grass and fire are common among 
the people" was interpreted as an early, nomadic, form of collective means 
of production; while Muslim concepts of ijma' (consensus), zakat (charitable 
donation), and 'adala (justice) were interpreted in line with the dictates 
of the "non-capitalist" road. Jihad was obviously a form of anti-imperialist 
struggle. A similar alignment of Islamic tradition and modern state 
socialism operated in the six Muslim republics of the Soviet Union.

Such forms of affinity were in the latter part of the 20th century succeeded 
by a far clearer alignment of Islamist groups: against communism, socialism, 
liberalism and all that they stood for, not least with regard to the rights 
of women. In essence, Islamism - the organised political trend, owing its 
modern origin to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, 
that seeks to solve modern political problems by reference to Muslim texts - 
saw socialism in all its forms as another head of the western secular hydra; 
it had to be fought all the more bitterly because it had such a following in 
the Arab world, in Iran and in other Muslim countries.

In a similar way to other opponents of the left (notably the European 
fascist movements), Islamists learned and borrowed much from their secular 
rivals: styles of anti-imperialist rhetoric, systems of social reform, the 
organisation of the centralised party (a striking example of which is 
Hizbollah in Lebanon, a Shi'a copy in nationalist, organisational and 
military form of the Vietnamese Communist Party). This process has continued 
in the modern critique of globalisation and "cultural imperialism".

The ferocious denunciations of "liberalism" by Ayatollah Khomeini and his 
followers are a straight crib from the Stalinist handbook. Osama bin Laden's 
messages, albeit clad in Qur'anic and Arabic poetic garb, contain a 
straightforward, contemporary, radical political messages: our lands are 
occupied by imperialism, our rulers betray our interests, the west is 
robbing our resources, we are the victim of double standards.

The hostility of Islamism to leftwing movements, and the use of Islamists in 
the cold war to fight communism and the left, deserve careful study. A 
precedent was the Spanish civil war, when Francisco Franco recruited tens of 
thousands of Moroccan mercenaries to fight the Spanish republic, on the 
grounds that Catholicism and Islam had a shared enemy in communism. After 
1945, this tendency became more widespread. In Egypt, up to the revolution 
of 1952, the communist and Islamist movements were in often violent 
conflict. In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia's desire to oppose Nasser's Egypt and 
Soviet influence in the middle east led it to promote the World Islamic 
League as an anti-socialist alliance, funded by Riyadh and backed by 
Washington. King Feisal of Saudi Arabia was often quoted as seeing communism 
as part of a global Jewish conspiracy and calling on his followers to oppose 
it. In Morocco, the leader of the socialist party, Oman bin Jalloun, was 
assassinated in 1975 by an Islamist militant.

A canvas of conflict

There are further striking cases of this backing of Islamism against the 
left: Turkey, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria among them.

In Turkey in the 1970s, an unstable government beset by challenges from 
armed leftwing groups encouraged both the forces of the nationalist right 
(the "Grey Wolves") and Islamists, and indulged the assassination of 
leftwing intellectuals. In Palestine, the Israeli authorities, concerned to 
counter the influence of al-Fatah in the West Bank in the late 1970s, 
granted permission for educational, charitable and other organisations 
(linked in large part to the Muslim Brotherhood) in ways that helped 
nurtured the emergence of Hamas in 1987; Israeli thus did not create Hamas, 
but it did facilitate its early growth. In Algeria too, factions within the 
ruling national-liberation movement (FLN) were in league with the 
underground Islamist group, the National Salvation Front; its French 
initials, FIS, gave rise to the observation that the FIS are le fils ("the 
son") of the FLN.

In Egypt, from the death of Nasser in 1970 onwards, the regimes of Anwar 
Sadat and Hosni Mubarak actively encouraged the Islamisation of society, in 
part against armed Islamist groups, but also to counter the influence of the 
socialist left. This was a project in which many formerly secular Egyptian 
intellectuals colluded, in an often theatrical embrace of Islam, tradition 
and cultural nationalism.

The trend culminated in the 1990s with a campaign to silence left and 
independent liberal voices: the writer Farag Fouda, who had called for the 
modernisation of Islam, was assassinated in 1992; Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel 
prize-winning author, was stabbed and nearly killed in 1994 (allegedly for 
his open and flexible attitude to religion in his Cairo novels); the writer 
and philosopher Nasser Abu Zeid, who had dared to apply to the Qur'an and 
other classical Islamic texts the techniques of historical and literary 
criticism practised elsewhere in the world, was sent death-threats before 
being driven into exile in 1995.

There were even worse confrontations between Islamism and those of a 
socialist and secular liberal persuasion. The National Islamic Front in 
Sudan, a conspiratorial group that explicitly modelled itself on Leninist 
forms of organisation, took power in 1989 and proceeded to arrest, torture 
and kill members of the communist party, all this at a time when playing 
host to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum.

In Yemen, after the partial unification of the military north and socialist 
south in May 1990, the regime allowed assassins of the Islamist movement to 
kill dozens of socialist party members and army officers. This process 
precipitated the civil war of 1994, in which armed Islamist factions linked 
by ideology and political ties to bin Laden (most prominently the Abyan 
army) fought side-by-side with the regular army of the north to crush the 
socialist south. This was an echo of the war in Dhofar province in the 
neighbouring Arabian state of Oman during 1970s, when anti-communist 
government published propaganda by the British-officered intelligence corps 
denouncing the leftwing rebels for allowing men to have only one wife, and 
promised them four if they came over to the government side.

The politics of blood

The historical cycle of enmity reached an even greater pitch in two other 
countries where the anti-communist and rightwing orientation of the 
Islamists became clear. The first, little noticed in the context of 
Islamism, was the crushing of the left in Indonesia in 1965. There the 
independent and "anti-imperialist" regime of President Sukarno was supported 
by the communist party (PKI), the largest in non-communist Asia.

After a conflict within the military itself, a rightwing coup backed by the 
United States seized power and proceeded to crush the left. In rural Java 
especially, the new power was enthusiastically supported by Islamists, led 
by the Nahdat ul-Islam grouping. A convergence between the anti-communism of 
the military and the Islamists was one of the factors in the rampant orgy of 
killing which took the lives of up to a million people. The impact of this 
event was enormous, both for Indonesia itself and the balance of forces in 
southeast Asia at a time when the struggle in Vietnam was about to escalate.

The second country, Afghanistan, also had an outcome of great significance 
for the cold war as a whole. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the 
most fanatical Islamist groups - funded by the CIA, Pakistan and the Saudis 
to overthrow the communist government in Kabul - were killing women 
teachers, bombing schools and forcing women back into the home in the areas 
they controlled.

 Such enemies led the first leader of communist Afghanistan, Nur Mohammad 
Taraki, to refer to the opposition as ikhwan i shayatin ("the satanic 
brotherhood", a play on "Muslim Brotherhood"). Bin Laden himself, in both 
his 1980s and post-1996 periods in Afghanistan, played a particularly active 
role not just in fighting Afghan communists, but also in killing Shi'a, who 
were, in the sectarian worldview of Saudi fundamentalism, seen as akin to 
communists. The consequences of this policy for the Arab and Muslim worlds, 
and for the world as a whole, were evident from the early 1990s onwards. It 
took the events of the clear morning of 11 September 2001 for them to 
penetrate into the global consciousness.
The true and the false

This melancholy history must be supplemented by attention to what is 
actually happening in countries, or parts of countries, where Islamists are 
influential and gaining ground. The reactionary (the word is used advisedly) 
nature of much of their programme on women, free speech, the rights of gays 
and other minorities is evident.

There is also a mindset of anti-Jewish prejudice that is riven with racism 
and religious obscurantism. Only a few in the west noted what many in the 
Islamic world will have at once understood, that one of the most destructive 
missiles fired by Hizbollah into Israel bore the name "Khaibar" - not a 
benign reference to the pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the name 
of a victorious battle fought against the Jews by the Prophet Mohammad in 
the 7th century. Here it is worth recalling the saying of the German 
socialist leader Bebel, that anti-semitism is "the socialism of fools". How 
many on the left are tolerant if not actively complicit in this foolery 
today is a painful question to ask.

The habit of categorising radical Islamist groups and their ideology as 
"fascist" is unnecessary as well as careless, since the many differences 
with that European model make the comparison redundant. It does not need 
slogans to understand that the Islamist programme, ideology and record are 
diametrically opposed to the left - that is, the left that has existed on 
the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the 
Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and 
generations of experience. The modern embodiments of this left have no need 
of the "false consciousness" that drives so many so-called leftists into the 
arms of jihadis.