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Title: The trouble with Islam
Author: Andrew Flood
Date: 2003
Language: en
Topics: Islam, religion, Red & Black Revolution
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=943
Notes: First published in Red & Black Revolution (no 7, Winter 2003)

Andrew Flood

The trouble with Islam

The September 11 attacks, the Afghan war that followed from it and the

ongoing war in Israel/Palestine have once again raised the issue of

Islam in the minds of many anarchists in Ireland and Britain. Not just

because of the role Islam has in shaping those conflicts but also

because militant Islam has become a far more noticeable presence on

solidarity demonstrations.

In Ireland we have seen the Hezbollah flag flown on demonstrations in

Dublin and chants of ‘God is Great’ raised. On some London

demonstrations it has been reported that chants of “Slay the Jews” and

“Death to the socialists” have been raised. Another report on the same

demonstration revealed that “ultrareactionaries of such organisations as

Al Muhajiroun, ... held placards reading, ‘Palestine is Muslim’. They

chanted, “Skud, Skud Israel” and “Gas, gas Tel Aviv” .. In Trafalgar

Square they hurled abuse (and a few missiles) at Tirza Waisel of the

Israeli group, Just Peace.”[1]

The left in general has not responded to this. Some groups like the

British SWP have gone so far as to describe left criticism of the

Islamic religion as ‘Islamophobia’ echoing the official line of their

government which insists “The real Islam is a religion of peace,

tolerance and understanding.” While there is a real need for the left to

defend people who are Muslims from state and non-state victimisation in

the aftermath of 9–11 this should not at any time imply a defence of the

Islamic religion. Freedom of religion must also allow freedom from

religion! At a SWP organised anti-war meeting in Birmingham, England it

was reported that Islamic fundamentalists there “segregated the meeting,

guiding/intimidating Muslim women into a women’s only section,

apprehended a Muslim looking woman because she had allegedly been

drinking, prevented the critics of Muslim fundamentalists from entering

the meeting and used violence against them.”[2]

The left in Ireland has been unsure how to rise to this challenge,

although on the Palestine solidarity march in Dublin on April 27^(th)

2002 anarchists did march with placards reading ‘End the occupation:

Support Israeli refuseniks’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic and chanted

‘No Gods, no Masters, no States, no Wars”. But otherwise fundamentalist

chants have remained unchallenged.

Over 130 years ago the anarchist Micheal Bakunin wrote “I reverse the

phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be

necessary to abolish him.” Writing of the Christian churches in Europe,

he said “In talking to us of God they propose, they desire, to elevate

us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary, they crush and

degrade us. With the name of God they imagine that they can establish

fraternity among men, and, on the contrary, they create pride, contempt;

they sow discord, hatred, war; they establish slavery.” These words

today are applicable to Islam.

This hostility to organised religion and the promotion of a material

rather than spiritual understanding of the world is common to most of

the anarchist movement, although there are exceptions. It was developed

in the face of Christian state-church systems that often bore

similarities to the Islamic State rule found today. Anarchist hostility

to religion tended to be strongest in those countries where the church

and state were almost inseparable, in particular in Spain.

Islam in general believes that no “division between matters social,

political and religious should exist.” The idea of Islamic government

and Islamic law is not something confined to what is called ‘Islamic

fundamentalism’ but is an expected belief of all Muslims. Under Shari’a

(Islamic) law the penalty for Apostasy (Muslims who reject Islam, for

instance they “might state that the universe has always existed from

eternity”), is execution for men and life imprisonment for women. So, if

anything, Islam today attempts to maintain a much tighter control of the

thoughts in people’s heads than Christianity has done since the time of

Galileo.

Islam insists that the Quran is almost entirely a document dictated by

God to Muhammad. Like most ‘holy books’ it is full of absurdities and

cruelties which are well documented on the web by Muslim apostates. For

instance in Quran 5:33 God commands “The only reward of those who make

war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land

will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and

feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land.”

God also dictates that women are second class citizens, in Quran 4:34 he

dictates “Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one of

them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for

the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in

secret that which Allah has guarded. As for those from whom ye fear

rebellion andmonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge

them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is

ever High, Exalted, Great.”

Of course anyone who is familiar with the Old Testament of the Christian

and Jewish religions will know there is nothing in the Quran that is any

worse then what is found there. Even the Christian New Testament

contains justifications for slavery e.g. Matthew: 24:46 “Blessed is that

slave whom the master finds at work when he comes.... But if that evil

slave ... begins to beat his fellow slaves and to eat and drink with

drunkards, then the master of that slave will come on a day when he does

not expect him and at an hour he does not foresee, and will cut him in

two, and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be

weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The difference is that the attempt to

impose a Christian state has been defeated almost everywhere. The

fundamentalist movements that seek to promote the idea may be

influential (as shown by their attacks in the US on the teaching of

evolution) but in general do not attempt to impose their complete

religious program.

With Islam however we see the continued existence of religious states in

Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan to name three. We also see a growing

movement that seeks to create new Islamic states, even in multi-faith

countries like Lebanon, Egypt and Israel/Palestine and which actively

seeks to impose Islamic law on Muslim communities everywhere. In

Northern Nigeria this has resulted in high profile cases where Islamic

courts have sentenced women to death by stoning for ‘adultery’. About 1

in 5 of the world’s population is Muslim.

The general label applied to this movement is Islamic fundamentalism.

It’s not a great label for a wide range of reasons, not least because it

lumps together some very different trends and ignores the fact that many

of the most objectionable elements are part of mainstream Islam. That

said I’m going to use it anyway because there are no better alternatives

that people will readily understand.

The rise of fundamentalism in the modern period owes much to the

struggle against colonialism and the failure of the Arab nationalist

projects to deliver a better life for the working class, including the

peasantry of the region. Frequently it is based on a revolt against

colonial control on the one hand and the westernisation of the country

on the other. The failure of successful national liberation struggles to

relieve the desperate poverty of the masses on the one hand and the

obvious growing enrichment of the westernised elites on the other leads

easily to the idea that the answer lies in a return to ‘traditional

values’.

The first of these movements to be successful was Wahhabism which

brought Ibn Saud to power in what was to become Saudi Arabia. In this

case, as with the early spread of Islam across North Africa, Wahhabism

was to provide essential glue to hold together a society created by

conquest in a manner similar to nationalism. Wahhabism was imposed by

force with massacres on the taking of Mecca and widespread destruction

of religious sites that were considered un-Islamic. Religious police

raided homes, beating those they suspected of smoking tobacco. Wahhabism

was also pretty much the only genuine ‘primitivist’ version of Islam as

it was anti-industrial. When they rose against Ibn Saud in 1927 one

reason for their revolt was Saud’s allowing of telephones into the

country! Modern fundamentalists may talk of a return to traditional

values but the societies they seek to create include aspects of advanced

modern technology, in particular if it is of military use!

Saudi came to play a similar role in relation to the export of

fundamentalism that the USSR played in the spread of Leninism.

Particularly with the growth of the oil industry in Saudi large sums of

money were provided to finance the infrastructure of fundamentalist

groups in other countries and a huge network of religious schools in

Saudi itself. Saudi, like Moscow, became the place of training, support

and refuge for fundamentalist activists. And funds could be exported

which provided schools, meeting places and even religious based welfare

systems to the increasingly desperate working class of the cities and

countryside in the Arab world. In the conditions of desperate poverty

that exist this cre — ates the infrastructure that fundamentalism grows

out of.

One Lebanese Marxist, writing of this and the failure of the somewhat

more secular Arab nationalism of Nassar, described the situation. “Then

came the October war [against Israel] with its parade of intense Islamic

propaganda, and the oil boom which enabled Libya and especially Saudi

Arabia to distribute their petrodollars to the integralist

(fundamentalist) groups everywhere in order to undermine left-wing

extremists, or pro-Soviet groups as in Syria. Even at the time when the

modernist statist bourgeois faction was still credible, Saudi Arabia was

used as the prototype by repressed or persecuted Islamic archaism; and

its emergence following the October war on the ruins of Nassar’s Egypt

as the leader of the Arab world gave the Brotherhoods of Sunni Islam not

only more subsidies, but the model of an Islam true to itself. The

propaganda pounded out by western media — depicting Saudi Arabia as the

new giant with the power of life and death over western civilisation —

stimulated, in old and young alike, the nostalgic old desire for the

return of Islam to its former strength.”[3]

The role of the west in relation to fundamentalism has been quite

complex. Up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 it was simple, promoting

fundamentalism was seen as a way of advancing the western agenda by

undermining Soviet influence and the various nationalist leaders of the

region who wanted to re-direct some of the wealth towards development.

“M. Copland, the former chief of the CIA in the Middle East, revealed in

his book The Game of Nations that from the 1950s the CIA began to

encourage the Muslim Brotherhood to counteract the communist influence

in Egypt.” Even after the Iranian revolution, “French president Giscard

d’Estaing, confided to members of his cabinet before taking the plane

for the Gulf in March 1980: “To combat Communism we have to oppose it

with another ideology. In the West, we have nothing. This is why we must

support Islam.”[4]

The facts of western support for the Afghan mujheedeen and the more

limited support for the Taliban that followed have been so well

documented since S11 that I don’t intend to repeat them here. But it is

important to realise that this does not mean that the fundamentalists

are simply a creation of the west that has gotten out of control. They

have their own dynamic and their own wealthy backers in Saudi Arabia.

Lack of western support would have hurt their war against the Soviet

occupation but the war would still have gone on.

Fundamentalism remains a mass movement. In almost all of North Africa

and the Middle East it is the only mass movement that threatens the

stability of the regimes there in any way. It is nakedly hostile to the

left in all its forms, Hezbollah for instance has carried out attacks on

even the tame Lebanese Communist Party, bombing its offices. The Iranian

revolution in 1979 saw a movement of workers councils (Shora) emerge

that sought to take over the management of production. “The regime

introduced a law aimed at undermining worker self-management by banning

shora involvement in management affairs — while at the same time trying

to force class collaboration by insisting that management must be

allowed to participate in the shoras.” [5] Since then, according to the

Iranian Revolutionary Socialists’ League, the “following groups have all

been attacked throughout the reign of the mullahs:

workers, trade unionists, left-wing and socialist activists

women and women’s/feminist groups

national and religious minorities

political oppositionists, including various monarchist, Islamic and

liberal groups

writers, journalists, artists, intellectuals and students;

peasants and tribal groups;

homosexuals and others who follow an ‘un-Islamic’ life-style.” 6

For opportunistic reasons sections of the western left are happy to

build alliances with Islamic fundamentalist groups that are not only

essentially uncritical but that discourage others from raising

criticisms. This is sometimes defended by the straightforward observance

that such groups oppose ‘western imperialism’ and in countries with

large Muslim populations sometimes succeed in attracting the masses to

their organisations.

The problem with this position is that it fails to recognise the

hostility of such groups to the left — a hostility that includes

physical attacks and murder- in the countries where they are strong.

This is not terribly different from the situation with fascist groups in

the west. Of course for the western left with no basis in immigrant

Muslim communities this is easy to ignore — they are not the targets of

such activities themselves.

Anarchists have a long and proud tradition of fighting the power of

organised religion, including in countries like Spain fighting fascist

gangs formed on a religious basis. While we recognise the freedom of

people to hold a religion we also recognise that there has to be a

freedom from religion — an idea that runs against the basis of Islam.

Anarchists in the Middle East and beyond will need to determine for

themselves the most effective ways of counteracting the influence of the

fundamentalists there. In the west we can at least make sure their

attempts to impose themselves on the immigrant communities are opposed.

[1] Peter Manson, weekly worker 433, May 2002.

[2] Salman, ISF journal, November 2001,

www.isf.org.uk

[3] Latif Lakhdar, Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the

Middle East. (1981)

[4] ibid

[5] Michael Schmidt, Religous fundamentalist regimes: a lesson from the

Iranian revolution 1978–1979. Zabalaza Journal, South Africa, Number 2,

March 2002