Boothman - Islam in Gramsci's Journalism and Prison Notebooks

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Islam in Gramsci s Journalism and rison N otebooks:

The Shifting Patterns of Hegemony*

Derek Boothman

Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori,Université di Bologna

boothman@sslmiLunibo. i t

AbstractGramsci recognised the inestimable historical contribution of Muslim and Arab civilisations,writing on these in his newspaper articles, his pre-prison letters and the rison Notebooks TheIslamic world contemporary with him was largely rural, with the masses heavily influenced byreligion, analogous in some ways to Italy whose economy was still largely oriented towards a

peasantry am ong w hom the Vatican played a leading (and highly reactionary) role. In addition tofactors such as the politics-religion nexus, what Gramsci was also analysing, without saying asmuch explicitly, was the upheaval caused by the disintegration and dismemberment of theOttom an Empire, and the inter-imperialist rivalries over the spoils and the construction of newstates from its ruins. Here he draws attentio n to the first hesitant and contradictory anticolonialstances being adopted among the traditional leaders, as well recognising the basis for morepopularly-based movements. In both Catholic countries and, as Gramsci knew especially fi-omthe experience of his Comintern work, in parts of the Muslim world, these movements could attimes assume a left and politically radical orientation. What emerges is a picture of conflictinghegemonies involving principally religion, class, the political ambivalence of many religiousleaders, and a burgeoning nationalism contraposed to the supra-nationalist claims of religion.But the factor underlying everything is the p otential of the m asses who, if awakened from torporand detache d from European colonialism, were Judged capable of rupturing previous imperially-determined equilibria.

KeywordsGramsci, Islamic world, Arab countries, religion-politics nexus, city-countryside relation, clericsand the faithful

* This work was suppo rted by a grant on Translation, Migration and Cu ltural Identity

awarded to the Dipartimento di Studi Interdisciplinari su Traduzione, Lingua e Cultura (SlTLeC)of the U niversity of Bologna. Further, ack now ledgm ent is ma de to th e British Academ y for grant(Grant RA2852 made Jointly to the author and to Adam David Morton) which was useful for



i i 6 D. Boothman / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140

1. Introduction

In its different forms, religion is the most widespread of all ideologies ancertainly in Gramsci s time, it was a widesp read force among the mapotential allies of the urban working class, namely the peasantry and the rumasses in general. Indeed, at the Third Congress of the Italian CommunParty, held illegally in the French city of Lyon, the trade-u nion theses made tpoint that a major task facing the communist movement was that of takithe masses of working people organised and controlled by the Catholitowards the class trade u nions , the influence of organised Catholicism in tindustrial field then being limited. Analogous problems were being posed parts of the Arab world too, as may be seen from the articles on strike actiand the growing - albeit still hesitant and contradictory - nationalist ananti-imperialist movements, that appeared every so often in the Comintejournal International Press orrespondence Inprecorr). Moreover, importattem pts w ere also being made in other parts of the M uslim world to win ovthe masses, as for example the Indonesian peasantry organised in the SarekIslam mov ement, subject of a debate at the second and subsequent congres

of the Comintern. Conservative forces were of course putting a brake on this, and emblematic of this in the Italian case was the treatment meted oto G uido Miglioli, the leader of the extreme left of the Catholic Popular Parfrom which he was expelled for supporting international trade-union uniand then becom ing a leader of the C om intern s autonomous sister organisatifor peasants, the Krestintern.

Gramsci certainly became aware of the problems of the peasantry-religinexus outside the Catholic world from his experience of work in Mosco

(May 1922-December 1923

and he m akes occasional com ments on Islam boin his pre-prison journalism and in the Prison Notebooks. His observations dewith: the roles of religion and of lay and religious intellectuals; with the neArab leaders and the states created u nder the tutelage of the imperial powein the aftermath of the First World War; and also with the inter-s tate relatiobetween the imperial powers and their client Arab states. Implicit in all of this, then, the interplay of rival forces, both hegemo nic and suba ltern. Differenhowever, from today s world, the oil factor was fairly minim al, being limitedthe time to Iran and the newly-formed state of Iraq.

Gramsci vwote very little in the way of extended essays and, different frowhat often emerges in the first anthologies of his prison writings in Italia



D. Boothman / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 117

English and various other languages, the prison notes, too, with a fev^^ notable

exceptions, have a very fragmentary appearance. To give overall shape to hisnotes even on Catholicism or on Christianity in general, in order to form acoherent discourse, is difficult enough, and to attempt such an operation forreligions on which he both knew and w rote less would be hazardous and riskdistorting any position he may have had. This paper therefore merely aimsat drawing attention to and briefly discussing the main observations thatGramsci makes on those aspects of the Islamic world which cam e to his notice,either as a political leader and journalist before his imprisonment, or through

the a rticles in the reviews he was allowed to receive in prison. His journalisticarticles and prison n otes are, of necessity, occasional and sporadic, depend ingon circumstances and access to information, but what however comesthrough, as is only to be exp ected, is the emergence of the nexus religion-class-national m ovem ents. Eight and mo re decades on from his observations, manyaspects of the situation have changed. Some underlying problems, however,such as the statehood of Palestine or conflicting forces in the Muslim worldstill remain, albeit in different forms. All these reservations must be taken intothe reckoning in reading and evaluating G ramsci s observations. A num ber of

his comments, in particular on what at the time was still called the Near East[Vicino Oriente] , contain somewhat indirect allusions to what was happeningat the time, and an attempt is made here to take this into account by, wherepossible, fitting the comments into the contexts both of the contemporaryevents then unfolding and of some of the positions adopted in the com mu nistmovem ent of the time.

2. The premiss: Islam s contribution to Western cultureUnderlying Gramsci s approach is the recogn ition th at what is called W esternculture has a huge, often unacknowledged, debt to the Muslim world. Thereexists a whole series of things tha t Europe has borrowed from Islam in cuisine -fruit, liqueurs etc. - in medic ine, in chem istry etc. ,^ all fields influenced by

2. Q4§92; rewritten form in Qi6§5, Gramsci 1995, p. 137. All quo tatio ns from Noteb ooks 1-7

(referred to here by Q for Quademo [Notebook] followed by its number and the number ofthe pa ragrap h, i.e. sub-sectio n) may be found in the first three v olum es of Joseph A. Buttigieg songoin g integral trans lation of the N oteboo ks: see Gramsci 1992a 1996 and 2007 The nu m berin g



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Arab civilisation,^ with elements of Arab vocabulary present as instanced inMatteo Bartoli's university course in glottology that Gramsci followed and wasentrusted with transcribing, so that even a common word like 'sugar' and itscognates in West-European languages comes from the Arab 'sokkar'. One ofItaly's most authoritative linguists, Giacomo Devoto (mentioned in passingin Q3§86 of the Notebooks , observes that Arabic has an immense lexicalimportance in Italian, going from A right through to Z, from 'ammiraglio'('admiral', meaning a commander, originally not only at sea) to zizzu (meaning'elegant', but also a dialect form of the name Giuseppe [Joseph]). Words of

Arabic origin are found in most if not all European languages, many of themconcerning trade and, naturally of course, science and technology.^ Indeed,as Gramsci observes in Q5§42, in the Middle Ages the 'Arabic element withits scientific influence' had a great effect on the West, most of all as an effectof the seven-centuries-long Arab civilisation in Andalusia, while later in thesame paragraph he writes a reminder to himself to 'keep track of Ezio Levi'spublished work on the Arabic tradition in Spain and on its importance formodern civilisation'.^ For Gramsci, with his roots in the neighbouring islandof Sardinia, the case of Sicily was perhaps too obvious for him to go into indetail as an example of Arab cultural influences in Italy, including among otherthings various Sicilian dialects.

Other advances made by Western' culture in the early Renaissance,fundamental to the subsequent development of the West and reflecting theera's 'greater demands of reason', were not, as some claimed, an autochthonousproduction of Catholic scholasticism but were instead due to thinkers such asAverroës (Ibn Rushd), i.e. to the 'pressure coming from Arab culture'. Indeedthe 'truths intuited by Christianity' could be rethought 'within the forms of

English and, in the case of paragraphs found with slightly different wording in two volumes, dualreferences are usually given.

3. Recent serious scholarship in Europe and North America confirms the fact, long known toMuslims and Muslim scholars, that if taken literally, Levi's position as here quoted by Gramsciunderestimates the Arab contribution. For example, in the medieval Muslim world, mathematicsand especially algebra - the word itself like various other scientific terms, being of course ofArabic origin - was advanced and by no means simply a reproposition of that of the Greeks.For this and other illuminating comments in this area, see Hodgkin 2005, Chapter 5, 'Islam,Neglect and Discovery*, pp. 100-32, and also p. 147 where, as well as the influence of Plato andPythagoras on Kepler, Hodgkin draws attention to a 'third tradition, that of practical algebra withits disturbing Islamic parentage', disturbing of course for those who downgrade Islamic culture.



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ancient philosophy precisely because this latter was brought in by the Arabs

and the Jews . Here as elsewhere, the interconnection, interdependence andinterpéné tration of cultures emerges as an integral part of Gramsci s approachto the masses, whatever part of the world is being considered .

Further, and specifically on the question of religion, in an isolated com m enton contemporary parallel developments in Catholicism and Islam, he observesthat advanced theological trends in church circles in Turin just beforeWorld War I went as far as accepting the modernising tendencies of Islamand Buddhism ̂ where, analogous to Catholic mod ernism, a modernisingtendency in Islam meant reinterpreting Islamic knowledge in the light of newsocio-economic reality, an important ongoing process.

3. The Arab Peninsula

The cultural and political attraction of a pur itan and would-be fundam entalistreligion is seen in Q2§30 where, on the basis of an article in a review hesubscribed to, Gramsci discusses various leaders and developm ents in the Arab

world in the 1920s. Atten tion is paid to the Yemen as Italy s p aw n .. . in the Arabworld and to w hat we now know as Saudi Arabia, united into one country in1926 by its founder, Ibn Sa ud. Nothing is said explicitly abou t the backgroundto these events and it is really only in a later paragraph (Q2§9o), which finishesby mentioning the reforms introduced in Turkey by Kemal Pasha (MustafaKemâl or Kemal Atatürk), that it becomes clear that the issue being discussedis the British and French reorganisation, in to the s tates we know today, of wha tthe West now calls the Middle East . W hat is, however, m ean t by this latterterm are the areas, situated in three different con tinents, that contained partsof the Ottoman Empire, called in nineteenth-century cultural and geopoliticalterms, the sick man of Europe .

It is of use here to fill in some of the background to the events in whichthe pro tagonists that G ramsci selects for com ment actually appear. Ibn Sa udhimself is the most important of these because of the discovery and thenthe post-World W ar II exploitation of oil reserves in his territory. The Sa udfamily had controlled a great pa rt of the Arabian peninsula during parts of thenineteenth century with either Baghdad-based Ottomans or the Ottoman-

backed Rashidi dynasty having control over various parts of the peninsuladuring the rest of the century. Ibn Sa ud finally recaptured Riyadh in 1902, inl i bj h l b fli h d i hi l f



120 D . Boothman / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140

defeated a combined force of Rashidi and Ottomans, thereby extending hcontrol over half of the central part of the peninsula (the Najd). The conse quehostility of the O ttoman Turks to Ibn Sa'ud goes a long way towards explainithe official statement made in the British House of Commons in 1922, thfrom 9 5 onw ards - i.e. during World War I when Turkey was in alliance w ithe Central Powers - Ibn Sa'ud received 'a regular stipend' from the Britigovernment^ From his main base in Riyadh, Ibn Sa'ud managed over tnext couple of decades to wrest or regain control, or have his protectoraaccepted, over the entire peninsula against various opponents or seekers

his protectorate. These included the Ottomans in the North East and the laof his Rashidi opponents in the North, Husayn ibn 'Ali, the Sharif of Mecin the Hejaz, and the Emir of Asir through a protectorate treaty in the SouWest. The Western coastal zone, containing Mecca and Madina, was thbasis for the postwar carve-up by President Wilson and Lloyd George, w'created a state of the Hejaz under British protectorate', as Gramsci had nota decade previous to these prison notes, in an article of his in the Socialist Panewspaper L'Avanti .^° Ibn Sa'ud went on to be proclaimed King of the Heby his victorious legions in 1926, thus to all intents and purposes laying tbasis for today's kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

What Gramsci further draws attention to in this same paragraph froNotebook 2 is the religious aspect Ibn Sa'ud and his followers were Wahha(more correctly Muwahhidun or 'Unitarians', placing the emphasis on toneness of the deity), Muslim puritans who, in claiming that their faith isreturn to the 'true' religion of Islam, maintained they were against religioinnovation. Among other things, their puritan initiatives (the destruction the tom b of Khadija, M oham med 's favourite w ife, and a ban on w ine, tobac

and kissing the black stone in Mecca) drew protests from the governm entsEgypt, from what was then known as Persia and from other parts of the Muslworld. It is exactly in relation to the W ahhabi tha t Gramsci writes elsewheof a 'return to origins pure and simple, just as in Ch ristian ity... the returnthe purity of the first religious texts as opposed to the corrup tion of the offichierarchy*.'2 In this he is echoing, perhaps unconsciously, the observatiomade in Engels's essay on primitive Christianity:

The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy andcovetousness these riches and pleasures [of the townspeople - DB]. Then



D Boothman /HistoricalMaterialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 I2 i

they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the

observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense thetreasures of the renegades.... ll these movements are clothed in religion butthey have their source in econom ic causes. ̂

Lest it be thoug ht th at this position is outm oded , similar assessments to thatof Engels continue up to the pr es en t Recently, for exam ple, an acute observer,such as was the great Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuáciriski,likewise pointed to the existence during the Algerian independence struggleof what were known there as two Islams, one of the desert , of the combative

nomadic tribes, with Colonel Boumediene as its representative, and one of the river and the sea , as represented by the country s first president, AhmedBen Bella. * However it is of interest th at th e latter, more cosm opo litan andinitially more secular in his outlook, in a self-critical analysis after his releasefrom a long internm ent after being deposed from the presidency, then sw ungover to a more traditiona list Islamic position.

Without accepting in its entirety the schema of Ernest Gellner, a writerrooted in a very different political and ideological m ilieu from Gram sci s,somewhat similar to this breakdown is the division he postulates in his well-known study N ations and Nationalism There is claimed to be a high Islam ofthe city, cultured and attentive to the scriptures, and a low* one of the ruralzones, superstitious and bou nd up with adoration of the saints, ̂ a practice, itmay be noted, that goes contrary to that of the traditiona listWahhabi. s such,Gellner s reading is close to wh at Gramsci quotes in a note on phenom ena foundin the Maghrib and elsewhere: primitive peop le tend towards a m ysticism oftheir own, represented by union vdth th e divinity through the m ediation of thesaints , these latter in Islam being privileged be in gs. .. who, by special favour,

can enter into contact with God, acquiring a perennial m iraculous vir tu e. .. . ̂From an anti-imperialist stance Roger Owen, too, pays attention to the

countryside-city division, noting that the first anticolonial revolts wereessentially rural, but also that these forces (the Ikhwan in Saudi Arabia andArab nationalist politicians using Transjordan as a basis for anti-French actionin Syria) were soon marginalised and destroyed . Those wh o be tter cam e toterms with the new realities were based in the urban centres and mostly inthe capital cities, and were often drawn from organisable groups in the cities,including workers, studen ts and th e professional groupings. ̂ And, as in

13 Engels 1955 p 317 note



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Gramsci's analysis of the South of Italy, in th e Arab world politico-institutionlinks between the countryside and the city were often provided by the m ediuscale landowners,'^ the social stratum that was known in Italy, before, duriand after G ramsci's time, as the 'notables'.

One of Owen's co-authors in another book, the Palestinian-AmericMarxist Hanna (John) Batatu, adds anoth er aspect in his analysis of the Syrisituation. The country's politics, up to and including the governm ent takeovby Hafiz Al-Assad, was charac terised by the conflict be tween the city and tcountryside. The city, and here the com m ent is not jus t limited to Syria, w

the seat of power for authorities that ranged fi om he tax collector through tothe colonial ruler; its characteristics were no t only economic and political, bcould be religious and sectarian too.'^ This rural-urban division took on nefeatures in the course of the twentieth century through the unprecedentmigration from the countryside to the cities, a factor only jus t underway whGramsci was writing, w hen anticolonial struggles were som etimes being wagmore in the rural - mountain or desert - areas: here Abd el-Krim in Morocand Omar al-Mukhtar in Libya have near-legendary status.

There may obviously be flaws and over-simplifications in Gramsccomments in the Notebooks based as they are on indirect information, anindeed a more nuanced position of the interplay between various politicreligious forces and city-countryside relations is given, among others, by tmodern left-authorities cited here. However, from the present reconstructioGramsci's stance seems fundamentally in lin with m odern scholars, attemptinfrom their various perspectives a serious analysis of social forces in the Islamworld. Grinding poverty may not now be the factor it was in Engels's timand some of today's Islamic radical movem ents^ may be directed by wealt

Muslims but, analogous to G ramsci's time, their followers are still to be fouam ong the disinherited masses.

Turning at this point to some of the oth er personalities discussed by Gramsche perceived as likely front-rank protagonists three other Arab leaders. Apfrom Ibn Sa'ud, we read of the 'Imam Yahya ibn Muhammad Hamid', usuaknown as Yahya; rather more importantly, Moham mad Ali, 'known as SheiIdris during the w ar with Libya' [i.e. the Italian w ar against Libya beg inning

18. Owen 2000, pp. 222-5.19. Farsoun (ed. ) 1985, p. 5.



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9 - DB]; and also Sharif Husein of Mecca (Husayn ibn 'Ali) 'who proclaimed

himself King of Arabia on 6 November 1916', and was thus the direct rival ofIbn-Sa ud. Yahya, leader of the Yemen until his assassination in 1948, headed anearly twen tieth-cen tury revolt of his coun try against the Ottom an Turks which'consolidated his independence', then switched alliances so that 'during theEuropean W ar, Yahya sided w ith Tü rk e/ to challenge the growing power of thepro-British Sharif Husayn. Further, Gramsci repeats his source's com m ent th atYahya was 'enterprising and has modern inclinations', if nothing else becauseof 'a certain administrative apparatus [and] basic schools' then operating inthe Yemen.2' Husayn's importance Hes not so much in him as an individualand as rival, but unsuccessful, claimant to the Kingdom of Arabia, as in hisposition as founder of a dynasty. One of his sons becam e Emir and, later. Kingof Transjordan (now the Hashimite K ingdom of Jordan ) and another, after theFrench had refused to cou ntenance him as King of Syria and expelled him fi-omthe country, became - as the result of a plebiscite shamelessly rigged by theBritish - King of the new sta te of Iraq. In this carve-up, Mosul - an oil-richprovince and also a buffer against Turkey - was incorporated into the nascentcountry (cf Q2§i9), while in a com prom ise trade-off Kuwait was excluded.^^

Idris, grandson of the 'Moroccan holy man' who in 1837 had founded theSufic Sanusi Brotherhood, instead had his main focus of interest in Libya, fromwhich he was expelled by the Italian fascist regime, only for him to return afterW orld W ar II, as leader and then fi-om 95 as king, still under the name Idris,until his overthrow in 1969 by Colonel Mu 'amm ar al-Qadhafi.

What is to be noted about all these leaders is the close interconnectionof politics and religion. Both Yahya and Husayn were able to reinforce theirposition by proclaiming themselves as a Khalifa (Caliph or 'successor') on the

basis of their descent fi-om

he proph et or fi-om

Ali, his cousin and son-in-law,desp ite the fact tha t the grov^rth of nations and nationa lism in the Islamic worldmade it near-impossible for any Caliphate to gain general recognition fromall Muslims. Yahya, like Ibn Sa'ud, aspired to be leader or champion 'of the

21. For all this, see Gramsci 1992a, Q2§30, and Gramsci 1995, pp. 210-11.22. The falsity of the 96 -maJority vote to install Faysal as first King of Iraq caused the

resignation in protest of the major British Middle Eastern expert, H. StJ. Philby, father of the

Riture double agent, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby. Under colonial secretary Winston Churchill, the RAFhelped persuade the opposition to Mosul's incorporation into the new country to desist bybombing recalcitrant Kurdish villages with gas shells perhaps the first example of such warfare



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Arab nation , as Gramsci notes,^^ bu t Yahya had the d isadvantage of belonginot only to th e m inority Shi ite branch of Islam, bu t to on e of its m inorsects, the Zaydis. Thus, rather than by claiming a Caliphate not recognisby Sunni Muslims and perhaps looked on dubiously even by the majority Shi ites, Yahya was best able to consolidate his position by playing on nationsen timent , defined in another no te on Islam as the great heresy from w hithe real heresies w ill arise ,^ * and on his ability to wring concessions from Itthat, among o ther things, recognised bo th Yemeni inde pend ence and his roytitle.^^ Of the other personalities discussed by Gramsci, Idris was a religio

leader before becom ing a political one , while Ibn Sa ud, true to the deseform of Islam, imposed a rigid Wahhabite puritanism on his country, whiremains until today.

4. Turkey Palestine Egypt and the Maghrib

4.1. Political leaders in Turkey an d Egypt

At a more-or-less purely political level, Gramsci s notes on the Middle Easteand Arab worlds offer, as seen, a comm ent on various personalities attem ptieither to assert their own leadership or to build some sort of national movemenoften forming very labile alliances having little or noth ing to do with questioof principle. Apart from the leaders discussed above, there are at least twothers who should be com mented on, both from outside the geographical arconsidered up to now. One of these leaders is Kemal Atatürk, whose reformare wrongly interp reted as a retu rn to the old, the pure , along the lines

the Wahhabi by the author of the article tha t Gramsci takes to task in Q2§9Rather closer to the truth, though still with certa in illusions, was the position othe Bolsheviks and Communist Inte rnational. The former, as Gramsci no tedan article of his in polem ics with the Italian reformist social dem ocra ts (FilipTurati etc.), were forced into certain things, such as a struggle against tMensheviks in the south of what became the Soviet Union (Georgia, Armenetc.) in orde r to bring help to the Turks of Kemal Pasha .^^ The Internation

23. See again Q2§30 in Gramsci 1992a, and for this literal transla tion ( Arab nation ) G ramsc1995, p. 211.

24. Q2§90: Gram sci 1992a.



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officially considered Kemal to be leader of specifically anti-British national

liberation movement, with similarities to the Bolsheviks; indeed, for a shorttime, Atatiirk is said to have looked favourably on certain rural movementstha t gave rise to the formation of pea sant soviets in Turkey. This, however, ifnot ploy, at least convenien tly allowed him to single out and later destroy realleft-movements in the countryside.

The other case in question, mentioned somewhat elliptically by Gramsci,occurs in a paragraph head ed Italy and Egypt , in which he says Check theperiodicals for op inions on the even ts of 1929-30 in Egypt .^^ This ra therintriguing com m ent seems to be a reference to the e lections won by the Wafdparty, in opp osition the British paw n. King Fu ad. The m ode rate nationa listmovement of the Wafd h ad com e into conflict with Britain when, two days afterthe arm istice tha t brought an end to hostilities in 1918, it sent a delegation -the word Wafd me aning delegation - to the British High Com missioner whoprom ptly arrested its charismatic leader, Sa d Zaghlul Pasha, thus provokinga country-wide revolt There followed a period in which, in popularity and inelections, Zaghlul Pasha frequently topped the representatives of the Britishpupp et, father of the even m ore reprehensible and corrupt King Farouk (Faruq

al-Avsfwal). These events came just after the Sixth Congress of the Comintern,which had condemned the Wafd as reformist and class-collaborationist, andas having more than once betrayed the struggle for national emancipation .^*Although the Sixth Congress was tha t of the sectarian left turn which didnot always recognise shifts to positions other than its own, there is probablymore than a grain of truth in its criticism, since slowly during the twenties, aclass struggle was beginning to take shape in some Arab and Middle Easterncountries, s well as other coun tries with a large Muslim population . Gramsci sinterest in the events presumably, however, stemmed from the exampleof some sort of opposition to a British-sponsored regime, borne out by theEgyptian pa rliam ent s subseq uen t decision not to let Britain have a completelyfree hand in the territories guarding its route to India.

4.2. The Palestine andjewish q uestions

Then, as now, the app roach of the great powers to the status of Palestine wasanything but above criticism. The Balfour declaration was good news for

in discussing his bookThe Great W arfor Civilisation that Ataturk founder of the mo dem Turkish



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presumably most of the estimated 80,000 Jews who lived in Palestine afterWorld War F^ and certainly for the Zionist movement worldwide. Gramschad noted, in an article of his from 1918, that Nikôlaos Politis, the Greek foreignminister in the latter stages of the War and afterwards, wen t as far as welcominga 'Jewish State in Palestine*.^ Here it mu st however be noted tha t Greece hadinterests in dismembering the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was aprovince with regular representatives at the Imperial Parliament in IstanbulAt the end of the same article, in polemics with an ultra-Catholic antisém iteGramsci makes a cautious prediction, based more than anything else on the

probable tergiversations of his opponent, but in any case not subsequentlyborne out by events, that in a couple of years it will be dem onstrated that theconstitution of a Jewish State in Palestine cannot be realised'.

In the Notebooks, apart from a note indicating bibliographical referencethere is only one com m ent on Palestine. This comes in Q5§iO7, whe re G ramscobserves that Ita l/s minimum requirement, in line with the agreem ent reachein 1916 betw een Britain, France and Russia, was the internationalisation ofPalestine; after the fall of the Tsar, however, France and Britain reneged andreplaced the agreement with a carve-up by which they took control of Syriaand Palestine respectively, 'leaving Italy in the lurch'. It may be observed thatin talks in 9 5 with Husayn, Sharif of Mecca and Emir of the Hejaz (see aboveas part of the general anti-Ottoman and anti-German campaign, the BritishHigh Commissioner in Egypt had offered independence to part of the Arabterritories including, in Husayn's interpretation, the indep ende nce of Palestinitself. Instead, m odifying this position, the Balfour Declaration, mentioned inpassing by Gramsci in Q3§i3O (attr ibu ting it by a slip of the memory to StanleyBaldwin), promised a Jewish hom eland in Palestine on strict condition that

to cite the text of the declaration itself, 'nothing shall be done which mayprejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jev^ash communitiein Palestine'; nothing was said in the Declaration, on the other hand, of theirpolitical rights. Gramsci concludes this very brief note by asking in what wayhad the 'new Z ionist movem ent, born after the Balfour Declaration, influencItalian Jews?'.

Going back to the newspaper article of 9 8 quoted above, Gramsci savagethe Catholic view, dom inant until overturned by a majority - but by no means

a unanimous - vote at Pope John XXIII's Second V atican Council, tha t Jews s

a people were guilty of deicide. Maybe in contradiction with this very clearlexpressed Catholic a ntisemitism i th Prison Letters h arg es against th



D Boothman /Historical Materialism 20 4 2012) 115-140 127

views of his friend, the economist Piero Sraffa (himself of a Jewish family),

that there existed no such a thing as popular antisemitism, claiming thatcases of Italian Jews who are relatively disadvantaged when compared to theChristians were due to particular circumstances and in some instances dueto the action of pro-Mussolini Jews acting against non-ideologically fascistJews.3 Gramsci here showed himself somewhat out of touch with events; lifewas already becoming more difficult for Italian Jewish inteflectuals, as seen ina letter of SrafFa s in w hich he rebu ts Gramsci s view, observing tha t Jews inthe universities were either losing their positions o r being overlooked.^^ Haifadozen years on fi om his exchange of views, and a year after G ramsci s death ,Mussolini introduced his racial laws, modelled on Hitler s, tha t among otherthings excluded ews from all public e m plo ym en t

4.3. The Maghrib

For those who, fi om he heights of W estern civilisation, currently em phasisefractures among civilisations, the Muslim world ten ds to be considered as partof the Orient ; bu t at the time of Gramsci, too, the nations of Mediterranean

Europe considered Morocco, to the west of them, as Oriental , m eaningof course Muslim .^^ And this despite the fact th at the nam e of the part ofAfrica tha t Morocco belongs to, the Maghrib , means in Arabic where the sunsets , i.e. the Occident . Such think ing conveniently overlooks not only recentimmigration to the metropolitan countries from their ex-colonies, but also thecenturies-long existence of Muslims in Europe : in Sicily, in Spain, in EuropeanTurkey, in th e Balkans etc.

Gramsci notes tha t it was in the M aghrib tha t the role of intercession and thelink with the divinity took place m ore through th e saints, which is no t to excludeother parts of the M uslim w orld o utside the cultural-religious centre of Meccaand M adina. The saints were privileged b ei ng s. .. able to enter into contactwith God , a status often recognised by popular acclaim and w hich seem ed tohold especially in Sufi m ysticism. The popular saints are often reminiscen t ofthe old gods of the religions vanquished by Islam ,^ thu s addingjust a veneer onolder polytheistic traditions that survived in folklore, their sainthood at timeseven degenerating into mere charlatanism . Even m ore than this, according to

31. Gramsci 1994, pp . 152 and 136. See the letters to his sister-in-law Tania of 21 Ma rch 1932(Gramsci 1994) for the direct quote used and of 8 Feb ruary 1932 for the question of pro-fascist andnon fascist Jewish intellectuals respectively



128 D. Boothman /HistoricalMateriatism 20.4 2012) 115-140

Bruno Ducati, the author of the piece that Gramsci relies on for his commenin this paragraph of the Notebooks the danger stem ming from a relatively welink betw een the faithful and their religious leaders could often cause a growof fanaticism. This is certainly to be borne in m ind, but mu st not be transposemechanically to, or confused with, the situation of today s world, in whidoctrines such the velayat-efaqih [ rule by the jurispru den t or jurisconsult o guardianship of the jurist - the phrase is variously translated] are innovationbroug ht in by leaders such as Iran s Ruhollah Khomeini.

Caution m ust be urged in the co mments G ramsci makes on the basis of wh

he himself w s able to read in prison, and one cannot and must not attribudefinitive opinions to him when h e did not have access to all necessary sourc warning th at he himself gives explicitly in two or th ree places in the NotebookSuch caution seems to be relevant regarding what he writes on the clergy Islam. In a no te dating to late Sum mer 1930, he notes the absence of a massecclesiastical o rganisation of the Christian-Catholic kind .^^ About a couplem onths later in ano ther notebook, he similarly reports, witho ut co m m en t tviews expressed by Ducati in the article on Saints in Islam , that Islam seemto be characterised by the absence of a regular clergy to serve as a trait d union

between theore tical Islam and popular beliefs , thus leading to a gulf betweintellectuals and people.^^ But the truth in this may lie more in the lack a formal hierarchical organisation of the clergy rather than a numerical laof the clergy themselves. In Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s, for example, tfamous M uslim C om m un ist Mir Said Sultan-Galiev claimed tha t a mullah, a low-ranking cleric, and two assistants would be in spiritual charge of betw e700 and 1,000 faithful.3^ (Though the term mullah is more com mon for Shiclergy, it was also in widespread use by Sunni Muslims in the republics of t

Soviet Union and elsewhere.) In any case, Islam has always been charac terisby a group of learned men or scholars, the Ulama, who function as religioleaders and interpret the hadith (traditions or oral declarations) of the pr op hethe first Caliphs and other venerable persons, all collected in the early periof Islam and having the aim of formulating judgements. Again as a note caution regarding Muslim religious intellectuals, Gramsci does add thatcareful study must be made of the Islamic type of ecclesiastical organisati



D . Boothm an / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 129

and the cultural importance of the theological universities (such as the one in

Cairo) and the learned

5. Colonial m asses, intellec tuals and elites

The aspect that is com mo n to Q2§30 on the Arab peninsula, to Q5§90 on theMaghrib, and also to Q §63 on Egypt is the outlook of the authors of the articleson whom Gramsci relies for his comments, authors interested solely in whatwould best serve the West', or individual countries there in; the questions posedin these articles hinge on who would serve best as a pawn in the power gameof imperial inte res t Making his jud gem ent from within a typically We stern-imperial framework, Ducati, the autho r of the article com mented on in Q5§90,first observes tha t the M arabouts of North Africa, as well as performing functionsequivalent to a Justice of the Peace, had also led 'anti-European insurrections 'and, further, were the bearers or vehicle of a superior civilisation. He goeson to conclude in words quoted by Gramsci that, in the Maghrib, the saints'constitute a power, an extraordinary force which may act as the the biggest

obstacle to the sp read of Western civilisation, as - if ably exploited - it mayalso become a precious auxiliary of European expansion'.^^ This is a positionechoed many years later by the Africanist Thomas Hodgkin, who observes tha tsystems of collaborating groups drawn from chiefs. Marabouts and, wherethey existed, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, all operated within a'framework of in stitu tions ... designed to preserve European dom inance for anindefinite period'. *

And, indeed, when instead local leaders opposed imperial action - addingto wh at has been he re com mented on previously - moving eastward along theNorth African coast, in Libya the 'biggest obstacle' met by Italy was found inIdris, scion as it happ ens of the founder of jus t one of the Sufic bro therh oods.Near-explicit in the outlook of commentators such as Ducati is the desireon the part of the European nations - United States foreign policy towardsthe 'Middle East' and North Africa at that time still being something of anunknow n qu antity to many Europeans - to incorporate the leading strata andclasses of the Arab and Muslim w orlds into their system and c reate conditionsof interdependency between two (or more) worlds: the relatively advanced

industrial one of W estern Europe and those of the im perial dep enden cies.



130 D . Boothm an /Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140

Gramsci is perhaps at his most exposed and least developed point on suquestions. In prison, his access to developments outside Europe and tindustrialised world was severely limited and he seems to rely, more thanything, on a sense impression that, despite even serious setbacks, events some of the key non-metropolitan countries were moving, albeit hesitantin the right direction. His strong point is the masses, as for example in tobservation of striking contemporary relevance: 'if China and India were become modern nations with great volumes of industrial production, thconsequent detachmen t fi om a dependency on Europe would in fact ruptu r

the current equilibrium: transformation of the American co nt in en t shift in taxis of Am erican life from the Atlantic to the Pacific seaboard'. Analogousthis is the view expressed by ZinoVev at the Fifth Enlarged Executive of tComintern (1925), attended by Gramsci, that the reawakening of the Oriewould in the long run bring an end to the isolation of the working class.

One aspect th at stands out in the situation of Gramsci's time is the extremgeopolitical fluidity. The countries of the Middle East and their borders weevolving and changing rapidly and important political figures might be foufirst in a region of what is now one country and then, only some short timlater, elsewhere. Apart from the class factor in the M uslim countries , to whithe C om intern paid atten tion right from its foundation, other factors still wus are the still-unresolved question of Palestine and the intertwining of t'national' aspect of politics with the 'cosm opo litan' one of religion: the examof Catholic Christianity in particular stands before us as a constant remindthat this is not something confined to Islam. In a com ment of is own on thearticles he was reading, serving as a sort of conclusion, Gramsci observes ththe most tragic problem for Islam was to complete 'at break-neck speed' t

same evolutionary process that it had taken Christianity nine centuries to through, beginning from the cultural, political and economic revival arouthe year looo. *^

Ano ther problem with the 'break-neck speed', or 'headlong rush', to use talternative published translation of this phrase , was the 'state of torpor* whicfollowing the authors of the article he is discussing from the fortnightly revieNuova An tología Gramsci observes to have been typical of much of Muslisociety through its 'centuries of isolation' and its 'rotten' or 'corrupt feud

regime'. It should be observed tha t 'isolation' is here used by the au tho r of oof the pieces discussed and this very Eurocentric notion, which projects hi th id d h ld t b tt ib t d i di t



D. Boothm an /HistoricalMaterialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 131

to Gramsci. Then, while the comment about feudal regimes may have been

more or less correct s regards the O ttoman Empire - the paragraph does in factbegin with mention of Turkey - it ignores (to mention bu t few examples) thepolitical experience of the Mughal dynasty in India, various Islamic cultural-renaissance m ovem ents and, economically, according to some, the indigenousroots of capitalism in Muslim countries such as Egypt*^ or im perialism shindran ce of the au tonom ous developm ent of capitalist society in areas suchas the Indian sub-continen t** A parallel with th e notions expressed in Q2§90comes in a note written at most a few days previously. In Q2§86, relying onan article published in the previous number of Nuova Antología Gramscicomments that India too suffered from its ossified stratifications of societyand from a centuries-old social torpor ,*^ a concep tual link between the twoparagraphs being the root of the Italian word corresponding to torpor , usedin both of them. Gramsci goes on to say that the crisis he expects in India will last for a very long time , and a great revolution will be need ed to b ringabou t the beginnings of a solution . The nature of the solution is no t andperhaps could not be, very clear. In one place he states that Muslim societieswill end up by ada pting to and acce pting modern civilisation in its industrial-

econom ic-political form *6 while, in another place, in India and China we readtha t it is Western civilisation w hich, in some form or ano ther, is still going toprevail .* ̂ As they stand, of course, these formulations regarding modern orW estern civilisation need to be disambiguated and read in the context of othercomments in the Notebooks. For Gramsci, it is no t so m uch tha t capitalismwould triumph, which would go counter to his whole app roach, starting vnthhis optimism of the will motto, but industrial society as a typology.

Atten tion is paid in three paragraphs in particular (Q6§32, Q7§62 and Q7§7i)to the role of intellectuals, already the expression of the middle and industrialclasses and the natu ral leaders of the g reat masses ,*^ as key players to be wonover in order for shifts at the mass, rather than simply the molecular, level totake place. For preliminary breakthroughs to be made, an exact knowledge ofthe ideologies and ways of thinking of these inte llectuals must be reached inthese great Asiatic countries so as to be able to challenge and destroy, or to

43. Cf. Gran 1979.

44. This was the subject of controversy in debates on the colonial question at the SixthCongress of the C omintern, held in 1928, only inklings of which could (indeed did) filter throughto Gramsci in prison



132 D Boothman /Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140

assimilate the existing 'cultural and moral hegemony'.''^ In what has been onpartially borne out by events, as also in other cases considered here, Gramexpresses the hope that the people will express 'new intellectuals formed the sphere of historical materialism'.^ Thus, fi-om these remarks, it is cletha t he was looking forward to a political shift in these societies as they movtowards a more industrialised form. And here too, going back once more Q2§86, the observations made on India by the author of the article thediscussed 'could be applied to many other countries and religions'^' amowhich are to be numbered, ohe presumes, Islam among the religions, an

among the countries, those of a largely rural nature, including those withsizable Muslim popu lation.

In this context, a comment of his on Italy may be usefully extrapolatto situations elsewhere. There would have been a normal and historicallbeneficial' hegemony of the more advanced zones, had the expansion industrialism incorporated 'new assimilated econom ic zones', in which case theresulting hegemony w ould be th e 'expression of a struggle between the old athe new, between progress and backwardness, between the more productiand the less productive'.^-^ This whole approach is confirmed in what Gramwro te at only abou t two or thre e weeks' distance regarding Russia, i.e. tha t industrialisation is its process of modernisation'.^^ And in m any countries onafter the initiation of these processes would the 'superstructural' elements society begin to develop.̂ *

What is more indirect, and requires greater extrapolation but is worreflecting on , is the question of the reciprocal influence between the h egemonstates and rival peoples. Gramsci himself does this in a passage which takes ithe subject of the Roman Empire but goes much wider. History on a wo

scale, he observes, is the history of the hegemonic states, and 'the historysubaltern states is explained by the history of hegemonic states'. The fall the Roman Empire, he goes on to say, 'is to be sought in the developmeof the barbarian po pu lat io ns ... no one wants to adm it that the decisiforces of world history were not then within the Roman Empire'.^^ Bringithe argument up to date, today's 'decisive forces' are not necessarily in tm etropolitan countries, but in the 'Orient', the 'South' of the world or how ev

49. Gramsci 2007, Q7§7i.50 . Gramsci 2007, Q7§62.51. Gramsci 1994, Q2§8 6.



D Boothm an / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 133

it is best to describe the parts of the world that lie outside what continues

obstinately to define itself as the West'. As a sort of proviso, Gram sci startsthe final part of Qi5§5 by stating that the fall of a (hegemonic) country to'barbarian' forces does not mean to say that the 'history ofthat country is notincluded in the struggle betw een social groups',^^ the word 'groups' being usedrather than 'classes' not necessarily to avoid censorsh ip prob lems, bu t possiblyfor reasons of generalisation. In Q25§5 Gramsci makes a number of importantmethodological points including one that is pertinent here, namely the needto study, among other things, 'the objective formation of the subaltern socialgroups, through the development and upheavals that take place in the worldof econom ic production, their quantitative expan sion and their origin in pre-existing social groups, whose mentality, ideology and goals for a certain lengthof time they continue to con serve '.

The task faced by any progressive m ov em en t bearing in mind the exam pleof the 'Vatican que stion' (the title of an Italian anthology of Gramsci's writingson Catholicism), and the 'Catholic forces controlled by the Vatican',^^ is tobreak the links between the Islamic masses and their conservative spiritualor politico-spiritual leaders in order to form a new progressive juncture.

For Gramsci this meant support for movements and leaders who were notnecessarily communist A case in point in Italy was the one referred to in passingat the start of this article, namely Guido Miglioli, leader of a Catholic peasantmovement and of the extreme-left of the Catholic Italian Popular Party. He wasexpelled from this party in 1925, only a short time after his mem bership had beenapproved, for supporting a policy of national and international unity with thecommunists in the trade unions and in the agrarian sphere (the Krestintern);then slightly later, after Gramsci's arrest, we find him on the Executive of the

International Red Aid movem ent (known as 'International Class War Prisoners'Aid' in Britain). Again here we see the policy of vann ing over and supporting aninfluential leader (the 'molecular' level in the term used by Gramsci) in orderto win over masses of peop le. In a much more guarded fashion, Gramsci urgedItalian Com munist Party supp ort for the peasan t movem ent and party headedby Stjepan Radié in C roatia, the Yugoslav C om munist Party for various reasonsbeing at that time negligible (for Gramsci still 'a metaphysical entity... exceptin the sense of the influence of communist ideas'). Very probably for his own

56. Gramsci is at pains to explain 'barbarian' etymologically, rather th an using it to mean asecond rate people devoid of culture: all primitive peoples refer to themselvesby words meaning



134 D. Boothm an /HistoricalMaterialism 20.4 2012) 115-140

motives. Radié claimed to be moving leftward, declaring in favour of tKrestintern and a worker-peasant alliance and, moreover, in a move to countSerb 'military and administrative hegemony' within Yugoslavia (at that timthe 'Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes'), formed alliances 'on the baof tactical necessity* with others including Mehmed Spaho's Muslim party Bosnia and Herzegovina.^^ Generalising this, and again including Islam, omay cite the 'Barnum' article already referred to, praising the young USSRpolicy towards the disinherited masses, both Muslim and others (a poliinitiated at the Congress of the Peoples of the Orient in Baku in 1920 a

confirmed at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, which he attended asdelegate): 'The task of a proletarian state is to fight alongside the oppresspeop les for their em ancipation from the imperialist oppressor That is w[the republics of the Soviets] are in sympathy with Morocco, with China, wSyria and with the peoples of North Africa.'^

6. The religion class link

In the 1920s national and incipient class movem ents, expressed throu gh striaction in the cities, were present not only in the ex-Ottoman Empire but alelsewhere in the Muslim world. Other struggles were underway, for exampam ong the Muslim masses in the Indian sub -continent and in Indonesia, allthem on the Comintern's agenda at its Congresses. One of these early focusof interes t was, as stated at th e start of this article, the Sarekat Islam movemein Indonesia.^' The International's original distrust of this movement, paIslamic in outlook, was challenged in an important speech by Tan Malakthe Indonesian delegate at the Comintern's Fourth Congress, attended

59. Letter of Gramsci from V ienna to the PCI Central C om mit tee, 9 April 1924, now in Gram s1992b, pp . 335-43- For the phrase s cited here see pp . 339 and 341.

60. Gramsci, 'II fronte antisoviettista dell'Onorevole Trêves [The Honourable Treves's AnSoviet Front]' in L Unità, 8 M ay 925 and also the following day, after seizure of the 8 May issunow in Gramsci 1971a, p. 397; cf. again 'La politica estera del Bamum', Gramsci 1966, p. 219. Thewording 'republics of the Soviets' is here preferred to 'Soviet republics' to emphasise the Sovas institutions, as Gramsci and others were doing at the time, which is perhaps indicated'soviettista', used instead of'soviético', which later hecame dominant and took on the naturean adjective almost of nationality. For strike action in the Middle East, see for example the fafrequent articles from Jerusalem of'J.B.', published in Inprecorr.



D. Boothm an /HistoricalMateriatism 20.4 2012) 115-140 135

Gramsci. Malaka explained that after Communist Party participation in the

Sarekat Islam movement, the propaganda of the two converged, going on toclaim that his party members had defeated the rightist Sarekat Islam leaders'with the Qur an in our hands' compelling them 'to cooperate with us', astriking paradigrnatic example of relations between Communist forces of anon-religious m atrix and religious believers: 'Today, Pan-Islamism signifies thenational liberation struggle, because for the Muslims Islam is everything: notonly religion, but also the state, the economy, food, and everything else. Andso Pan-Islamism now means the brotherhood of all Muslim peoples, and theliberation struggle no t only of the A rab but also of the Indian, the Javan ese andall the oppressed Muslim peoples'.^^

The situation of the Indonesian Muslims as described by Tan Malaka iscertainly by no means identical to the largely Catholic European peasantmovements, to which Gramsci was paying great attention in Italy and inthe Balkans in particular, but similarities are apparent Appeals are made tothe masses over the heads of their rightist leaders and attempts are made todivide the clerics. E.H. Carr writes regarding another instance from the sameperiod that the central Bolshevik authorities in Moscow, but not always the

outlying leaderships, were all in favour of alliance with the Muslim peasantmasses, and in the task of winning over these masses 'the only course wasto divide the priesthood against itself by wooing the support of its youngermem bers'.^^ And for Gramsci too, events in wh ich clerics und ertook a positiveleadersh ip role have the ir imp ortance, as seen in his reference to such cases inthe Risorgimento.̂ * While no thing in G ramsci's writings indicates a positionof his on the Muslim clerics, apart from the comments he reports from BrunoDucati's Nuova A ntología article, it may be assumed that his position mirrorsthe on e referred to above tha t he held towards the various levels and divisionsv^rithin Christianity.

This nexus of class-religion relations is one to which Gramsci returnsseveral times in the Prison Notebooks, and in the early notebooks in some ofhis 'geopolitical' comments, here specifically on the stirrings and movementsin the Muslim, Middle Eastern and Arab countries in general. In the case ofthe masses, especially the peasant masses, his position follows on the onethat Lenin began to sketch out in his agrarian theses at the Second Comintern

62 . Tan Malaka, speech at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (Malaka 1922); 'General'before a name in published translated versions of this speech are a slip for 'Comrade' Other



D Boothman / Historical Materialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 137

belong to the European e lite'.'' After the first two Congresses, such positions

were firmly rebuffed within the Interna tional by figures ranging from GeorgijSafarov , an old Bolshevik whose task was to follow 'Middle' and 'Far' Easternquestions, through the almost totally forgotten Tunisian Tahar Boudenghawho, at the Fourth Comintern Congress, demanded to know whether the'deviationists' typified by the Sidi-Bel-Abbès motion had been subject todisciplinary sanctions,̂ ^ to Nguyen Aï Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh, the toneand content of whose various articles in Inprecorr are characterised by theirgreat authority.

7. Some conclusions

One of Gramsci's few explicit obse rvations on th e religion-class-politics nexusis found in Notebook 6 and, with slight variations, in its first draft in JosephButtigieg's translation.^^ Referring to France, Gramsci writes tha t the 'formallyCatholic' masses gave their political support to the centre parties (centre andleft in the first draft), despite the anti-clericalism of these latter. The Left hadto create 'the type of Catholic radical , in other words a popular , to acceptv«thout reservations the republic and democracy and organise the peasantmasses on this terrain, overcoming the discord between religion and politicsand to make of the p riest not only the spiritual guide (in the individual-privatesphere) but also the social guide in the politico-econom ic sphere'.'''* Just as inthe early Soviet experience w ith th e M uslim clerics, it is recognised tha t priestsand clerics can play a positive role, and account is taken of their autonom y an deven, at times, radical opposition to a conservative religious hierarchy.''̂ T hestandard-bearers of such positions were potentially precious allies, capable of

influencing the faithful. All this forms part-and-parcel of Gramsci's analysis ofthe Risorgimento and the post-Risorgimental un itary State of Italy.

In the con text of today's world, it may be of use to extend to the internationallevel Gramsci's breakdown of the potentially progressive class forces in theRisorgimento, modifying its terms to take account of the current situation.

70. cf. Maxim e Rodinson (Rodinson 1988, p. 100), citing the 'celebrate d l etter to th e se cretaria tof their party by French co mm unists in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, in Algeria', published in Carrère d'Encausse

and Schramm 1965, pp . 268-71.71. Safarov 1922.72. Cf Ageron 1972, p. 31, n. 54.



138 D Boothman /HistoricalMateriatism 20.4 2012) 115-140

His analysis of Italy singles out 1) the Northern urban force; 2) the Southerural force; 3 the North-Central rural force; 4-5 ) the Sicilian and the Sardiniarural forces.''^ In bo th the initial and the rewritten versions of this paragraphhe several times indicates this complex of forces as examples of the ' citcoun tryside relation', the poin t of dep artu re, he says, for exam ining thefundamental mo tive forces. The first of these forces had the task of'organ isiaround itself the urban forces of the other national sectors', i.e. especially the South, to aid the latter 'to become autonomous', on condition that tNorthern forces 'had to begin by convincing them selves of [the] complexity of

the political system'. The analogy with cu rrent events can not by its nature exact, but m any of today's elem ents m ay be discerned in this description, moof all beginning with the 'city-countryside' metaphor, often synonym ous w ia metaphorical 'North-South' of the world. Then, as well as the urban forci.e. working class, of Gramsci's heg em onic No rthern regions (today's 'North'the world), and the North-Centre, in a modern analogy represented by a mof 'urban' and 'rural' forces of the lesser industrial nations, account has to taken of the same type of forces in the 'em erging' coun tries, while the islandsSicily and Sardinia might be taken to stand for the 'Fourth World', of extrempoverty in income and natural resources.

Near the end of this paragraph, of fundamental importance, from tfirst Notebook, the crucial question is raised of how to break the hold of tconservative clergy over many of the faithful.^'' The case he discusses is thatthe Catholic clergy: there, unless 'the agrarian problem' is raised, it is 'nearimpossible to resolve the question of clericalism and of the Pope's attitudAnd break ing the hold of the conservative clerics to win over the faithful wof course, as Carr observes (see the prev ious section), Bolshevik policy towar

the Muslims in the young Soviet state.The point of importance here is Gramsci's criticism of intervention by

religious hierarchy in favour of the privileged classes, a continuing factor relevance in the attem pt to cond ition the faithfiol am ong the subaltern classesis to be compared w ith the highly Eurocentric and instrum ental approach of tautho r th at G ramsci discusses in Q5§90 (in a rem ark capab le of interpretatiin terms of imperialism, either then or now) that, as quoted above, the forconstituted by the 'saints' of Islam may either hinder 'the spread of Westecivilisation' or provide it with a 'valuable' or 'precious' auxiliary.^^ In a similway, the Christian clergy and its hierarchy can play a reactionary role or - witness am ong m any other examples liberation theology can base itself



D. Boothman /HistoricalMaterialism 20.4 2012) 115-140 139

the disinherited masses, in a return to its origins in primitive Christianity, a

notion tha t comes into several of the prison notes of Gramsci.In summ ing up, wh at G ramsci always has in mind in his line of thinking on

Islam, on the Muslim world and on the analogies and comparisons with theChristian world, is the question of rival hegemonies. These may be within areligion, they may be between religion and nationalism or growth to na tionhood,or between different nations and states, bu t most of all between th e hegemonicgroups, classes and states and the suba ltern ones. But there are various bu rningquestions that, of necessity, he leaves open, among which we can number thefollowing: Just what stages do the disinherited and (over-)exploited massesoutside the metropolis (the North ) have to go through? And, in the words ofGramsci in Section 5 of this article, jus t what is the nature of mode rn civilisationin its industrial-economic-political form ? And in what particular forms, and towhat ex tent is it true (if, as Gramsci claims, it is true) th at this civilisation will inthe end, trium ph in the Orient ? ^

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Boothman - Islam in Gramsci's Journalism and Prison Notebooks

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