The weekly column by Alan Johnson

Islamic Fundamentalism and the Left

What links John Rees, leader of the ‘Socialist’ Workers Party and the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt? What links Alan Simpson MP, Chair of Labour Against the War and ‘Sheikh Hassan Zarkani, representative of the Al Sadr movement, Iraq’. No, this is not a game of seven degrees of separation. It is the platform of the Third ‘Anti-Imperialist Cairo Conference’.

The ‘Cairo Conference’ was launched in 2002. At it, the Iraqi delegation to the Cairo Conference was headed by Nabil Negm (an under-secretary in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry who rose to become chief political adviser to Saddam Hussein) and Saad Qassem Hammoudy (a leading member of the Baath Party, Secretary-General of the Iraqi Conference of Arab Popular Forces, and Iraqi Ambassador to the Arab League.

Key speakers alongside these Saddamists were John Rees of the SWP and George Galloway. Writing in New Politics in 2002, Stan Crooke noted that among the other participants were ‘Moustafa Bakri, editor of the Egyptian magazine Al Osboa, attended the conference. Al Osboa is a publication renowned for its denunciations of homosexuality and human rights activists. In 1999 the International Human Rights Federation published a report accusing Bakri of ties to the Egyptian security services’.

The Iraqi Communist Party described the first Cairo Conference as “a conference of solidarity with Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

In 2003 the Cairo Conference coincided with the capture of Saddam Hussein. As news filtered through that the tyrant had been caught it was George Galloway who expressed the outrage of the conference. ‘But Galloway had taken the microphone. “The Prisoner is Saddam,” he said, “he’s been paraded on the TV screens and he’s been virtually humiliated. His enemies are having a good laugh but it won’t be the last laugh,” at which point applause filled the hall’ (Al-Ahram Weekly Online report of the second ‘Anti-Zionist and Anti-Imperialist Conference’, held at Cairo, Egypt).

At the final press conference of the Second Cairo conference John Rees, a leader of the SWP sat happily between George Galloway, the man who hailed Saddam Hussein and spent Christmas with Tariq Aziz, Ramsey Clarke, defender of Radovan Karadzic and a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosovic and Azzam Tamimi, who, according to Louise Ellman MP, speaking in the House of Commons, is an advisor to Hamas and hopes the Jews drown with the boats they are driven out of Israel in (Tamimi denies these charges).

A new political force is emerging, part ‘anti-imperialist’, part fascistic, each chasing a purity without spot. The Rees-Galloway project is to yoke the left to ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’. The democratic left needs to raise our dropped jaw and take its measure. We need a better understanding of the rise of Jihadi Fundamentalism and a more compelling political program to combat it.

When he was a socialist, Max Shachtman argued that if capitalist society continued to decay and if the organized working class failed to lead an alliance of forces to a progressive democratic collectivism then a totalitarian doppelganger, Stalinism, could emerge as a reactionary alternative to impose a reactionary ”bureaucratic collectivism.” While history never repeats itself, we can use the logical structure of Shachtman’s analysis – “if…if…then” – to fathom the rise of Jihadic Islamic Fundamentalism.

If the national, secular, often state-capitalist, modernizing projects of the bourgeoisie and state elites fail to develop the society and culture, and become stalled in corruption, tyranny, and cultural stagnation (in 2001 only 300 books were published in Egypt), leaving the rulers unable to secure the support of large sections of the middle class; if global capitalist competition, penetration, and dislocation presses upon that middle class, sending it into panic and rage, disintegrating welfare systems established by the state-capitalist regimes in the post-war period, ravaging old social relationships but not creating new ones, threatening the old exploiting classes – the bazaar merchants, the religious establishment, sometimes landlords; and if the political leaderships and organizations of the Left are widely discredited for having tailed the nationalist projects of the bourgeoisie (the Egyptian CP dissolved into Nasser’s front in the 1960s, for instance), and if the working class is weak and not organized independently, then not only the middle classes (small manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, market merchants, frustrated university graduates) but also those classes created by primitive capital accumulation and pauperization, a cast-off sub-proletariat, a mass of marginalized semi-proletarian poor and distressed petit-bourgeois (who were, in truth, never really won over to secularism during the post-war years) are “opened up” for recruitment by the traditional intellectuals of political Islam, the ulemas. These forces can be swept up into a mass movement aimed inchoately at “the West” or “Imperialism” or “the Infidels,” chasing the entirely reactionary “solution” (actually incapable of implementation) of using modern military technology and, they hope, state power, to turn back the clock to the pure Islamic state of the 7th century based on Sharia law.

Each of these pre-conditions for the rise of political Islam can be found, with national peculiarities of course, in the countries that have suffered its spectacular rise.

The Islamic Fundamentalists appeal to a deep sense of humiliation. Bernard Lewis, in his book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, is right (whatever his political failings) to focus attention upon that anguished question which torments the Islamic world: how did the very fulcrum of civilization become dependent, defeated, backward, corrupt, and poverty-stricken? The Fundamentalists say “they did it!” pointing to a cast of villains such as “infidels,” “westernizers,” corrupt oil sheiks, Jews, and uppity women.

Fundamentalist Islamic intellectuals such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawlana Mawdudi, and Ruhollah Khomeni laid the foundations for the rise of Political Islam. When modern secular nationalism stalled amid defeat and failure in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Stalinist-led workers’ movements lost the allegiance of major social layers, then the Islamists became the repository of the hopes and dreams of millions. In turn, the Islamists worked tirelessly to redefine those dreams as nihilist fantasies. The result has been a wave of Islamist political militancy and violence from Iran to Algeria, Sudan to Afghanistan, Kashmir to Chechnya, and, in the form of al-Queda, a global Jihadic terrorist network.

How does this mayhem connect up to Shachtman’s idea that “capitalism is decaying”? It depends how “decay” is defined. If Shachtman meant the “decline of the productive forces” then he was just plain wrong. The global explosion in the productive forces of the post-1945 world, and the surge in life expectancy and living standards associated with it, speaks for itself. World GDP increased six-fold from 1950-1998, with an average growth rate of nearly 4 per cent a year, according to the OECD. Real GDP per capita rose by 2.1 per cent a year between 1950 and 1998. That compares with less than 1 per cent a year between 1820 and 1950.

In fact Shachtman defined decay rather differently: “To say that capitalism is decaying is to say that it is increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems of society, of maintaining economic and political order.” That is an accurate indictment of the “runaway world” of the 21st century: a voracious, amoral capitalism eats up the resources of the planet, churns up communities, mocks social institutions from the family to representative democracy, and turns everything it touches – and it touches everything – into a commodity to be bought and sold. This pathology generates a counter-pathology: an irredentist throwback to a simpler time of order, tradition, tribe, and blood. Benjamin Barber has called this the dialectic of McWorld and Jihad.

We have tamed the irrational forces of nature but we remain at the mercy of irrational social and political forces we have created, from the religion of the market to the market place of religions. Humanity is kept in a state of suicidal macro-irrationality “increasingly incapable of coping with the basic problems.”

The Jihadis offer no answer to any of this. They are a desperate, anti-modern reaction to the impasse. And half the region are aged 25 or under.

If the democrats are to push them aside, and reconnect with Muslim workers and diverse progressive elements in society who experience the Fundamentalists as their mortal foe, then we must first define them correctly as a deadly enemy not a potential ally.

When Islamic Fundamentalism first emerged the Left defined it as analogous to fascism. The Arab Trotskyist Salah Jaber wrote in 1981 that “Islamic Fundamentalism is one of the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary proletariat.” He pointed out that “the fundamentalist movement shares many of the characteristics of fascism outlines by Trotsky: its social base, the nature of its political ideology, its fierce anti-communism and its totalitarianism”. But there were also differences between classical fascism and fundamentalism. In some respects “the fundamentalist movement is, in fact, more backward than was fascism”. It drives the historical clock backward to a reactionary utopia with more faith and zeal than the classical fascists. But the Fundamentalists, as part of this “more reactionary” drive backwards, can also challenge big private capital. This contrasts to the role of classical fascism as the brutish guarantor of big capital in the face of a mass workers movement. All this means socialists will find themselves on the same demonstration, protesting the same social ill, from time to time. However “any compromises proposed by the fundamentalists as a result of this type of situation pose enormous dangers for all sections of the left, both moral and physical”. Tactical flexibility must be balanced against the overriding political conclusion that it was “absolutely and under all circumstances necessary to combat its ‘reactionary and medieval influence.’” Even the so-called “anti-imperialism” of the Fundamentalists, Jaber pointed out, does not amount to what socialists mean by that term. It represents only an inchoate reactionary hostility to “the hated ‘west’…all the political and social gains of the bourgeois revolution”.

Compare Jaber’s approach to a Lindsey German chasing ‘the Muslim vote’, a George Galloway denouncing the free Iraqi trade unionists as ‘Quislings’ in the Arab press, a John Rees, cosying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, or a Professor Alex Callinicos, sniffily waving away the “hullaballo” about the torture and murder of Hadi Saleh, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, by the ‘resistance’. That left is finished whatever its noisy show.

It is finished because once Fundamentalism gained a mass base and - all-important, this, for an essentially anti-American left - came into conflict with the USA, then some (forgetting that the possession of a mass base was also typical of classical fascism, forgetting that totalitarian Russia was also in conflict with the USA) allowed their rhetoric about the USA being “the heart of the beast” to merge with the political Islamists’ talk of “the Great Satan.” Reactionary Islamic Fundamentalism was now redefined as “Radical Islam” and the anti-Semitic zealots of Hamas, for instance, were redefined as bone fide “anti-imperialist” forces. This redefinition was part of a wider collapse of independent working class socialist politics. Too often leftists halt at a merely negative and inchoate oppositionism to whatever the U.S. is doing. A complex world has been reduced to a face-off between two camps, “Imperialism” versus “the Resistance.” (the crudity is dressed up in post-structuralese, but crudity it is). These leftists define the political Islamists as part of “the Resistance,” and, of course, in that act redefine themselves as the critical supporters of the political Islamists. The price paid in the West has been the loss of independent political judgement and much idiocy about, for instance, the “anti-imperialism” of groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Elsewhere the price has been much higher. In 1977 in Pakistan, the Left sided with Jamat al-Islami against Bhutto, imagining a tactical alliance against a common enemy. They were used and then jailed. During the Iranian Revolution negative oppositionism and inchoate “anti-imperialism” pushed the Left into the arms of Khomeini, the so-called “objective anti-imperialist.” They were led to his gallows.

Our job is to push on past a stalled modernity and a demented reaction. How? By a consistent fight for democratiya. That’s how the decent left we need will come to know itself and challenge the pro-tyrant left we have. This column will publicise the debates and the struggles of the Iraqi democrats over the coming 12 months.

Parts of this column first appeared in New Politics 35 in Summer 2003.