I distilled my thoughts on Green-Red commonalities today at "[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace"; here follows new information and insights, starting with two quotes from soon after the 1917 revolution.
Bertrand Russell wrote in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 114:
Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.
The notorious but sometimes insightful Lorthrop Stoddard wrote in his 1921 book, The New World of Islam:
young men whose brains are seething with radical Western ideas—atheism, socialism, Bolshevism, and what not. Yet, curiously enough, these fanatic radicals tend to join hands with the fanatic reactionaries of Islam in a common hatred of the West.
During the height of the Cold War, the French Marxist Middle East specialist Maxime Robinson declared that "L'islam est un communisme avec Dieu" (Islam is Communism with God).
(July 14, 2008)
Apr. 25, 2012 update: Jemima Khan reports in the New Statesman (UK) that George Galloway, MP for Bradford West, has converted to Islam and is a Muslim.
He converted more than ten years ago in a ceremony at a hotel in Kilburn, north-west London, attended by members of the Muslim Association of Great Britain. Those close to him know this. The rest of the world, including his Muslim constituents, does not.
George Galloway, MP for Bradford West, England.
"So you converted?" I ask at the end of our lunch at the back of Akbar's café, on Bradford's main high street, where we have enjoyed a halal, alcohol-free meal of Pakistani staples. ...
"I can't answer that. God knows who is a Muslim ..." he answers breezily.
"I know someone who attended your shahadah [the Muslim conversion ceremony]."
He stares at me across the table, penetrating blue eyes squinted, pausing for the first time in an hour. ... The silence grows awkward. Galloway puts down his napkin, clears his throat and says, not impolitely, "How's that then? Are we finished?" and gets up from his leopard-print covered chair.
Oct. 28, 2012 update: In a surprisingly good article for the New York Times opinion page, Colin Shindler (emeritus professor at the University of London asks "why do today's European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?" He points to leftist anti-colonialism as the key, something I did not mention in "[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace":
The old left in Europe was forged in the struggle against local fascists in the 1930s. Most of Europe experienced a brutal Nazi occupation and bore witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The European left strongly identified with Jewish suffering and therefore welcomed the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. Some viewed the struggle for Israel in the same light as the fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War.
Colin Shindler of SOAS.
But the succeeding generation of the European left did not see things this way. Its frame of reference was the anticolonial struggle — in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia and a host of other places. Its hallowed icon was not the soldier of the International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain, but Che Guevara — whose image adorned countless student bedrooms. Anticolonialism further influenced myriad causes, from America's Black Panthers in the 1960s to Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.
It began with Israel's exclusion from the ranks of the nonaligned nations more than 50 years ago, when Arab states refused to attend a 1955 nonaligned conference in Indonesia if an Israeli delegate was present. The Jewish state was snubbed in favor of such feudal kingdoms as Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen. And Israel's collusion with imperial powers like Britain and France during the Suez crisis the following year cemented its ostracism.
Given the deep remorse for the misdeeds of colonialism, it was easier for the New Left of the 1960s to identify with the emerging Palestinian national movement than with the already established social democratic Israel. This deepening hostility toward Israel was present in Europe before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and before the rush to build settlements on the West Bank.
Apr. 16, 2013 update: Harris Interactive today published a survey, "Le regard des Français sur la religion musulmane" ("French views of the Islamic religion") that confirms in numbers the leftist-Islamist bond. Asked about Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam "For each of these religions, do you have, overall, a very good, a fairly good, a fairly bad or a very bad image?" the replies look like this:
As Harris Interactive notes in its headline, "Islam is the only religion which the Left sees more positively than does the Right." Also of note is that the two non-Western religions, Buddhism and Islam, have, respectively, the best and worst images; so much for xenophobia driving fear of Islam and "the other."
Feb. 11, 2015 update: Stephen Schwartz provides historical context for this alliance in "Famous Communists and Islam," where he finds a pattern of "defend Muslim autocrats, blame the West." He proffers quotes from none less than Karl Marx, Lenin, and the Communist International of 1920. Marx, for example, had a soft spot for the Ottoman Empire. Schwartz concludes that "These declarations shouldn't surprise us. When anti-imperialism is the concept and purpose that defines a movement, it will naturally find allies in radical Islam, which presents itself precisely as a creation of colonial oppression."
 Shannon Morris, aka Shahid King Bolsen. |
Feb. 28 , 2015 update: An American convert to Islam living in Istanbul, born as Shannon Morris but going now by Shahid King Bolsen, has won himself a role directing Islamist violence in Egypt. In an article on the 43-year-old from Colorado, David D. Kirkpatrick calls him "the unlikely apostle for a distinctive blend of anti-globalization sloganeering and Islamist politics that is fueling a new wave of violence against businesses across the country":
he calls on Egyptians to start off-hour attacks against KFC restaurants, banks, mobile phone shops and other corporate outposts. He urges assaults on the military's commercial interests instead of its security checkpoints. ... Although the attacks have mainly hit empty banks, stores and restaurants, they have killed two Cairenes so far. On Thursday alone, six bombs set off around greater Cairo injured at least nine others, including four police officers. ...
Mixing Quranic verses with fusillades against "corporate crusaders," he argues that multinational corporations are both the real power behind the military takeover and also its greatest weak spot. "The army has occupied Egypt on behalf of multinationals and foreign investors," he declared in a recent Facebook post. "The revolutionaries can prove that collaboration with the coup is bad for business, " Mr. Bolsen wrote in another, urging "rebels" to prove they can "inflict serious disruption" to corporate profits.
"It makes more sense, in my opinion, to fight against the army's economic holdings than to fight against their security apparatus," he has often said. "This will be much more of a blow than targeting checkpoints or police stations." Islamist activists leaning toward violence circulate his statements approvingly, and militant groups like the Popular Resistance Movement have cited his arguments as inspiration and justification as they have carried out dozens of small attacks on business storefronts. ...
"When you strike KFC, or any of their companies, your message goes directly to the top of the pyramid," Mr. Bolsen wrote on Jan. 31. "If the investors who work through Vanguard alone are convinced that the coup cannot secure their capital, they easily have the power to demote Sisi from the presidency of Egypt, to washing dishes at KFC." Militants attacked more KFC locations the following week.
Comment: Note that he lives in Istanbul, perhaps the center for inciting violence against the Egypt authorities.
June 7, 2018 update: Epoch Times has posted an important analysis at "The Communist Roots of Terrorism."
May 27, 2020 update: In "Michel Foucault and Iran's Ayatollahs," Reza Parchizadeh considers the impact of Foucault's enthusiasm for the Islamic revolution:
the legacy of Foucault's advocacy of Islamism remains with us to this day. His favor made it much easier for the Islamists to justify their positions to Western audiences despite their tyranny and violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Leftists, who are hostile on principle to Western values under the all-encompassing term "capitalism," felt free to ally themselves with Islamists and thereby helped to promote their agenda in the West.
July 23, 2021 update: John Jenkins has written the deepest account of what's now sometimes known as islamo-gauchisme at "Islamism and the Left: An essay in two parts" (the first part is general, the second is about the United Kingdom). Its goal is to "consider the question of the relationship between Islamism (in all its forms) and parts of the Left." Some excerpts from the remarkable part one:
[The two] create a commonality not simply of tactics but of worldviews. These worldviews are framed in opposition to what we might consider the modern liberal and democratic order.
it was probably in Iran, under the sponsorship of an organised neo-Jacobin state, that both Shi'a and Sunni Islamist ideas and radical European thought were first brought into alignment, widely mobilized, and forged into a tool of sustained discursive resistance to alleged global injustice, western oppression and orientalist hegemony. This discourse, inflected by a mixture of reimagined Islamic and non-Islamic modernist thought, resonates with the European and American Left precisely because it claims to have the same targets.
The critical theorists of the New Left see tyranny as a discursively encoded function of state power: so do Islamists.
[Western intellectuals] always [find it] more exciting, after all, to be on the metaphorical barricades rather than in the actual (and dusty) archives.
Whatever the exact nature of the confluence of contemporary radical western and Islamist thought, it is plain that both grew out of the same milieu: the revolt against Enlightenment rationality, Cartesian subjectivity, Kantian universalism, the late 19th century intellectual crisis of western modernity, the shocks of imperialism and mass conflict and (in a different tradition) the translation of Marx's materialist view of the class struggle in industrial economies to suit the different circumstances (and floating signifiers) of advanced global capitalism
Islamists have adapted the [Leftist critique of western modernity] to support their different purposes within an entirely different tradition, whose chains of authentication stretch back not to the radical scepticism of Heraclitus or Empedocles, but into the mists of divine revelation.
Western modernist and postmodernist thought rejects both God and Revelation as appropriate subjects for the public sphere.... Islamists in contrast, ... believe themselves to be prophetically inspired and fuelled not by radical doubt, but by absolute conviction.
When the two projects [Leftism and Islamism] are combined in an assault upon liberal democracy, we risk the destruction of everything valuable in the Enlightenment legacy. ... the Enlightenment and its consequences are not immune from criticism: they never have been. But neither Islamism nor critical theorists have a persuasive remedy for their imperfections. They call for the replacement of the existing order and the erasure of its monuments and memory. Neither brooks dissent. Each has a quasi-Calvinist belief in 'election'. Separate, they are disturbing. Combined they are destructive.
questions relating to Islam and Islamism are out of bounds to non-Muslims, non-Islamists and their allies. That way madness lies.
the Enlightenment that produced the modern, individualist and instrumentally rational West, with its systems of private, political and legal liberties, also furnished a manual for its ideological detonation.
Sep. 9, 2024 update: Not often that an Islamist organization, in this case Rahma Worldwide, expresses "sincere gratitude to our esteemed partners," a reference to agents of the Chinese Communist Party, but here it is.
