09.01.2003
Marxist analysis or crying wolf?
Martyn Hudson's article, 'Fight islamism, not islam', and indeed his previous piece on the same question, though interesting in some ways, applies a non-Marxist, academic understanding of the questions posed in seeking to work against the current war drives and Zionist terror with those broad sections of the Arab diaspora communities who are influenced by conservative and semi-radical forms of islam (Weekly Worker December 19). In response to my previous argumentation in favour of applying elementary united front tactics to those religious organisations such as the Muslim Association of Britain - which publicly reject acts of indiscriminate, anti-working-class terrorism, while at the same time demonstrating the ability to mobilise substantial numbers from the Arab and muslim communities - Martyn accuses me of misunderstanding his original, somewhat opaque material. And even more strangely, he accuses me, in the manner of many a dogmatist, of being unable to understand the nature of 'political islam' itself. Yet comrade Martyn, for all his belligerence on the latter point, demonstrates by his own scattergun approach to the subject that he is either unaware of, or indifferent to, the basic difference, widely understood at least formally among those who claim to be Marxists, between the communist tactic of the united front, addressing non-communist organisations that mobilise a section of the masses, and the treacherous strategy of the popular front, which involves workers' organisations adopting the de facto programme of a wing of the bourgeoisie, thereby liquidating the independent programme of the working class for the sake of an illusory alliance. For Martyn, in his original article, "the left urgently needs to reassess its relationship to the new global recompositions of islam and abandon attempts to construct united fronts with certain forms of islamist organisation where, to use the old phrase, we march separately and strike together" (Weekly Worker November 28). He then goes into a long rendition of why no such episodic blocs are possible, even with those such as the MAB who, as I and others have pointed out, are more forthright than some in the Socialist Alliance in condemning some of the recent ultra-islamist atrocities. I will address this strange reasoning shortly. But first it is worth noting the shift in Martyn's argument in his subsequent reply to me - no longer arguing against the use of the united front tactic, he instead argues: "The Muslim Association of Britain is not openly and directly a clerico-fascist organisation - but those who would wish to construct popular fronts with such groups should be aware of the following" (my emphasis). He goes on: "officialising one group, constructing a popular front with these rightists, is condoning their activities in muslim communities "¦" (my emphasis). Nowhere, in either of his two pieces, does Martyn clarify or theorise the distinction between the two concepts, united front and popular front, nor does he, on the other hand, explain why he feels able to use these fundamentally different terms interchangeably. This inability to differentiate between episodic blocs with reactionary leaderships of the oppressed in the furtherance of a struggle against oppression, and class collaborationist strategic blocs aimed at mortgaging the struggles of the oppressed, is shown later in his second piece. Martyn no doubt thinks his verbiage here is devastating: in fact it clearly shows up the political danger in his refusal to distinguish between the united front for a clearly defined purpose, and popular frontism. The danger is, to be blunt, that such a failure to distinguish leads to popular frontism itself once the political pressure for some sort of bloc with somebody becomes irresistible. Thus Martyn's accusation that "the worst element of this though is that "¦ Ian is siding not with the moderates, traditionalists and so on ... but with those "¦ who are the fanatics of that [islamist] reformation" reveals his own strategic conception - that it is necessary to side with the "moderates, traditionalists, and so on" against those currents who he deems as the ultra-reactionary, modernists, necromantic 'political' islamists. I am afraid I do not consider it to be the task of Marxists to promote, and even less to help bring into being, a 'progressive' wing of any religion, including islam. Still less is it part of a communist perspective to promote the 'traditionalist, moderate' wing of such a religion. As Marxists, we do not take sides in theological disputes between believers, we rather seek to use our tactics to promote class struggle, class consciousness, and thereby (at a point that will vary enormously between individuals within any given religion) the discarding of religious belief in favour of a scientific, materialist view of the world. It is possible, indeed likely, of course, that as the class struggle proceeds among populations with an initially deep religious belief, that various hybrid 'religious socialist' or 'religious communist' formations will come into existence for an historically brief moment in time (the Iranian Mujahedin-e-khalq of the 1970s and 1980s were an example of such a formation). In that case communists will seek to work closely with such currents and help them overcome their contradictions in favour of consistent materialism: ie, militant atheism. But in no case is it our duty to try to create such unviable, self-contradictory currents where they do not exist. The programme Martyn seems to be putting forward, of siding with the 'traditional, moderate' forms of islam against the nasty, modernist 'political' islamists, seems to me to be in reality a chemically pure form of popular frontism. Lenin once wrote, in connection with formulating an analysis of any given phenomenon, that "there is no such thing as abstract truth: the truth is always concrete". And, reading between the lines of the abstruse, academic language that pervades Martyn's writings in the current controversy, one can nevertheless extract enough implicitly concrete points to be able to translate Martyn's essential argument into a more comprehensible, concrete form. However, doing so does not reveal any profound Marxist analysis, but in reality a yearning that the situation regarding islam, a subject to which I understand Martyn has devoted years of study, should only be different and less grim than it actually is, and a peculiar partiality for some forms of islamic theology and beliefs over others. Both of these things I believe are pretty well useless, and indeed harmful, in formulating a communist perspective for dealing with the problems posed today by political developments in the Middle East and the muslim world in general. Martyn indignantly denies the accusation that the perspective he is arguing is in practice islamophobic - in response to my questioning why he does not extend his critique of any united action with the MAB to the practitioners of other religions, he responds that "Every religion is composed of a complex of factions, doctrines, practices, etc." and again goes on to explain that what he calls "political islam" is not really islam at all, but in the words of his earlier article "a radicalised product of Zionism and imperialism" (November 28). But for Martyn, this non-islam has been, from the 1960s onwards, the dominant form of the islamic religion internationally. Otherwise, what is meant by the statement in his original article that "Islam as a faith has been constantly recomposed and modified. Since the 1960s, however, the world has witnessed the ascendancy of one particular form of islam - a political islam which presents a civilisational alternative to that of both communism and capitalism and which seeks to eliminate secularism, liberty and any vestiges of enlightenment thought"? Martin's subjective view of what islam ought to be colours his perception of what it actually is, to the point that unfortunately childish debater's tricks and misquotations creep into his work. Islam for him ought to be what he calls 'traditionalist, moderate' islam, tolerant to a fault. He paraphrases (without citation marks or page reference) Albert Hourani's study of Arab and islamic history, A history of the Arab peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991), to the effect that the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban shows that islamism today "is different because islamism is not the islam of tradition, but a newer, ultra-reactionary product of imperialism, Zionism and islamic modernism". This is a rather strange citation, since Hourani died in 1993 and therefore never lived to see even the coming to power of the Taliban, let alone the destruction of the Buddhas; in fact this event is not even mentioned in the posthumous postscript by Malise Ruthven in the 2002 edition of Hourani's work. No doubt Martyn meant to say that the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is consistent with Hourani's earlier projection as to the likely evolution of islamic fundamentalism, but really, given Martyn's complaints about the abstruse, academic language in his earlier pieces being misunderstood, he really should take care to give accurate, exact citations. I do not have the time or the energy to follow and check up all his other academic references, but this hardly inspires confidence. In any case, I will leave it to the reader to judge whether Martyn's complaints about his allegedly being misunderstood over the question of the so-called 'irreversible reformation' have any merit or not. I think they have little merit, and if any misunderstanding occurred, then Martyn should, again, look at his own writings as to the reason why such misunderstandings could possibly take place. If someone fulminates about things such as "political islam which presents a civilisational alternative to that of both communism and capitalism and which seeks to eliminate secularism, liberty and any vestiges of enlightenment thought", whose "explicit task" is "the construction of a global islamist state" and ends with the stark warning that "The emergence of one victorious theocratic state would signal world-historical necromancy - a profound defeat for the global proletariat", it is, I suggest, not unreasonable for a reader to conclude that the author of these lines believes that this is a real, world-historic danger that he is warning against. For the author then to turn around and state that he never believed this at all, that it was the "spectral fantasies of clerico-fascists", and that any misunderstanding is the fault of the reader for not being able to discern this, is, to put it charitably, an example of what in the jewish community is known as chutzpah. As indeed is Martyn's protestation that his understanding of the so-called 'irreversible reformation', he was warning about, was a conquest of the islamic religion itself by fundamentalists, as opposed to the conquest of the non-islamic body politic, as I believed he was saying. Readers might also conclude, given Martyn's own writings about the "ascendancy" of this form of islam within the religion itself "since the 1960s", that he believed his own words: that such an ascendancy - ie, reformation of the religion - had already taken place. It is very foolish to blame readers and critics for failing to understand one's own self-contradictory confusionism. It is the duty of the reader to make reasonable efforts to understand what an author is saying, but it is also the duty of an author not to take refuge in ambiguous and obscurantist terminology in order to give an illusion of profundity to writings that do not merit it in terms of content. In any case, there is of course much truth in the contention that the forms of hard-line, politicised islam that are widespread today are products of the humiliation and degradation of a number of the most important muslim peoples by imperialism, and particularly by the creation and subsequent expansion of the state of Israel. That is the concrete reality we have to deal with; it is no use sentimentalising for the return of the wonderfully tolerant practices of the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphates, or the Ottoman empire, and contrasting that with the current practices of the likes of (say) Hamas in the occupied territories with the plaint that the former was "real, tolerant, traditional islam", whereas the latter is not islam. The former three, which by the way at least formally adhered to the basic commandments of Quranic law subsequently codified in the Sharia, were the products of islamic world strength, whereas the more militant, and anti-western, forms of islam that have risen to prominence in the imperialist epoch are of course the products of defeat. No matter: we have to deal with not the religions of the past abstracted from their social and political contexts, but the religions that influence the masses today. We have to deal with religion objectively, in terms of addressing the material oppressions and clashes of material interests that lead sections of the oppressed to support militant, or even not-so-militant, religious groups. In this regard, the likes of the MAB occupy an intermediate position - not a fundamentalist group itself, it nevertheless has a constituency that sympathises with more or less radical islamic sentiments. This sentiment is indeed a product of the blending of traditional, widely held religious beliefs with the circumstances of Zionist and imperialist oppression, and it indeed produces manifestations that are dangerous to the working class. It is utterly impermissible, for instance, for leftists to engage in any blocs with religious political movements, whether islamic or not, that have as the strategic aim of the bloc the creation of a government of such theocratic elements. This was the central problem of the mass movement against the Shah that erupted in the Iran of 1978-79. An historic opportunity was missed for proletarian revolution, in the main because the Iranian left, and their mentors from Moscow to the tiny Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth International, adhered in practice to the Menshevik conception of 'two-stage revolution', and, seeing the powerful religious sentiment behind the Shi'ite clergy, which in some ways played a role of a surrogate nationalism among the masses, concluded that the 'national democratic' revolution could be led by the same Shi'ite clergy. The result was a genuine popular front, a suicidal one in fact, where the left facilitated, by its flawed theories and inability to play a genuinely independent role in social struggle, the coming to power of the 'radical' clergy, thereby laying the basis for their own destruction. However, these considerations do not change the social fact that, in this period where the old 'secular' forms of bourgeois nationalism have palpably failed to even cohere real nation-states in the Arab world, some forms of radical islamic movements are playing the role of a surrogate nationalism, and thereby giving a highly warped expression of the desire of the masses for a liberation from powerlessness and being simply prey for the imperialists and their Israeli allies. This is certainly true in Lebanon, for instance, where Hezbollah has effectively played such a role in the movement against Israeli occupation, and has therefore gained enormous prestige among both 'fundamentalist' and secular opponents of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. I would argue that, given the intimate connection between the Lebanese and Palestinian questions (remember that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was aimed at crushing the PLO presence in that country), the real social role of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, culminating in the driving out of the Israelis at the end of the 1990s, was that of a kind of ersatz, surrogate national liberation movement, and that the effective defeat of Israel by Hezbollah was a real blow against national oppression. Not because of Hezbollah's Shi'ite fundamentalism, but despite this reactionary ideology and politics, was it forced in a partial manner to give vent to the aspirations of muslim Lebanese suffering under Israeli occupation and oppression. There are some very complex questions involved here, which obviously cannot simply be solved in this discussion, though we can begin to address them. But, to put it simply, communists have to find a way to steer between two parallel dangers with regard to these kinds of questions - islamophobic sectarianism, as epitomised by Martyn, and the kind of genuine popular front with the mullahs practiced by much of the Iranian left in 1978-79. We have to formulate tactics by which communists are seen to be the best, most consistent fighters against the kinds of oppressions (national and social) that drive sections of the oppressed to support islamic fundamentalist movements in the first place, without at the same time falling into the trap, as did the Iranian left, of helping the clergy into power. This will necessarily at times involve some kinds of blocs with islamist types, for limited purposes, where the thrust of what the islamists' mass base are struggling for gives expression to something that is consistent with part of our programme. It is part of our programme to support concrete struggles against national oppression - and when islamists are forced to act as a surrogate for such aspirations, then it would be just as suicidal for the left to retreat in a sectarian fashion from such struggles as it would be to emulate the Iranian left and support an 'islamic republic'. Such a sectarian practice would only marginalise the left and give islamists a monopoly on the struggle against oppression, again consolidating their hold over their putative base and helping the theocratic quasi-nationalists into power. In this context, there are other absurdities in Martyn's article that need clarifying. First of all, he makes much of my identifying (in his words) "two totally different types of political islam": that of the Taliban and Khomeini. Martyn sagely lectures: "This is, in programmatic terms, a very elementary error, but one that is very common on the left - the conflation of Shia prophet worship and the more rigorous islamism of Sunni islam. In fact the state in Iran is not really a 'fundamentalist' state at all, as 'fundamentalism' is the product of the high cultural doctrine within the Sunni tradition. This is one of the reasons for the lack of support for the Taliban and 'fundamentalist' politics by the Iranians." This is a really incredible passage from a Marxist, elevating the internal conflicts of theology within the islamic religion above political and social reality. A woman in Iran, who is forced to wear the head-to-foot black chador veil (less common these days, I gather, but still significant), can certainly console herself that, unlike her sister across the border in Afghanistan (whether under the Taliban or now Karzai and the Northern Alliance) who is forced to wear the dark blue head-to-foot burqa, she is not ruled by a fundamentalist state because the rulers of her country adhere to a form of theology that Martyn considers to be less "rigorous" than that of the "high cultural doctrine" of Sunni tradition. This is like saying that protestant varieties of religious fundamentalism, such as for instance the American militant (and indeed murderous) anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, are not real christian fundamentalists, because protestantism is itself a heresy against 'true' (ie, catholic) christian theology. Whereas of course, the Irish-based Youth Defence, which is analogous but maintains loyalty to the Holy See, now they are real fundamentalists, deserving of the name because of the purity of their doctrine. What nonsense! While sectarian hostilities between fundamentalist regimes due to denomination are a material factor that communists have to take into account, to mock the 'fundamentalist' credentials of one because of theological differences is to make a mockery of Marxism. And additionally, it is not scientifically accurate to say that Shia muslims are 'prophet-worshippers'. It is simply not true that they worship the prophet Muhammad as a god. The differences between the two denominations are about the legitimacy of the lineage of the caliphate, not about who to worship. This phraseology sounds to me like a piece of Sunnophile polemical/theological abuse, and is hardly useful for Marxists, who should be strictly, indeed militantly, neutral on such questions. Martyn's material is riddled with strange, often self-contradictory, quotations from academic sources that only serve to underline his incoherence and the many flaws in his arguments. Indeed, many readers will be scratching their heads in puzzlement as to what exactly he is saying. On the question of so-called islamic 'modernism', for instance, he engages in the most incredible self-contradictory nonsense. He writes: "But for islamism, the reality is - otherwise it would not be islamism - that the doctrine is the programme. The methods to carry out the programme are based, in every dot and comma, in the doctrine of the high culture of islamic texts and those texts alone. The readings of the Quran and the Hadith serve as the template for those actions - actions deplored by other muslims [like the MAB?] reading the same texts." Later he writes: "... undoubtedly the poetry of the past exemplified in islamism is backward-looking - but a backward-looking, radically new form of politics, born out of despair "¦" He then approvingly quotes my statement that these phenomena are a "punishment for the failure of the left to defeat capitalism". All very well, but rather in contradiction to his earlier condemnation as methodologically islamophobic of my statement: "The idea that these kinds of ideas are somehow a new or modernist development is misplaced. They are fundamental to the belief system of the islamic religion itself ..." (December 5). Martyn flies off the handle: "Who is the islamophobe now? The very idea that most muslims support the programme of the islamists is absurd ..." But I never said that most muslims support the actions of the fundamentalists. I merely said that the aims of the islamists, in terms of a society built on the law of the Sharia, are fundamental to the belief system of the islamic religion itself. Example - the Quran prescribes that the punishment for theft should be the amputation of a limb, and also that the punishment for adultery should be flogging and/or stoning. Fundamentalists who seek the introduction of such punishments therefore have the authority of the Quran and the Sharia for such aims - which are therefore fundamental to the belief system of the islamic religion itself. Does that mean that "most muslims" support these kinds of punishments? Almost certainly not. But those muslims are therefore at some level in contradiction with their religion itself, just as catholics who practice contraception or who have abortions despite the prohibitions of the church are in contradiction with their religious doctrine. But it would be a fool who said that strict opposition to abortion and contraception are not part of orthodox catholic doctrine. Ditto for Sharia law vis-à -vis islam. In this case, such is the extremity of the contradiction with modern-day social reality that even avowed fundamentalists like Muhammad Ghazali, an early ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, regarded such laws as practically utopian (see Dilip Hiro Islamic fundamentalism Paladin 1989, p65). In terms of islamic fundamentalist 'modernism', the truth is that every significant political movement is compelled to be modernist to a greater or lesser extent, irrespective of its original doctrine. As Marx said, "People make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing". Islamism has played two complementary roles - as the distillation of counterrevolution, in a manner analogous to European fascism, most notably in Afghanistan in destroying the petty bourgeois, left nationalist/Stalinist PDPA regime, but also partially in Iran as the mullahs drove a stake through the heart of the Iranian left and the nascent proletarian revolutionary upheaval that had been delivered into their hands by that left. But the other role it has played is that of a surrogate form of the nationalism of the oppressed, given the failure and bankruptcy of the older, secular forms of nationalism - as with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the occupied territories, partly in Iran in the early period of the revolution, etc. But nevertheless islamism is not sufficiently a 'modernist' movement to have a real future as anything other than an excrescence caused by the delay of the world revolution - it is not a world-historic competitor to communism for the allegiance of humanity. This really brings out the one-sided, and in many ways flatly wrong, character of Martyn's bald equation of 'political islam' with Hitlerite fascism. According to Martyn, for the left to co-sponsor with the MAB a demonstration against imperialist war on Iraq is "like communists lining up with Nazi sympathisers on demonstrations during World War II, because we are both against British imperialism - at the same time as communists are being executed by the Nazis in Belsen". Elsewhere, he extends this with his statement to the effect that the programme of the MAB is "the killing of jews and secularists" - the implication that the religious anti-Judaism of the fundamentalists is the same thing as Nazi racist jew-hatred. Of course, as a reactionary imperialist alternative to the proletarian revolution, and the most economically and militarily powerful capitalist state on the Eurasian supercontinent, Nazi Germany could be seen as the potential ruler of the world, the nemesis of the world proletariat. Martyn's bald use of this analogy is certainly consistent with the view he appeared to argue in his first article, that islamism was the bearer of a world theocracy. Despite Martyn's subsequent protestations that this is not what he believes, this analogy does not really make sense unless one holds that islamism really is a contender for world domination. I would certainly admit that there are similarities, as well as differences of social content, between some attributes of islamism and European fascism that can make it act in an analogous way in some circumstances. But islamic fundamentalism also acts, in situations where national-type aspirations exist among the oppressed masses in the absence of a viable national project, as a surrogate 'nationalism of the oppressed' - the classic example being Israel's well-deserved defeat by a mass movement led by the Shia fundamentalist/surrogate-nationalist Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Indeed, this is the only way the appeal of this form of politics to the oppressed can be explained without ending up demonising the semi-proletarian and plebeian poor of the muslim world as the agency of world reaction, which they certainly are not. Martyn's use of the 'Nazi' analogy here is wrong and ahistorical, and has something of the quality of the boy who cried wolf. Ian Donovan
Worker