Marxism versus Zionism: is it even a competition?
Recently there was a debate among Muslims on Twitter whether Marxism was a bigger danger to Muslims, either in terms of their life and liberty or their faith, than Zionism. Abdullah al-Andalusi firmly said that it was, in a short Twitter thread last week:
Ibrahim Moiz (@SyedIbrahim1137; he changes his Twitter surname quite frequently) called this claim a “common rightwing canard” and countered that rightwing Zionists had been uniformly hostile to Islam and had in fact been “a huge driving force behind the majority of anti-Muslim sentiment since at least 1980s”, citing Daniel Pipes as an example. Some Marxists had been extremely hostile, such as in the USSR, while those in Burkina Faso were apathetic or supportive. (His thread starts here.)
I don’t actually think there’s much competition between the two ideologies. The original post was about Muslims falling into Marxism at university. Zionism does not actually appeal to Muslims, but Marxists are active in social justice and anti-racist spheres and some work as lecturers and professors which is where Muslims may well come into contact with them. There are two separate reasons why they pose a danger: one is that their ideology contains a large amount of kufr (beliefs or ideological tenets incompatible with Islam), and the other is that, when they gain political power, they have a history of suppressing religious practice and preventing the passing-on of religious belief.
To take the first: Marxist-Leninists and those of similar persuasions believe that private property should be seized and all land worked collectively and the yields and produce shared according to need. This call may have had some appeal in a 19th-century Europe where the mass of the population had been impoverished and oppressed over centuries by the aristocracy and later by wealthy industrialists, but Islam respects private property and this picture was largely untrue in the Muslim world in any case. Theft is a sin, and taking private assets into state ownership by force is theft. It is oppression. I recall a shaikh telling us how some scholars and their associates refused to have anything to do with nationalised industries in Syria in the 20th century; nationalisation was theft, they said. Similarly, when religious schools were consolidated in the Muslim Seljuk empire during the reign of Nizam-ul-Mulk, some scholars refused positions in the new institutions because their resources had been unjustly taken from pre-existing trust funds (awqaaf). It has been said that the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money to spend; a problem with Marxism-Leninism is that you run out of aristocrats and robber barons and have to start seizing honestly-acquired farms and other businesses that have been built up by hard work from people who don’t see why they should give them up. This is why Stalin and Mao invented numerous groups of enemies, calling them “kulaks” (a derogatory term for small farmers who resisted having their lands seized; it means grasping fist in Russian), “rich peasants”, “people taking the capitalist road”, among others. People who got in the way, in other words.
Related to this is the fact that Marxism-Leninism is totalitarian in intent and the history backs this up. Regimes based on Marxist-Leninist ideology were invariably dictatorships, even if the communists were initially freely elected (as in Czechoslovakia). It envisages a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, in practice a dictatorship of an elite which has a very un-proletarian lifestyle. The upshot is that if you value freedom of religion, you should not entrust it to a dictatorship of a cabal that regards religion as akin to opium, as a drug to numb the people’s senses while being oppressed. This type of state is prone to sudden changes in regime, to stupid mass-mobilisation campaigns that a discussion in a proper parliament would usually prevent, to leadership changes that happen without popular consent, to paranoia and suspicion about sabotage and espionage. The same is often true of Marxist factions in western countries, such as the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The fact that inequalities are nowhere near as stark in western countries today, that we have a fairly free press and freedom to form political parties, a private ballot and so on, mean that Communism has no appeal to the majority of people but some people fancy themselves as a ‘vanguard’ to lead a revolution and some like the theatrics of a revolution and a revolutionary state (hence the appeal of Marxist micro-parties to actors).
In recent years Muslims have worked with Marxists on left-wing, anti-imperialist political campaigns, shared platforms with them, ran alongside them for various political offices. In the UK they don’t have the power to stop us practising Islam, of course, but the results for us have not been very convincing; we elected a non-Muslim ex-Labour MP for two constituencies in London and Bradford who proved to be a joke both times (in one case literally, as he took time out of being an MP to appear on a reality TV contest). Some of them rail against Islamophobia at home and condemn Israel and mouth platitudes about a free Palestine but actively support regimes abroad that oppress and persecute Muslims, including Syria and China. Some of them repeat regime propaganda, calling people who rescue civilians from bombed buildings ‘terrorists’ and those imprisoned in concentration camps and tortured for practising their religion and culture liars and terrorists. So, in allying with such people for often pretty slim gains, we run the risk of betraying Muslims who are facing some of the worst oppression going on in the world.
Much as we sometimes have to work with Marxists or the “anti-imperialist” Left on some issues, we also ally with Jewish organisations, some of them pro-Israel, on limited matters such as keeping halal slaughter and circumcision (both of which have opposing lobbies) legal in this country. Israel is an enemy of the Muslims and some of the foremost agitators against Muslim liberties and in favour of wars against Muslims around the world have been motivated by loyalty to Israel, but we have things in common with some of them. There are reasons why scholars have condemned Marxism-Leninism, whatever name it uses, more forcefully than almost any other ideology. We have heard of Abdul-Aziz bin Baz’s remark that atheist socialists are “bigger infidels than the Jews or Christians” but this paragraph is from a prominent Yemeni shaikh of the 20th century, Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad, who lived much of his life in east Africa, from his book The Key to the Garden (Miftah al-Jannah), translated here by Mostafa Badawi:
The fiercest and most presumptuous kafirs are the atheists. They have plunged into the depths of denial, so that their hearts and brows are stamped with wretchedness and ingratitude. (The communists are one example.) They do not suffice themselves with denying the Creator, the Messengers, and the message which they brought, but out of hatred and arrogance, in the depths of their disbelief and cruelty, they attempt to abuse people of faith, and insult their religion using words which the heart trembles to remember and the pen hesitates to record.
(Communists in South Yemen at this time had been persecuting practising Muslims and that some of the scholars of the Hadramaut region were ‘disappeared’ or killed by the regime.)
So this is why Marxism appears as a more insidious threat to Islam and to Muslims’ faith than Zionism. Marxism appeals to a lot of young people’s desire for a just world, especially when they have read stories about how people around the world are trapped in poverty by a capitalist system, but never lives up to its ideals and invariably delivers tyranny when it gains power. Young people today might not be so well aware of that, as they didn’t grow up in a world where decaying Leninist regimes held a large part of the world in their grasp and held it behind walls and fortified borders to stop people escaping, so they only know the idealistic version presented to them. Zionism has no such appeal; it has long been associated with western hegemony and racism. Zionists threaten actual Muslims, but it’s Marxism that threatens a Muslim’s Islam, whether by succumbing to the ideology or by them coming to power wherever Muslims are.
