The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power by Melanie Phillips & Melanie Phillips

Author:Melanie Phillips & Melanie Phillips [Phillips, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781594035753
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

THE DEBT OF ISLAMISM TO BOTH COMMUNISM AND FASCISM

The apocalyptic revivalism of neofascism corresponds precisely to the agenda of radical Islamism. We noted earlier how Islamism, as a form of revolutionary utopianism, marches alongside the left. But as a revolt against liberalism and modernity, it is closely allied with both communism and fascism. That is because, just like these two secular Western movements which also led to fanaticism, terror and mass murder, Islamism repudiates modernity and reason in the interests of creating a perfect world. And so—ironically, considering it believes itself to be a hermetically sealed thought system owing its influence only to God—Islamism has drawn heavily upon and formed alliances with communism and fascism, both representing a heretical world it despises and aims to destroy.

The common interest with communism was first made evident when the Muslims of the Russian Empire were conscripted into the Red Army. In 1920, the Second Congress of the Communist International summoned the “enslaved popular masses of Persia, Armenia and Turkey,” as well as Mesopotamia, Syria, Arabia and elsewhere, to gather in Baku, Azerbaijan. During the first session, the president of the International, Grigory Zinoviev, called in his speech five times for “holy war” against the British and the French “colonialists” and “the rich in general—Russian, German, Jewish, French.” Thus the “ Bolshevik jihad” was launched against the common enemy, the “materialist West,” in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere that the Russians faced the forces of imperialism.52

The Muslims found much in common with communism. Not only did they have a common enemy, but they shared a utopian vision for transforming the world by negating all distinctions between peoples. As Hanafi Muzaffar, a prominent Volga Tatar intellectual, put it, “Muslim people will ally themselves to Communism. Like Communism, Islam rejects narrow nationalism. Islam is international and recognises only the brotherhood and the unity of all nations under the unity of Islam.”53

Ali Shariati, a prominent ideologue of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, was an Islamo-Marxist who drew heavily upon the anticolonial radical Franz Fanon and his conception of creating a “new man.” Shariati borrowed Fanon’s description of “the wretched of the earth” and translated it into Persian by reviving the Qur’anic term mostazafin, or “the disinherited.” Under Shariati’s influence, Iranian radicals became Marxists and read Che Guevara, Regis Debray and the Brazilian urban guerrilla theorist Carlos Marighela. Others studied revolutionary activity in Russia, China, Cuba and Algeria and interpreted Qur’anic verses according to the theory of class struggle. Also under Shariati’s influence, Ayatollah Khomeini introduced into radical Islamic thought the pivotal Marxist concept of a world divided into oppressors and oppressed. As the Iranian Islamic Revolution developed, it established a totalitarian apparatus including a morals police, a ministry of intelligence, and Islamic societies acting as watchdogs for Islamic conformity. By 1980, Khomeini had established a communist-style Islamic “cultural revolution” to purge all traces of Western influence from high schools and universities.54

As Laurent Murawiec noted, there was also an eerie similarity between the Marxist-Leninist and Islamic outlooks in their Orwellian inversion of aggression and self-defense.

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