Imperialist Lunacy Is Not Better Than Islamic Fundamentalism

Imperialist Lunacy Is Not Better Than Islamic Fundamentalism

the secret assassinations of progressive intellectuals and the banning of their works, and the wholesale massacre of the masses in certain villages of Algeria by the Islamic Salvation Front. In Afghanistan, the invasion of the Taliban and Northern Alliance of each other's areas during the last decade, in which they have indiscriminately killed the masses and raped little girls and women as a prize of jihad - these are the al-hamdo l-el lah - "praise be upon God" - fruitful jihads. The big jihads of the last two decades - the war between Iran and Iraq, the war of the Afghanistani Mujahedeen against the occupying Soviet army - were aided and fought with the advanced "God sent" weaponry dispatched from the arsenals of the Western imperialist powers and with the aid of their satellite intelligence. What makes jihad reactionary in nature is not waging armed battle. The world amply shows that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It is the political and social objectives of jihad and the way it is fought that makes it reactionary.

In the nineteen eighties, the Islamic fundamentalist movements called for jihad for the seizure of political power and the establishment of Islamic sharia societies. But their calls have changed to some extent. Now most of them are calling for jihad as a way of striking blows at the enemies of Islam and for the sake of Islamic self-purification. The success of jihad is no longer guaranteed, but it is said that victory will be granted whenever God decides - toufigh men allah. This kind of superstitious talking to the people has a ring of modern-day politics to it. It is telling the masses, "Let me use you efficiently and don't ask why things are not changing or when victory will come." There have been two shifts that have influenced this change in the perspective of the Islamic fundamentalist movements. One, these movements have lost their big allies amongst the imperialist powers in the aftermath of the Cold War. Two, the bankruptcy of the Islamic states in Iran and Afghanistan, where not only poverty, dependence on imperialism and all sorts of social injustices have continued for the great majority of the masses, but the enforcement of sharia has made the lot of the people even worse. These Islamic projects have proven that the promised Islamic society is not Eden but the continuation of backwardness, poverty, debilitating ignorance and all kinds of discrimination, as well as national subjugation and humiliation.

Along with jihad there is a complementary concept of shihadat or martyrdom for the cause. There is a wide gulf between shihadat and the revolutionary concept of daring and readiness to sacrifice one's life for revolution. The latter is in the service of the clear aim of achieving victory - the seizure of political power by the workers, peasants and all the other oppressed masses and the overthrowing of private appropriation and exploitation. In shihadat, achieving an earthly political aim is secondary, and ascending to the summit of "closeness to God" is primary. In fact, in Islam shihadat is the highest goal of jihad. Becoming a martyr (shahid) is an end in itself, preparation for travelling to the other world and securing well-being and happiness in the other world. This is what makes the doctrine of shihadat reactionary.

The appalling conditions that the masses face provide enough reason for them to want to strike at the enemy by any means possible. In fact, in Palestine the Islamic Hamas group, by promoting a series of suicide missions, only gives vent to the anger of the masses and leaves them spectators to individual acts, however spectacular, instead of taking the more difficult road of finding the way to make them active participants in sustained collective armed struggle. Shihadat is based on, and nurtures, desperation and the masses' lack of hope that they can actually change this world. The masses need a revolutionary and scientific ideology that can raise their sights and enlighten them about real winnable war strategies against their powerful enemies. The masses of the Middle Eastern countries do not need jihad. Since it is the product of an ancient oppressive society, jihad would only bring more suffering. Plus, with the hocus pocus of jihad, the masses cannot rid themselves of powerful reactionary state powers and their imperialist masters. The masses need to scientifically see how an enemy as strong as the imperialist powers can be brought down by a correct strategy. And for taking the enemy by strategy there will be a huge need for audacity and sacrifice by the masses, including laying down one's life. But laying down one's life is not the goal. The goal is to lay down the enemy's life and to destroy the system of exploitation by destroying the powers that guard it - at the heart of which lie their state powers and their armies.

Religious ideology is injected into the masses as a fantasy escape route from this horrible world. Marxism teaches the masses to face the world as it is and change it accordingly. Marxism is completely based on the realities of the world and, therefore, is capable of changing it. Marxism teaches the masses that there is no supernatural being to aid them. The masses do need "magic". But this magic has always been and can only be a conscious human product. And today it can be produced if the masses wield the only ideology and science that belongs to them. Marxism, being thoroughgoing materialism, has to, and has been, constantly developing; without this development it would die out. Marxism has developed through epoch-making revolutions and by absorbing the advancing knowledge that human beings acquire through production and scientific inquiry - it has developed to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the powerful scientific revolutionary ideology of the proletariat. It is this class that, under the leadership of its greatest representatives, Marx, Lenin and Mao, has been able to produce a scientific world-view, a political, military and economic line that truly reflects the interests of the exploited masses. For the first time in the history of class society, the exploited masses do not have to resort to ideologies that come from the ancient or modern arsenals of the exploiting classes.

Two. Factors Giving Rise to Islamic Forces

Three decades ago the overwhelming majority of the political forces opposed to the ruling cliques in the Middle Eastern countries and their imperialist backers were secular - genuine communist forces, pro-Soviet phoney communist forces, and secular nationalist forces. Look at Iran, Egypt and Palestine. After the Second World War, in Iran two major political forces opposing the Shah's regime and its imperialist masters were the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and the National Front led by Mossadegh, who was toppled in nineteen fifty-three by a CIA-led coup, with the help of the Mullahs. In the Arab countries, it was mainly secular nationalist forces. In Egypt, these forces were led by Jamal Abdul Nasser, who picked up the flag of opposition to foreign domination whilst suppressing genuine revolutionary forces. In Palestine, it was secular nationalist forces and Palestinian left-leaning forces that led the struggle against Israel, while the Islamic forces gained influence mainly in the nineteen eighties. This raises the question of what factors have been fuelling the Islamic movements. The following must be examined: One, how Islamic political forces were brought onto the political stage by deliberate imperialist policies. Two, how the destructive workings of the imperialist system have provided a framework for the development of these forces. Three, how the bloody suppression of, and failures of, the revolutionary communists left a vacuum to be filled by them.

One of the obvious reasons for the growing influence of the Islamic forces has been the deliberate policy of the Western imperialist powers and their client states in the Middle East to contain the revolutionary masses, as well as the advances of their Soviet imperialist rivals, by fanning Islamic forces. In the nineteen seventies, throughout the Middle East, a network of mosques was developed with the consent and encouragement of the respective regimes. In nineteen seventy-seven General Zia ul-Haq carried out a US-backed coup against Bhutto in Pakistan and inserted sharia into the Pakistani constitution. In Iran, the Monarchical Philosophy Association headed by Western-educated Islamic scholars was founded with the thesis that Iranian society needed a new ideological identity with a heavy dose of Islam. While the revolutionary communist forces were hunted, killed, imprisoned or pushed into exile by the Shah's regime, all kinds of Islamic discussion forums were made available for spreading Islamic thought among the intellectuals. The alliance of the clergy with the bazaar merchants and usurers was allowed to expand the network of mosques and house-to-house Islamic preaching, and they were even given considerable freedom to mix in criticism of the Shah. Only a small underground Islamic-left guerrilla organisation, the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, did not enjoy that freedom. In nineteen eighty, after the military coup in Turkey,

fanatical pro-Ataturk, secular-minded generals went to Switzerland to bring the Islamic leader Arbakan back from the exile that they had imposed on him earlier. He returned to form the Islamic Refah Party. The Islamic forces were given room to establish their control over the basic masses, and granted millions of dollars for Islamic schools. During the counter-insurgency against the Kurdish upsurge, hezbollah forces were used extensively by the Turkish army.

While it is true that those running the oppressive societies in the Middle East had a deliberate policy of placing Islamic forces on the political stage, the question remains as to what underlying workings produce and reproduce them. It must be said that these forces cannot be reduced simply to "echoes of the past", even though they pledge to roll back their respective societies. They are products of the modern structures of the Middle Eastern societies, which are in turn products of the deep imperialist penetration of these societies that has reorganised and integrated them into the worldwide web of the imperialist system. This has been a very tumultuous process and one of the ugliest in history, in terms of the human suffering inflicted. This is an ongoing process that breeds crisis and suffering on a massive scale for the peoples of the world - "globalisation" being its latest chapter.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism reflects the incurable crisis of the neo-colonial states in this region, their massive permanent poverty, whilst tremendous riches are pumped out of this region into the West. It reflects the spasmodic rise and fall of the middle classes; the displacement of populations from one end of their country to the other, and from inside to outside of their country; and the never-ending clash between being stuck in the pre-capitalist era and being dragged into the maelstrom of world capitalism. These countries are in constant turmoil. Even the reactionary classes are beset with bitter splits and ruthless competition.

Islam has been the ruling ideology in Middle Eastern societies for a long time. And the religious establishment has been a part of the ruling structures - both before and after the domination of the Middle East by the colonialist and imperialist powers of the West. However, their position in the ruling structures underwent some changes in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. After the First World War, the British carried out major transformations in the various countries they dominated. They resorted to what is now called "nation building" in imperialist lingo: establishing centralised states with modern armies and police forces, roads and railroads, etc. This was part of building fortresses against the newly born socialist Soviet Union, and gave rise to figures like Reza Shah of Iran and Ataturk of Turkey. After the Second World War came another nodal point. Taking over from British imperialism, the US carried out major economic and political restructuring in several key countries it now dominated. The result was a new class configuration: the working class expanded, and a modern school system churned out modern intellectuals, some of whom became state functionaries and technocrats, whilst others joined the progressive and revolutionary milieu. A big part of the religious establishment was alienated, and in most of the countries their veto power over legislation was overturned.

The Islamic forces that seized power in Iran in nineteen seventy-nine had been shaved off from the power structures following the Second World War. After the First and Second World Wars the feudal economic base and its corresponding superstructure were dealt heavy blows in separate waves of imperialist penetration. The clerical establishment, which had been a powerful pillar of state power, was pushed aside in several waves, first after the First World War when the British introduced a semi-colonial centralised state structure, and then again after the Second World War. The US sponsored land and other reforms that the Shah of Iran carried out in the nineteen sixties under the name of the "White Revolution". These weakened the clergy to a considerable degree. But the White Revolution did not uproot feudalism, it simply reorganised the semi-feudal mode of production and linked it to global imperialist relations. Moreover, because the further penetration of "modern" relations was on a capitalist basis and was concerned to preserve the existing state structures, it did not seek a decisive showdown with feudal representatives, ideas and institutions, but instead sought compromises with them so as to integrate them into the neo-colonial system. Ayatollah Khomeini protested two chief features of the Shah's White Revolution: the distribution of Land among the peasantry, limited though it was, and the granting of the right to vote to women. When the "modernisation" drive hit the rocks, the Islamic forces that had been pushed out of the power structures came back to hound the Shah and his US masters. This imperialist modernisation created a lopsided and disarticulated economy to such a degree that it not only inflicted suffering on millions of people, but it even became dysfunctional.

Similar dynamics developed in other countries such as Egypt. Starting in the nineteen sixties, the so-called modernisation drive there uprooted the peasantry in vast numbers, but bureaucrat capitalism could not absorb them into the token modern factories, agri-businesses and infrastructure construction activities.

This was a major phenomenon throughout the Middle East. The big cities swelled with populations displaced from the countryside. The urban middle class, which had grown in the nineteen sixties - one expression of this was growth of the secular school system and the number of university students - started to feel the squeeze. The Islamic movements, originating from clerical centres, used all of their wits to connect with the rage of the poor masses, who were swelling the cities, and a section of the urban intellectuals.

The revolutionary communists, obscurantist religious forces and nationalists found themselves on the same side against the Shah of Iran and its United States masters for a short but intense and turbulent period. A section of the urban poor - largely the displaced peasantry - followed Ayatollah Khomeini. It is not true that this displaced poor is inherently Islamic. It is the case that Islamic ideology spontaneously boils from the semi-feudal structures of the society and is there to be resorted to by the distressed masses. But a similar crowd of urban poor to that which greeted Khomeini in nineteen seventy-nine in Tehran, the capital of Iran, had marched there a decade earlier in mourning for a popular woman singer - dancer called Mahvash.

The third and extremely important factor is the crisis within the communist movement internationally. The restoration of capitalism in the ex-USSR in the mid-nineteen fifties was the first source of this crisis. Islam did not gain such a prominent place among the masses opposing the status quo because of its political vigour, theoretical clarity or practical radicalism. The crisis within the international communist movement created a huge vacuum of leadership among the masses, which was filled by the Islamic forces who in turn were being virulently promoted by the Western imperialist powers. Just as the socialist revolutions in Russia in nineteen seventeen and China in nineteen forty-nine and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in nineteen sixty-six had tremendously boosted the growth of communist and revolutionary secular movements in the world as a whole, including in the Middle East, the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the betrayal of the national liberation movements by it and the pro-Soviet so-called Communist Parties was a blow to the genuine communist forces. On the basis of Soviet foreign policy interests, the pro-Soviet parties started to collaborate with reactionary regimes. For example, they "discovered" "progressive" elements in the Shah of Iran and in Arab socialism and Islamic socialism in the Arab countries. The revisionist coup in China in nineteen seventy-six was a second major blow, which in the nineteen eighties caused tremendous crisis in the communist movements in these countries, as well as on a world scale. These defeats, along with bloody suppression of the genuine revolutionary communist forces by the reactionary regimes and imperialists, gave an opportunity for the growth of opposition under Islamic flags. When there is no powerful alternative to idealism, obscurantism and imperialism, then assorted reactionaries seize the opportunity.

When China was a red power base, it provided a resounding argument for revolution and a revolutionary vision of society. It was a powerful magnet for the oppressed masses everywhere. It was a flag for the people that dared to change the world themselves and not wait for some god to decide whether he wants to bother. It was a shining example of internationalism, aiding all the struggles of the people around the world. It gave heart to the world's oppressed.