In Tablet, a fascinating essay on the intellectual merging of religion and politics in the form of Islamism and Marxism:
The first self-object of neurotic obsession was Arab culture and Islam. Imitating the Frankfurt School’s analysis which exonerated revolutionary thought from the possibility that it produced Nazism and fascism and instead identified them as manifestations of the latent violence and mythological thinking in European and Christian culture, so did the intellectuals of the new Arab left identify Islam and Arab culture as the source of the region’s own latent reaction and oppression. The 1967 defeat was blamed not on what is gnostic and religious in revolutionary thought, or the Fanonian valorization of brutal violence as a spiritually redemptive act, but on traditional culture. The new leftists doubled down on Marxism and revolutionary thought and placed the entire blame squarely on the irrationalism of traditional culture and religion.
The most important work of the genre, and by far the most influential Arab intellectual work of the 20th century, was the four-volume Critique of Arab Reason, an obvious play on Kant, by Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabiri. In his work, Jabiri provided a systematic analysis of foundational Islamic texts showing that everything from Arabic grammar to Islamic law contained the nucleus of irrationalist and magical thinking. His work was a triumph for the calls for more Enlightenment-style rationalism, generally understood as a refined Marxism with clearer atheistic presuppositions.
The second most prominent intellectual of the genre was Algerian French Sorbonne professor Mohamed Arkoun. If Jabiri wanted to follow the Frankfurt School’s lead and push revolutionary thought toward Marxism’s roots in Enlightenment rationalism, Arkoun wanted to go the other way, following the lead of postmodernism, in rediscovering Marxism’s other roots in Romanticism. Arkoun brought Derrida and Foucault, without ever saying so explicitly, to bear in excavating Islamic Arab epistemology to uncover its deep layers of power relations obscured by myth and Quranic semiotics. Jabiri and Arkoun still occupy the center of Arab high culture intellectual life.
Below the high culture and sophisticated analysis of the new left, a populist new left emerged, primarily centered in Lebanon, fueled by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ali Ahmed Esber, known by his pagan pen name Adonis, and by the writings of Ghassan Kanfani. The rising Palestinian guerrilla groups, Fatah and the PFLP, a splinter Marxist group from the quasi-fascist Arab Nationalists’ Movement, managed to overthrow the old left from the leadership of the PLO and took its place—a development which was seen as an inspiration to all the Arab new left forces dreaming of overthrowing and replacing the Arab old left. The Palestinian guerrilla groups, inspired by Régis Debray, were making a “revolution inside the revolution,” a natural outcome of the urge to invert devastating defeat into a decisive victory.
This revolutionary subversion inside the Arab revolutionary movement managed to invert the conception of the Palestinian cause. Pre-1967, Arab nationalism held that Arab unity was the road to Palestine. Post-1967, the Palestinians inverted this Hegelian motto by turning the salvific dream of a destroyed Israel and a liberated Palestine into the essence of the revolutionary mission itself. “Palestine is a revolution,” became the new self-conception of the rising Palestinian factions, adding it to the ranks of a transnational anti-capitalist revolutionary movement that included Vietnam, Cuba, Black Power in the U.S., German Marxist terrorism, and others. After their expulsion from Jordan, Palestinian groups declared their plan was to turn Lebanon into an “Arab Hanoi” from which a popular liberation war and a total revolution would revolutionize the entire Middle East. This was the decade in which Palestinian groups laid the grounds for international terrorism of plane hijacking, assassinations, and bombings.
It is important to mention here that in all the ideological tracts and literature of the Palestinian groups, the works of French and communist intellectuals were continually quoted. The first Fatah newsletter after the Munich Olympic Village terrorist attack featured quotes from Fanon on its cover.
To the right of the new Arab left was the Islamic left, a group of committed Marxist intellectuals who decided to apply Maoist principles of popular mobilization and saw Islam as the most suitable vehicle to do so. It was not uncommon for Arab Marxist Christian intellectuals, such as Munir Shafiq, to convert to Islam and become Islamic Marxists. In Egypt, the strongest base of the Islamic left, this milieu of intellectuals was led by Abdul Wahab Al-Missiri, Hassan Hanafi, Mohamed Imara, Adel Hussein, and Nasr Abu Zayd. Missiri, a student of Nazi sympathizer Abdulrahman Badawi, focused entirely on synthesizing a Marxist-Islamic critical theory of Zionism and Judaism, depending on Lukacs, Marcuse, but above all Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge in producing a seven-volume critical deconstruction of all of Jewish history and culture, revealing its inherently colonialist, imperialist, and dehumanizing nature. When Missiri was once asked about what remained from the Marxism of his youth, he answered, “Nothing and everything … my Marxism dissolved into Islamic humanism.” Others, such as the Islamic thinker Hassan Hanafi, who is the teacher of the current generation of Egyptian intellectuals, maintained that Marxism is identical to Islam.
By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, in which Khomeini demanded “dissolving all ideologies in Islam,” there was enough public interest in a potent mixture of Islamic fundamentalism, existentialism, and Marxist revolutionary thought embodied in intellectuals like Ali Shariati for a wave of conversion to political Islam to overtake the ranks of Maoist and Marxist Lebanese and Palestinian militants and intellectuals, for whom Islam would become the gateway back into the embrace of the masses.
In Egypt, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, had the ambitious plan of ending Egypt’s leftist and pro-Soviet orientation and transforming Egyptian politics and culture to fit inside the Western camp. This ambition was centered upon the achievement of recognition and peace with Israel, to which the population and the intellectuals were opposed. The fierce resistance Sadat met from the hegemonic establishment of Nasserist and leftist intellectuals led him to resort to two strategies: political repression of intellectual life, and a restoration of Islamic conservatism, and even fundamentalism, in order to maintain popular support for the state.
Unbeknownst to Sadat, by that point, religious thought had completely dissolved into revolutionary thought to an extent that made it impossible to provide a nonrevolutionary reading of Islam. In turn, the definition of intellectual life itself had been profoundly altered to exclusively mean “leftism.” Egyptian intellectuals, poets, and journalists filled Egyptian culture with anti-Sadat, anti-American, and anti-Semitic works. Folk poets wrote songs mocking Coca-Cola and the American lifestyle. Young novelists such as Sonallah Ibrahim wrote novels about a protagonist eating himself into annihilation because of the invasion of Coca-Cola capitalism. Amal Donqol, a talented poet, wrote his infamous poem “No reconciliation,” exalting the eternal worship of vengeance upon Israel.
Shortly before his assassination by Islamic revolutionaries, Sadat signed an order to arrest over a thousand Egyptian intellectuals. After his successor, Mubarak, came to power, and with the dangers of an Iranian-styled Islamo-Marxist revolution ever closer, he released the imprisoned intellectuals, made peace, and restored them to their various chairs heading the universities and media agencies. A division of labor was established where the state would deal with Israel and the U.S., while intellectuals were responsible for maintaining an anti-American and anti-Israel national culture, a situation recognized today in Egypt as the “cold peace.” Hamas, Hezbollah, 9/11, Baathist Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Islamic State are all downstream from this intellectual story.
Leftist intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky are therefore not wrong when they declare that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are part of the international left. A journey of philosophical inversions started from a Hegelian inversion of Christian theology, then a Marxist inversion of Hegelianism, a fascist-Nazi inversion of Leninism, the globalization of European thought, the conversion into Arab nationalism, its fragmentation into Arab Marxism and Palestinian radicalism, and their inversion back into theology, creating an ideological tornado with antisemitism as its vortex. The aggregate result was the gradual decivilization, and moral and social erosion, of entire Muslim and Arab societies, many of which collapsed unto themselves in spirals of self-destruction.
The dissolution of religious thought of otherworldly transcendence into a political transcendence inside history fundamentally transformed and restructured the identity of Islamic religious piety into the piety of struggle. Muslim identity was remolded into an eternal struggle that in its origin is not the jihad of classical texts, but the German dialectic world made by Marx. A religious doctrine of martyrdom and eternal life in the hereafter merged into a cult of the eternal revolutionary glory and hero worship of the Che Guevara type. This is the best explanation one could offer for the peculiar phenomenon of Muslim societies becoming more religious since the late 1970s in a way that only translated into more rage, more rebellion, less moral restraints on violence and sexuality, and conspicuous pagan worship of pain, blood, and misery. This is also the best explanation for why the societies of the Arab Gulf, which did not modernize during the 20th century, seem to have a much smoother transition away from antisemitism into social liberalization and peaceful worldviews.
Let’s assume I’m correct, and Islamists got this idea by way of a global revolutionary culture that got it from Lenin who got it from Marx who got it, not by way Plato as Popper assumed, but by way of rediscovery through inverting Hegel’s inversion of Christian theology. Doesn’t this theory naturally fall right back into the religious dogmatism that is associated with Marxist intellectuals? Raymond Aron rightfully thought so in his Opium of the Intellectuals. Theory then reverts into a theology that becomes a political religion waging religious wars, schisms, ancestral worship, and textual fanaticism. Theology made philosophy by Hegel, philosophy made politics by Marx, and then politics was made into a religion. So naturally, Qutb’s and Khomeini’s conversion of the Marxist inversion reverted back into theology. But what does theology lose by this double inversion and what does it gain? Much. It becomes a religion of atheistic politics. It loses all its basis of religious justification and with it its entire moral structure and becomes an immanentist atheistic theology that leads to no redemption, no transcendence, and nowhere.
I want to emphasize what this article is not saying. I’m not saying that any form of Islamic fundamentalism could be attributed to modern revolutionary thought. Indeed, all religions have their own forms of modern fundamentalism as a response to modern liberal social organization. But Islamic fundamentalism proper means a rigid and ultra-conservative social ethos that is resistant to social change, as best exemplified in the Salafism that until recently dominated the Arab Gulf.
What the union of imported European ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and existentialism with Islam accomplished was to profoundly alter the entire conceptual scheme and epistemological foundations of Arab societies so that even Islamic fundamentalism, unbeknownst to itself, could no longer provide a pre-revolutionary reading of Islam. European moral philosophical traditions and their language managed to make a tectonic shift that resulted in the development of a modern Islamic political theology that is totalitarian, dystopian, and revolutionary. The Islam of Iran, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida is simply a regional variant of progressive Western revolutionary thought.
Yet I am not saying that the West is to blame for this development. For if this article seeks to affirm anything it is that the West-Islam dichotomy is not only meaningless but delusional. Cultural and moral relativism are meaningless when the foundation of all our modern moral and political thinking comes from the same place. Europe has managed to create a truly global human culture that no longer has ideational barriers and in which fashion, style, fads, and ideas form global mimetic contagions.
This is a story of a global nightmare constructed by intellectuals from all religious and national backgrounds. The Enlightenment and its aftermath are now just as solidly a part of Islamic intellectual makeup as they are in Western cultures, and if the Muslim world is to move forward it would be through the recognition and not the denial of this fact. If the moral and social destruction of the region resulted from incompetent Arab intellectuals sleepwalking in the orbit of a global culture, the solution is competence. The exploitation of the intellectual, social, and political energies of impoverished and pre-modern societies for use as cannon fodder in the great ideological battles of the Western left has had disastrous effects on the social, economic, and political development and progress of many Arab and Muslim societies. In this regard, the Western left’s theology of how the West destroyed other societies has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, from which it is now our duty and obligation to liberate ourselves. >>>
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/liberation-arabs-global-left
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