CIP - Center for Islamic Pluralism · ISLAM and COMMUNISM by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz 2009 CIP...

ISLAM and COMMUNISMby Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

2009

C IPCentre for Islamic Pluralism

2009

www.islamicpluralism.eu

Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers

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ISLAMAND COMMUNISMIN THE 20th CENTURYAn Historical Surveyby Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

Center for Islamic Pluralism

Washington * London * Köln * Sarajevo

www.islamicpluralism.org

www.islamicpluralism.eu

www.islamicpluralism.de


Islam and Communism in the 20th CenturyAn Historical Survey

by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

Published in the USA in 2009by the Center for Islamic Pluralism

1718 M Street NW #260Washington, DC 20036 USA

andBM 2394, London, WC1N 3XX

First English edition June 2009

An abbreviated version of this paper was originally published in German as“Kommunismus und Islam im 20. Jahrhundert:

Ein Historischer Überblick,”in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismus-Forschung 2009, Aufbau, Berlin

Design: Asim Mesihi

www.islamicpluralism.orgwww.islamicpluralism.euwww.islamicpluralism.de

ISBN 978-0-9558779-3-3

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is pending with the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © Center for Islamic PluralismAll rights reserved

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offprints on paper will be supplied on request.

Cover photograph:Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers

IslamComPref:CIPPrefatoryNEW 3/5/10 10:16 Page 2

The present study is mainly concerned with

relations between international Communism

and the Islamic umma, or global community,

rather than Moscow’s policies toward Soviet

Muslims. The former topic has been neglected

by historians and experts, while the latter has

been treated in considerable detail.

As in Christianity and Judaism, communistic,millenarian, radical-political, and revolutionarysocialist movements have a notable presence in thehistory of Islam. Typical examples of eachphenomenon may be cited. The legacy of pre-Islamic Iranian religious communism – themovement known as Mazdakism, a variant ofManichæism which briefly flourished in the 6thcentury C.E. – is reflected in aspects of IranianShi’ism. Mazdakism adopted social collectivismand principles of public welfare.

Radical Sufi or Islamic spiritual movementswith tendencies toward millennialist, utopian,antinomian, and other forms of anti-authoritariandissidence included TurkishAlevism, the Kizilbashvariant of Shi’ism, and Hamzeviyya in the Balkans.Their doctrines stirred peasants, and occasionally,city dwellers, to rebellion against the Muslimauthorities, and memory of their traditions ofprotest is often easily found in the Islamic world.1

In addition, a body of scholarship on Sufism ingeneral, produced by Christian, Jewish, andMuslim scholars, has perceived in it a social protestmovement, from its beginnings in Islam.

For example, the outstanding Sufi Husaynbin Mansur Hallaj (858-922 was executed inBaghdad allegedly for heresy; he has traditionallybeen portrayed as having faced persecution fordeclaring, “Ana ul-haqq”, or, “I am truth as amanifestation of God.” But the definitive Western

scholarly examination of Hallaj, by the Frenchscholar Louis Massignon,2 identifies the Sufi withthe threat of an Islamic social revolution. InMassignon’s account, which may be skewed by theFrench scholar’s own anti-Jewish prejudice, theintoxicated metaphysics involved in Hallaj’spurported heresy fades into the background in aMuslim Baghdad in which public corruption wasubiquitous and supposedly complicated by the roleof Jewish bankers. Some Sufis claim Hallaj waskilled for disclosing state secrets to the people.One of the disciples of Hallaj, Ahmad Al-Amuli,told the court official Hamid bin Abbas that thealleged transgressions in religion of Hallaj werenothing compared with the acts of theft and crueltycommitted by the rulers; Al-Amuli was thentortured, but, like his mentor, refused to submit.

The present-day critic of radical IslamKhalid Durán viewed Hallaj as a saint of the poor,and one Sufi source describes him as the patron ofoutlaws.3 Some have taken him as a model ofsubversive and libertarian4 conduct. Hallaj was,however, also a topic of verses by no less thanAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who wrote, “I forgetmy own existence and proclaim, ‘I am the truth,’And like Mansur Hallaj I volunteer myself forhanging.” Khomeini’sidentification with Hallajembodies therevolutionary aspect ofthe dour Iranian cleric’spersonality, but also mightindicate Khomeini’s viewof himself as a martyr tooppression.5

CIP

CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC PLURALISM (CIP) www.islamicpluralism.eu 1

Islam and Communism in the 20th CenturyAn Historical Summary

AyatollahRuhollahKhomein

IslamCom20June.pdf 19/6/09 23:41:17 - 1 - (Cyan)IslamCom20June.pdf 19/6/09 23:41:17 - 1 - (Magenta)IslamCom20June.pdf 19/6/09 23:41:17 - 1 - (Yellow)IslamCom20June.pdf 19/6/09 23:41:17 - 1 - (BlacK)

Islam and Communism in the 20th Century —An Historical SummaryCIP

Islamic Modernism and RevolutionLater prominent expressions of radical-politicalreformism in Islam include the activities of 19thcentury “Salafis” such as Jamalal’din Al-Afghani(1838-97), a Muslim ideological adventurercomparable in many respects to Mikhail Bakunin(although Bakunin is a problematical figure in thiscontext, for his Pan-Slavism and inspiration of ananti-Muslim spirit in the Balkans in the 1870s).6 Amore developed example of Islamic reformismwasfound in the Committee of Union and Progress(CUP or Itihaclar), the leading force in the internalpolitical transformation that occurred at the end ofthe Ottoman imperial state in the early 20thcentury.7 The CUP included members of TurkishFreemason lodges whose organization waspromoted by the Western powers, a historicaldevelopment which left an unfortunate legacy ofanti-Masonic “conspiracy theory” in Turkish andwider, global Islamic consciousness. In theaftermath of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia,Leon Trotsky and others argued that the 1906constitutionalist movement in Persia and the 1908Young Turk revolution led by the CUP bothreflected the impact of the Russian upheaval on thetsarist empire’s eastern neighbors.

The Bolsheviks had become involved in thePersian constitutional revolution, with theGeorgian-born activist Grigory “Sergo”Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937) crossing the Russo-Persian border to assist Iranian revolutionaries inorganizing armed detachments.8 KhrastyuRakovski (1873-1941), the Bulgarian-bornrevolutionary socialist active in several countries,and a long-time associate of Trotsky, wrote on theoccasion of the Young Turk Revolution:

“After Russia and Persia, Turkey nowenters the revolutionary movement”9. The trope ofa chain of revolutions beginning in Russia in 1905,continuing in Persia and Turkey, and resulting inthe Chinese upheaval of 1911 was also the subjectof theoretical meditations by Vladimir I. Lenin,outlining the opening of the anti-imperialistmovement in the colonial nations as an adjunct tothe socialist labor movement in the developedcountries. Lenin wrote in 1908, in a “quite casual”

manner according to the 1930s Trotskyist authorC.L.R. James:

“The revolutionary movement in the states ofEurope and Asia has manifested itself soformidably of late that we can discern quiteclearly the outlines of a new and incomparablehigher stage in the international struggle of theproletariat… The class-conscious workers ofEurope now have Asiatic comrades and theirnumber will grow by leaps and bounds.”10

Lenin summed up his view on this issue in 1917,when he wrote, on Bolshevik foreign policy:

“The Russian revolution, which as early as1905 led to revolutions in Turkey, Persia andChina, would have placed the German andBritish imperialists in a very difficult position ifit had begun to establish a truly revolutionaryalliance of the workers and peasants of thecolonies and semi-colonies against the despots,against the khans, for expulsion of the Germansfrom Turkey, the British from Turkey, Persia,India, Egypt, etc.”11

The Turkish convulsion brought trade unionorganizations to the Ottoman territory, mostremarkably under the leadership of SephardicJewish workers, as in the major European Ottomanport of Selanik, which had a large Jewish majority.

A separate and special instance of Sufilibertarianism, uniquely combined with da’wa ormissionization of non-Muslims, support for theOttoman state, Islamic heterodoxy, and progressivepolitical attitudes is offered by the history of theBektashi Sufi order. Bektashis formed the chaplaincorps of the Ottoman military units known asYeniçeri (Janissaries) or “new men,” originally

CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC PLURALISM (CIP) www.islamicpluralism.eu2

VladimirIlyichLenin


made up of Christian converts to Islam. TheBektashi order has been centered in Albania sincethe suppression of Sufism by Mustafa Kemal,founder of the Turkish Republic, in 1925; itcomprises the only indigenous Shia Muslimcommunity in Europe. Bektashism has played amajor role in the Albanian national movement, aswell as advocating women’s equality and populareducation. Its followers account for as much as aquarter of all Albanians, or two million people, andalthough shunned by some, but not all Sunnis fortheir nonconformism, the Bektashis are among thebest-organized and most influential Sufi orders.12

The first majorexample of “Islamicsocialism” appearedduring the second decadeof the 20th century,parallel with the firstworld war, in the DutchEast Indies, which laterbecame Indonesia. TheIndies Social DemocraticAssociation (IndischeSociaal-DemocratischeVereeniging or ISDV) was created by Dutch radicalsocialists living in the colonial territories, the mostnotable being Hendrik Sneevliet, alias Maring(1883-1942). Sneevliet became a leader of theThird (Communist) International (CI), representingthe CI in China, and then emerged as a left-oppositionist aligned with but independent of theTrotskyist movement in the 1930s. He isconsidered a national hero in the Netherlands forhis involvement with the February 1941 strike

against the German occupiers of the country, inprotest against anti-Jewish measures; a street andmetro station in Amsterdam are now named forhim. The strike, which took place during the Hitler-Stalin pact, was the first important solidarity actionwith the persecuted Jews to take place in WesternEurope. It put forward the slogan, “AgainstNational Socialism and National Bolshevism –International Class Struggle!” In April 1942Sneevliet and other leaders of a small andindependent anti-Stalinist entity called De DeerdeFront (The Third Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front)were arrested and executed by the Germanoccupation authorities in Holland.13

The Indonesian aspect of the revolutionarymovement in the Dutch colony is best related byTan Malaka (1894-1949), who followed Sneevlietinto the Comintern. Indonesians were the earliestsubstantial group of Muslims outside Soviet-controlled territory (i.e. the Caucasus and CentralAsia), and neighboring Turkey and Iran, toassociate themselves with Moscow. Tan Malakahad cooperated with a Muslim nationalistmovement counting millions of members, SarekatIslam (SI or Islamic Union). A revolutionaryfaction, Red Sarekat Islam, was born from theranks of SI in the Javanese city of Semarang. In amemoir, Tan Malaka eloquently recalled his viewof the intersection of Islam and Communism, andthe necessity of an alliance between Pan-Islamistsand Communists: “When I stand before God, thenI am a Muslim, but when I stand before men, thenI am no Muslim, for God has said there are manySatans among men.”14 Thus, Islam could resolvespiritual issues but could not assure justice in theface of exploitation and other evils in humansociety. Examination of the Indonesian exampleputs in question the general typology of Muslimradical religiosity as “Islamist.” The nationalmovement in what would become Indonesia wasIslamic but did not favor religious purification oran Islamic state.

Marxist Attitudes Toward MuslimsThe CI was the first of the revolutionaryinternationals to make a serious approach to the

Islamic Modernism and Revolution CIP


Yeniçeriler (Janissaries): The term in Turkish, yeniçeri means new troops,indicating what they were originally, an alternative to the regular army.

HendrikSneevliet,aliasMaring



Muslim umma; both the International WorkingMen’s Association of Marx and the SocialistInternational that succeeded it were either “whiteracist”, in present-day terminology, or Western-imperialist in their main attitudes – their support forIrish revolutionary claims being the only notableexception. Historians of Bolshevism typically datethe new strategy to the Soviet-sponsored 1920Congress of Peoples of the East, held in Baku, butascribe it to Russian ambitions in the East. In aspeech at the 1920 Congress, Karl Radek, theformer comrade of Rosa Luxemburg in the SocialDemocracy of the Kingdom of Poland andLithuania (SDKPiL) and confidant of Lenin,charged that “the British capitalists resolved tobreak [Ottoman] Turkey into pieces as soon aspossible… British capital condemned Turkey todeath”, Radek declared, with the aim of betteruniting the British colonial possessions in Africaand India.15

Marxist sympathy for the Ottomans andtheir successors against the British did not,however, begin with the CI. Karl Marx himselfcollaborated with the British politician DavidUrquhart (1805-77), defender of the Ottoman orderin the Balkans (after participating in the Greekindependence movement) and scourge of pro-Russian interests in Britain. Marx and Urquhartwere united in accusing Lord Palmerston of sellingout to Moscow.16

In terms of extensive practical encounters,prior to 1917 the main experience of therevolutionary Marxist movement with Muslims

came about in the Balkans, a theatre of warbetween Austria-Hungary and Russia. Luxemburgand the Austrian Marxists condemned Slavicdemands for the breakup of the existing empiresinto small, ethnically-defined states, arguinginstead for conversion of the multiethnic andmultireligious Habsburg and Ottoman domainsinto socialist federations. Criticism of tsaristcomplicity in assaulting the Ottoman dominionsand murdering local Muslims en masse –particularly the Turks andAlbanians slaughtered bythe Serbs in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, whichresulted in the Serb conquest of Kosova and othercomponents of a disintegrating “Turkey in Europe”– was also forthcoming from “proto-Bolsheviks”such as Trotsky, who served as a war correspondentin the Balkan conflict.17

Similar condemnation of Slav atrocitiesagainst the Balkan Muslims and Albanians (thelatter community including a significant Christianpopulation) was put forward by the Serbian SocialDemocratic Party (SSDP), most of whose memberswould be absorbed into the Communist Party ofYugoslavia (KPJ) when it was founded in 1919.One of the first public figures to sound the alarmabout the brutality of the Serb invasion of Kosovain 1912-13 was a leader of the SSDP, DimitrijeTucović (1881-1914).18

Trotsky wrote on Serb atrocities in Kosovafor the liberal Russian dailies Kievskaya Mysl’(Kiev Thought),Dyen’ (The Day), and Luch (Ray).It is probable that Tucović, who was his friend andcomrade, was the source of one of Trotsky’s most


Above: the partition of European Turkey 1908-13Karl Radek, Bolshevik functionary (1885-1939) Historical Prizren, center of Ottoman Kosova


shocking dispatches. In “Behind the Curtain’sEdge”, published by Kievskaya Mysl’, Trotskyplaced in quotes a first-hand account of Serbianmilitary atrocities:

“‘The horrors actually began as soon as wecrossed the old frontier... The sun had set, it wasstarting to get dark. But the darker the skybecame, the more brightly the fearfulillumination of the fires stood out against it.Burning was going on all around us. EntireAlbanian villages had been turned into pillars offire – far and near, right up to the railway line...Dwellings, possessions accumulated by fathers,grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, weregoing up in flames. In all its monotony thispicture was repeated the whole way toSkopje.’”

The remainder of this long account consisted of anextraordinary series of murders, tortures,massacres, and thefts committed by Serbiansoldiers and officers. Balkan Muslims andAlbanians were not the only victims; Bulgariansand Sephardic Jews were also despoiled by theSerb forces. The authoritative historian of the once-distinguished Sephardic community of Manastir(Bitola) in Macedonia, Mark Cohen, describesSerbian atrocities as an incentive for earlyimmigration of the Manastir Sephardim to theU.S.19

Tsarist Russian encouragement to Serbianaggression was a preoccupation of manycommentators, and radical criticism of the Russianrole was extremely sharp. Trotsky lashed atexamples of “ethnic cleansing” – a term that hadjust then been coined by the Serbs20 – and thecomplicity in it of Russian tsarist and democraticnationalist politicians including the liberal PavelMilyukov, in two extraordinary texts, published inDyen’ in January 1913: “An ExtraparliamentaryQuestion to Mr. P. Milyukov”, and “Results of the‘Question About the Balkans’ .”

In the former, Trotsky wrote:“Mr. Deputy! ...You have frequently, both in thecolumns of the press and at the tribune of theDuma, assured the Balkan allies... of theunaltered sympathies of so-called Russian

society for their campaign of ‘liberation.’Recently, during the period of the armistice, youmade a political journey to the Balkans... Didyou not hear during your travels... about themonstrous acts of brutality that were committedby the triumphant soldiery of the allies all alongtheir line of march, not only on unarmedTurkish soldiers, wounded or taken prisoner,but also on the peaceful Muslim inhabitants, onold men and women, on defenseless children?...Did not the facts, undeniable and irrefutable,force you to come to the conclusion that theBulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia[Kosova], in their national endeavor to correctdata in the ethnographical statistics that are notquite favorable to them, are engaged quitesimply in systematic extermination of theMuslim population? ...Is it not clear to you thatthe silent connivance of the ‘leading’ Russianparties and their press... makes it much easierfor the (Bulgarians and Serbs) to engage in theirCain’s work of further massacres of the peopleof the Crescent in the interests of the ‘culture’ofthe Cross?”21

In the succeeding text, “Results of the ‘QuestionAbout the Balkans’”, Trotsky’s polemic reached anintensity rare even for him. Addressing himself

Marxist attitudes toward Muslims CIP


Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary, was a warcorrespondent for the Kiev newspaper Kievskaya Mysl’ in the Balkansand reported on the atrocities committed against the Albanians andTurks of Macedonia and Kosova during the Serb invasion of 1912



again to Milyukov, he wrote:“Since the ‘leading’ newspapers of Russia...either hushed up or denied the exposurespublished in the democratic press, a certainnumber of murdered Albanian babies must beput down, Mr. Deputy, to your Slavophileaccount. Get your senior doorman to look forthem in your editorial office, Mr. Milyukov!”

He continued:“Indignant protest against unbridled behaviorby men armed with machine guns, rifles, andbayonets was required for our own moral self-defense. An individual, a group, a party, or aclass that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking itsnose while it watches men drunk with blood,and incited from above, massacring defenselesspeople is condemned by history to rot andbecome worm-eaten while it is still alive.”22

The SSDP leader DimitrijeTucović had volunteered forservice in the Serbian army, andhad marched in its ranks intoKosova, on the belief thatsocialists needed to be withtheir people wherever theywere. He had been won to

socialism as a middle-school student, acharacteristic East European phenomenon of thetime, and his internationalist beliefs were sincereand profound. Almost immediately, he beganwriting about the horrific character of the Serbianconquest of Kosova in the Belgrade socialistnewspaper Radničke Novine (Workers’ Journal).His statements were extraordinary for their candorand their author’s authentic solidarity with theAlbanians.

When Prishtina, the capital of Kosova, wasoccupied by the Serbs, Radničke Novine printed thefollowing as a letter from a soldier:

“My dear friend, I have no time to write to youat length, but I can tell you that appalling thingsare going on here. I am terrified by them, andconstantly ask myself how men can be sobarbarous as to commit such cruelties. It ishorrible. I dare not (even if I had time, which Ihave not) tell you more, but I may say thatLuma [anAlbanian region along the river of the

same name], no longer exists. There is nothingbut corpses, dust, ashes. There are villages of100, 150, 200 houses, where there is no longera single man, literally not one. We collect themin bodies of forty to fifty, and then we piercethem with our bayonets to the last man. Pillageis going on everywhere. The officers told thesoldiers to go to Prizren and sell the things theyhad stolen.” The Radničke Novine editor added,“Our friend tells us of things even moreappalling than this, but they are so horrible andso heartrending that we prefer not to publishthem.”

In later articles published by Radničke Novine,summarizing the Balkan Wars, the acquisition ofKosova, and particularly the suppression of theAlbanians, Tucović wrote among other things:

“It is at the very least now necessary to looktruth in the face and, setting aside all prejudices,recognize that the struggle that the Albanianpeople are today conducting is a natural,inevitable historical struggle for a differentpolitical life from the one they had underTurkey, and different from the one imposed onthem by their ruthless neighbors, Serbia,Greece, and Montenegro. [Emphasis inoriginal.] A free Serbian people must value andrespect that struggle as much for the freedomsof the Albanians as for their own, and denyevery government a means to carry out a policyof aggression.”23

“We have carried out the attemptedpremeditated murder of an entire nation. Wewere caught in that criminal act and have beenobstructed. Now we have to suffer thepunishment... In the Balkan Wars, Serbia notonly doubled its territory but also its externalenemies...

“Our lordly people dreamed of foreignlands and foreign freedoms, but we who hadbeen heralds of national liberation brought withus, instead, the banner of nationalenslavement... The basis for all of themisfortunes we now suffer and which we willcontinue to suffer in the future lies in the factthat we invaded a foreign land.”

“Voltaire said the poor always like tospeak of their past... This is clearly true of the


DimitrijeTucović(1881-1914)


tiny Balkan states, which wanted to create theirfuture on the basis of the past. Some recall therule of Tsar Dušan, they dream of a GreaterSerbian state... The memory of that ‘illustrious’past is inseparably linked to territorialexpansion by the ruling classes...”

“Serbian overlords are trying to turn anational minority [Kosova Serbs] into amajority by means of a police state, and they arepreparing their subjects not to be free citizensbut submissive subjects. The regime ofextraordinary police measures... is inspired bythe reactionary desire to advance one nation andsubdue another... On the other hand, it gives riseto new urges... provoking intolerance and hatredbetween peoples.

“The Serbian bourgeoisie desiresfreedom for its own nation at the price offreedom for other nations... We want freedomfor our nation without denying the freedom ofothers. This goal can be achieved in the Balkansonly by the formation of a political entity inwhich all nations would be completely equal...without regard to who ruled what regioncenturies ago.”

Tucović was an extraordinary figure. A capablesoldier, although he was a firm antimilitarist, heremained a reserve officer in the Serbian army, andwas killed in action in the first months of WorldWar I. He was not only an enemy of Serbianimperialism, he was also a real friend of theAlbanian people. He believed, in effect, and withconsiderable reason, that the Serb, Montenegrin,andAlbanian inhabitants of northAlbania formed asingle, interrelated regional community, embracingtwo nations, Serbo-Montenegrin andAlbanian, andthree religions, Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim.

But he saw this in a way completelydifferent from certain Serb chauvinists, whodeclared the population of Kosova to be no morethan “Albanized Serbs.” In reality, Tucović argued,it was the other way around: Karađorđe, leader ofthe Serb national uprising of 1804 and progenitorof a Serb monarchical house, the Karađorđevićes,was, Tucović said, of Albanian origin. Above all,Tucović defended Albania’s right to independence,and the Albanian-majority character of Kosova.

Tucović insisted:“Relations with foreign nations, and thereforewith the Albanians, must be built on ademocratic, civil, and humane foundation oftolerance, cooperative existence, and labor.”

Alone in its uncompromising rejection of “GreaterSerbia”, the SSDP which Tucović led was a tinypolitical formation, founded in 1903. Other notableinternationalists in the party included KostaNovaković, who also served as a combat soldier inthe Serbian army, Dušan Popović, DragišaLapčević, and Triša Kaclerović. Novaković,Lapčević and Kaclerović were all elected to theSerbian parliament. Their party had links with theRussian Bolsheviks prior to the 1917 revolutionand the formation of the CI, and with the similarBulgarian left socialist tendency known asTesnyaki or “Narrows,” as well as with Trotsky,then affiliated to no party, and other independentRussian Marxists. Tucović and Lapčević wereSerbian delegates to the 1910 congress of theTesnyaki, a major regional political event of thetime.

Popović, editor of Radničke Novine, wroteof the 1912 Albanian campaign:

“The details concerning the operations of theSerb armies are frightful. They plunder, laywaste, burn, plow up, massacre, and destroyeverything, down to the roots... It is no wonderthat our peasant masses have such barbaricinstincts since this state never saw to it that theywere educated and civilized; nor should we beshocked at the narrow and meagre political andspiritual horizons of our military commanderswho are trained to regard the brutal and cold-blooded murder of tens and hundreds ofAlbanians, their wives and children, as heroic...The slogans in which such ideas and views areexpressed come from the highest social andpolitical strata in Serbia. It is not merely aquestion of a protest by Serbian workers againstthe Albanian policy of the Serbian bourgeoisie;we must rescue the image of the Serbian peoplein the eyes of cultured and democraticEuropeans. We must show that there are peoplein Serbia, many people, who oppose this, andthat at the head of this opinion stands the

Marxist attitudes toward Muslims CIP




working class and Social Democracy.”

Lapčević wrote at the same time, with greatprescience:

“Through the politics of our governmentconditions have been created so that for a greatmany years (perhaps even decades!), there willbe repeated clashes and suffering between twounfortunate nations... Serbia has ordered itsarmies to subdue and enslave... Our soldiershave marched with guns and cannons but havenot only created dishonor for their land, whichonce had a tradition of revolution and liberation,but they have also created conditions for eternaldiscord. We shall constantly have conflict andmisfortune if Serbia does not change itspolicies.”

Nearly 20 years later Kosta Novaković recalled:“The invasion of Albania by the Serbian armywas a Serbian imperialist attempt to capture theports of Shkodra, Durrës and Shen-Gjin… TheSerbian imperialist government left nothingundone againstAlbanians during its occupation.It issued orders for scaffolds to be erected in adozen parts. It massacred, killed and plunderedthe impoverished Albanian population. And itpersecuted only the poor…

“When they invaded Kosova, theSerbian imperialists proclaimed that they weregoing to regain the historical rights they had in1389. Basing themselves on these ‘historicalrights,’ Italy or France, Greece or Turkey, coulddemand half of Europe, because they had heldthose parts at one time. Indeed, France coulddemand a piece of Russia, because once in 1812Napoleon went as far as Moscow.

“Kosova is a purely Albanian territory;it has only 10-15 per cent Serbs. The Serbianimperialists employed the tactics and methodsof medieval warriors or colonial invaders: theannihilation of the population under the pretextof military operations, the disarming of people,and the suppression of the armed resistance.Thus… 120,000 Albanians – men, women,boys, old folk and children, were wiped out;hundreds of villages, more in Kosova and fewerin Macedonia, were bombarded and most ofthem completely destroyed. It should be pointedout that the representative of the tsarist Russian

imperialist policy, Hartwig, the minister ofRussia to Belgrade, blessed Belgrade’s policy ofannihilation. The Orthodox Russian tsar urgedhis Orthodox Serbian brothers, King Petar andhis sonAleksandar, to kill a whole people and tospread the Orthodox faith in the Balkans. Atleast 50,000 Albanians were forced to becomerefugees and flee to Turkey andAlbania to savetheir lives. This annihilation thinned out theAlbanian nation in Kosova, but in no waychanged the Albanian character there. Theobjective of these massacres of Albanians inKosova was to replace them with Serbs and tocolonize and Serbianize it. However, until theend of 1912, as long as there was resistance onthe part of the Albanians, the colonizationprogressed rather slowly. Only a few Serbssettled in the Kosova region at the start.”

Novaković wrote these lines in Liria Kombëtare(National Liberation)24 an Albanian-languageperiodical printed in Geneva, which, supported bythe CI, backed Kosovar Albanian rebels againstSerbian domination in the late 1920s.

A CI-directed front, the Balkan Federation,came to include the leading Kosovar revolutionarygroups. It should be noted that the social-revolutionary Internal Macedonian RevolutionaryOrganization (IMRO/VMRO), which like SerbianSocial Democracy contributed many cadres to theCI, was also, originally, an internationalistformation. VMRO projected a future Macedonia inwhich Slav Muslims, Albanians, and local Turkswould have equal rights with ChristianMacedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Gypsies,and Sephardic Jews. The official language ofindependent Macedonia, to foster unity betweenthese disparate peoples, was to be Esperanto.Decades later, during and after the period of TitoiteCommunism, the VMRO became almostexclusively Slavist in outlook. But at the beginningof the history of the KPJ, in the 1920 elections inmonarchist Yugoslavia, then known as theKingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (KSHS),the KPJ received a major share of votes inMacedonia, and in the same year the Macedonianmetropolis of Skopje experienced a general strikeor “commune.”25 Throughout this period,



Macedonia no less than Kosova was inconsiderable insurrectionary upheaval, with wholedistricts liberated from the control of monarchistand Great-Serbian Belgrade.

Political activists from Muslim-majorityBosnia-Hercegovina played a significant role in theearly history of the KPJ. Josip Cizinski, alias MilanGorkić (1904-39), a member of the Czech minoritycommunity born in Bosnia, was a dominant figurein KPJ activities, although not Muslim.26 AMuslim-born former head of the KPJ inHercegovina, Mustafa Dedić, became one of sixmembers of an executive committee of YugoslavTrotskyists living in Russia, formed in 1929.27

The Baku Congress of 1920 and Its

AftermathWithmuch of Eastern Europe aflame with revolt, atthe Baku Congress of 1920 the CI revealed that itsinterest in an alliance with Turkish and othergeographically “near” elements in the Muslim

world exceeded the expressions of anti-imperialistsolidarity with the Ottoman Muslims previouslyenunciated byMarx, the Serbian Social Democrats,and Trotsky. A Turkish Communist Party wasbriefly prominent in the country’s political life, butwas curbed by Mustafa Kemal. Franz Borkenaudescribed the fate of the Turkish Communists inthis period as “a catastrophe”, writing “TheComintern had to choose between Kemal and theTurkish Communists. For the first time the interestsof Russian foreign policy actually involved theexistence of a communist party. The Russians choseKemal in preference to Turkish communism… inthe later congresses and meetings of the Cominternno Turkish delegates took part… The decisionabout Turkey was taken while Lenin was formallyand actually at the head of the Soviet state.”28

Soviet approaches to Muslim communitieshad predictably begun within the borders of theformer tsarist empire, now Soviet territory. In someregions, mainly in the Caucasus, where tsarist

The Baku Congress and its Aftermath CIP


Azeri communists painting slogans for the conference.South Caucasus 1917 Republic of Azerbaijan, 1919-1920

Congress of the Peoples of the East. Baku, September 1920



aggression had been cruel and caused continuousresistance, Communism was welcomed andadopted an Islamic vocabulary (e.g. shura or“Islamic consultative body” for “soviet” or“council”) during the Leninist period. The Leninistadministration also granted religious privileges topreviously-suppressed Caucasian Sufi shaykhs.

During the Baku Congress, of animpressive total of 1,891 attendees, 1,275 had filledout personal questionnaires. Given the new Sovietpolicy in the Caucasus, it is unsurprising thatChechens, who had been active combatants indefense of Islam through much of the 19th century,were the sixth largest delegation, with 82 present(plus 13 Ingushes, a national group related to andtypically associated with Chechens), numericallyfollowing 235 Turks, 192 Persians, 157Armenians,104 Russians, and 100 Georgians. The Daghestanirevolutionary Jalalad’din Korkmasov declared tothe Congress, “heroic struggle… has dyedDaghestan in the color of its own blood, shed forthe glorious Red Flag… what is at stake is theworld revolution. What faces us is a great worldwar… even before the [Baku] Congress… beforethe call issued by our leaders, we began ghazawat,29 a holy war.” 30

In the Central Asian regions where tsarismhad been much more successful as a military powerbut had left much of local Muslim governance inplace, Communism was perceived, withconsiderable justification, as an “ethnic Russian”and antireligious phenomenon, and was resisted by

Muslim combatants with moral help from elementselsewhere in the umma. Muslim dissidence was fedby the legacy of jadidism, an Islamic reformisteffort among the Turkic communities of theRussian empire, as well as the Turkestan rebellionof 1916 against tsarist orders for militaryconscription. The 1916 insurrection is commonlyknown as the Basmachi movement, and isunfortunately neglected by Western historians.Having begun as opponents of tsarist imperialism,the Turkestani rebels maintained their resistance toSlavic domination after the establishment of Sovietrule. Soviet political agents treated the Basmachi inCentral Asia and another movement, the Musavatin Azerbaijan, as equal, Pan-Turkic enemies of thenew regime.

It is noteworthy that the questionnaires forthe Baku Congress listed only three Arabs,surpassed by 12 Jamshidis and 11 Hazaras (bothMuslim ethnic groups living mainly inAfghanistanand Iran), and eight Kurds. The final Manifesto ofthe Congress listed Arabia, Syria, and Palestine ascountries represented by delegates. As in theaftermath of 1905, outside Moscow’s annexedterritories, Russian political developmentsexercised a greater influence over the Muslim statesbordering on the former empire than in the broaderumma. Until the late 1940s, Soviet policy towardMuslims manifested a reversal of the commonattitude of the Western powers, which treated Islamas “the Arab religion”, and therefore as mainly afactor in dealing with the colonized Arab peoples,


In the summer of 1918, Mensheviks and right Social-Revolutionaries stageda counter-Revolutionary coup and seized power in Baku. They invitedBritish forces into the city and arrested 26 leading members of the lawfulSoviet of Peoples' Commissars, mainly Bolsheviks and a few left Social-Revolutionaries. Then, on 20 September 1918, on orders from the British,the Commissars were taken out to a remote location in the desert wherethey were shot and beheaded. Painting by Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky Soviet Desert Police commandant cross-examines an Uzbek Caravan leader


The Baku Congress and its Aftermath CIP


Training Azerbaijani soldiers for the Red Army (under General Frunze)Red Army troops advancing into the Pamirs

Central Asia and the Caucasus: focal point of ‘The Great Game’

Bukhara, Uzbekistan: Left, the Mir Arab Madrasah; right, the KalanMasjid; between them the ‘Tower of Death’

Dance of a bacha (dancing boy), Samarkand, ca 1905 - 1915Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

*


and secondarily with the Indian Muslims. For theRussians, relations with the Turks and Iranians weremore important, at the beginning, than with theArabs.

Nevertheless, elements of confrontationbetween Soviet politics and the movement forJewish colonization in Palestine, in which Arabswould be subject to considerable Russianblandishments over time, are visible early in CIhistory. The Baku Manifesto included thefollowing: “What has Britain done for Palestine?There, at first, acting for the benefit of Anglo-Jewish capitalists, it drove Arabs from the land inorder to give the latter to Jewish settlers; then,trying to appease the discontent of the Arabs, itincited them against these same Jewish settlers.”31

Only three years later, in 1923, the ex-anarchist andfuture Left Oppositionist Victor Serge, functioningas a CI journalist in Germany, expressed thecommon hostility of both the German Communists(KPD) and the rising National Socialist movementto the Jewish petty-bourgeoisie. In that period, CIrepresentatives like Ruth Fischer and Karl Radek(in the notorious Leo Schlageter case) expressedtheir solidarity with ultra-nationalist extremists inGermany. Much commentary on this example ofCommunist flirtation with fascist Jew-baiting hastreated it as a temporary aberration, but Serge’swriting shows others beside Fischer and Radekconforming to the posture of the CI. Serge reportedthat in Breslau, then in Germany, and todayWroclaw in Poland, young fascists had incited thelooting of Jewish shops; according to Serge, themob “had given a good lesson to some viciousgrocers.”32 Serge further praised Radek andHermann Remmele, a German Communist leader,for their speechifying and debates with fascists,writing, “‘You are fighting Jewish finance,’ saidRemmele to the fascists. ‘Good, but also fight the

other finance, that of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes…!’He thus got those fascists to applaud the classstruggle.” This idiom was identical to the better-known rhetoric of Ruth Fischer.33

Meanwhile, the lure of the Orient had become apowerful motif in Soviet literature. The SovietMuslim communities produced numerous works invernacular languages exalting the regime, but littleis of enduring worth. By contrast, the legendarywoman Bolshevik Larisa Reisner (1895-1926)joined her then-lover Fyodor F. Ilyin, known asRaskolnikov (1892-1939), in a diplomaticadventure in Afghanistan in 1920, when theLeninist regime tried to assist the anti-British policyof Amanullah Khan (1892-1960), the Afghanmonarch from 1919 to 1929. Reisner composed akind of prose-poetry about CentralAsia, resemblingthe Sufi classics, in which she observed, “Betweena flat earth and a flat sky, smoke drifts intonothing… Smothered silence for hundreds ofmiles… All fades on the steppe, where stones aremade of moonlight and clouds petrified inemptiness.” She also described “Tashkent blazinglike a dark emerald” – a simile few would findappropriate today, given the shabbiness anddemoralization of the capital of independentUzbekistan.34 She further discerned “a silencewhich makes the birds dumb and the trees stopgrowing… High in the pale sky a snowstorm offighting white eagles… But… in the long, hopelessclay wall, raised from the earth and splashed by thebreath of tired laden donkeys and camels – who candeny that here, in that exhausting, pitiless wall thereis a green window, from which one may see agarden hidden from view like a jewel inside aring.”35 She later wrote brilliantly on the failedGerman Communist revolution of 1923.36 Reisneralso became the lover of the ill-fated Radek, whoalong with Ilyin-Raskolnikov was a victim of theStalinist purges, and it is not unlikely that had shelived she would have become involved with theLeft Opposition (LO). The first wife of Josip Broz-Tito, Pelagea Denisova-Belusova, was a member ofthe Trotskyist group and remained one until she waspurged by the Stalinist apparatus.37

Hermann Remmele



Ruth FischerLarisa ReisnerVictor Serge


Another Soviet writer with a heterodoxreputation, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), wrote inhis novella Dzhan with considerable insight on thedifficult situation facing the Soviet Central Asianpeoples; a Turkmen is its tragic hero. 38

The Soviet authorities sought to transformSoviet Central Asia into a “display window” formodernization of the Muslim East, a policy thatachieved some minor victories, perhaps bestsymbolized by the construction of a mass metrotransit system in Tashkent. In addition, from 1933 to1943, de facto Soviet control was extended toEastern Turkestan (called Xinjiang by the Chinese),which has a Muslim majority. Eastern Turkestanisviewed this as a progressive development, sayingtoday that when they were under Sovietadministration they turned to (and even consideredthemselves part of) Europe, but with thereestablishment of Chinese authority during the

second world war they were forced to look towardBeijing – and to accept wide-scale Han Chinesecolonization. Although tsarist and Soviet Russiansalike colonized the Soviet Muslim republics, theymade no such attempt in Eastern Turkestan.According to one authority on Soviet nationalitypolicy, pro-Soviet Turkestanis, especially Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, “took upon themselvesthe tasks usually reserved for Russian andUkrainian settlers.”39

In 1924-25, the CI encountered its firstimportant ally from theArab world in the person ofAbd el-Krim (c. 1882-1963), the Berber leader ofresistance in the Moroccan Rif to Spanish andFrench imperialism. In 1927, the Soviet Union wasthe first government in the world to recognize thetotalitarian Wahhabi supporter Abd Al-Aziz IbnSa’ud as ruler of Hejaz.40 CI support for the Arabsin the Palestinian anti-Jewish riots of 1929 has been

Soviet Communism and Muslim Liberation Movements CIP


Uighurs of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang)Left: a Bukharan Uzbek; right, an Afghan

Turkmen villagers Andre Platanov, author of Dzhan (1930)



a subject of considerable historiological comment.CI commentary on the riots was, however,contradictory, with the Berlin Communist dailyRote Fahne praising theArabs and branding Jewishdefenders as fascists, while the CI weeklyInternational Press Correspondence detailed thesuffering of the Jewish victims.41

The latter outcome was predictable in thatJewish settlers then comprised the overwhelmingmajority of Palestinian Communists. With the turnof the CI toward the People’s Front strategy,heralded by a Russo-French military pact, after1935, the position of the Soviet Union became evenmore convoluted and self-contradictory. Theelection of the Front Populaire to power in Francein 1936, in which the French Communists (PCF)were represented, led the PCF to oppose Arabnationalism in the French North Africanpossessions. The first substantial modern Algerianrevolutionary group, l’Étoile Nord-Africaine (TheNorth African Star, hereinafter l’Étoile) was led byAhmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898-1974), whocooperated with the CI and PCF in the 1920s.

Messali Hadj and his movement became associatedwith the French Trotskyists after the PCF failed toprotest the suppression of theAlgerian organizationin 1937; the Trotskyist Fourth International wasproud to continue the line of the CI in mobilizingthe colonial masses.42 L’Étoile was later known asthe Parti du Peuple Algérien (Party of the AlgerianPeople, or PPA), the Mouvement pour le Triomphedes Libertés Democratiques (Movement for theTriumph of Democratic Liberties, or MTLD), andthe Mouvement National Algérien (AlgerianNational Movement, or MNA.)

Arabs in the Spanish Civil WarIndependently of CI action, and at the same time asthe PCF had turned against colonial protest, theEuropean and American left adopted an anti-Muslim viewpoint based on the involvement ofMoroccan troops in the Spanish counter-revolutionary movement led by Gen. FranciscoFranco in 1934-39. Franco had been a commanderof Moroccans in the Spanish Foreign Legionduring the 1920s, and led Moroccans into the


Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj, founder of the Mouvement National Algérien


Asturias region of Spain to suppress the 1934proletarian commune briefly established there. Theintroduction of colonial forces into Asturias wasprofoundly shocking to the Spanish left, in thatAsturias was the only Spanish region that had neverbeen conquered by Muslims. While the Spanishright claimed to defend the country’s traditionalChristian religiosity and culture, it did not hesitateto allow Moroccans to invade Asturias inliquidating a revolutionary uprising.

Employment of the contemptuous termmoros or “Moors” to refer to the Moroccansserving with the Spanish Nationalists became, andtoday remains, a staple ofWestern leftist discourse,as well as the Francoist narrative, on the Spanishconflict, which became an open war in 1936.Moroccan Islamic clerics (ulema) declared theSpanish struggle to be a jihad against atheistCommunism, in which martyrs would beguaranteed entry into Paradise. African volunteersfrom then-Spanish Guinea (now EquatorialGuinea), as well as Senegal and Mali in then-

French Soudan, also served in the Franco forces.But as many as 1,000 Arabs, Berbers,

Africans, and non-Soviet Asians, presumablyMuslim if only by birth, also fought in the Soviet-controlled International Brigades (IB) as well as inthe party and trade-union militias on theRepublican side in the Spanish war.43 The PCF,notwithstanding its bad record on Algeriandecolonization, opened recruiting offices for Spainin Oran, as well as in the French-controlledMoroccan cities of Casablanca and Agadir, and inTangier, then under international jurisdiction. ThePCF even pondered the organization of an “ArabLegion” to fight in Spain. But while someAlgerianArabs, along with Franco-Algerian Communists,joined the IB, the attempt to create a substantialunit failed because of the superior appeal of l’ÉtoileNord-Africaine, members of which had attemptedunsuccessfully to get to Spain for enlistment in theRepublican army. L’Étoile, through its periodicalAl-Umma, decided to emphasize propagandaagainst the Francoists, especially targeting the

Arabs in the Spanish Civil War CIP


Franco’s Moroccan troops enter the city of Oviedo, October 1934First meeting of the Committee of (Anti-Fascist) Militias in Barcelona onJuly 21, 1936. Of its members, the leading elements were six anarchists, plusthe Catalan Left and other republicans with five, the POUM with threerepresentatives, and Catalan peasants with one. In addition, four weresocialist trade unionists and the Stalinist Communists had one officialdelegate



Berbers of the Rif, rather than direct recruitment tothe Spanish Republican forces. L’Étoileparticipated in a 1935 European Islamic conferencein Geneva, alongside the Syrian Druze emir,Islamic modernist, and occasional contributor toCommunist periodicals in French, Shakib Arslan(1869-1946)44, grandfather of the present-dayLebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt (b. 1949).

Arslan, who knew Spanish Muslim historywell, wrote, “The fire of civil war in Spain has beenlit between the two big parties: the conservatives,and, joined with them, priests, bishops, the greaterpart of army officers (sic)45, monarchists, andmoderate republicans (sic)46; and [against them],the workers, Communists, the poor, the peasantswho demand land, the extremist Republicans, thosein rebellion against the past.”47 While hisknowledge of contemporary Spanish politics wasimperfect, Arslan’s Islamic modernism seems tohave naturally merged with the radicalism of theSpanish non-Muslim masses.

EgyptianArabs were included in the BritishBattalion of the IB. Some hundreds of PalestinianArabs andArmenians (the latter, and perhaps someof the former, of Christian origin) joined thePalestinian Jewish majority in the Naftali BotwinCompany of the IB. Palestinian Arabs also servedin other sections of the IB, along with smallnumbers from other Arab lands. An Iraqi-American, N. Anwar, who had been a leadingfunctionary of the Syrian and Lebanese CP, foughtin the IB and joined the Spanish CP, later returningto the U.S. where he pursued his professional

career in engineering.48 In Spain, Communist andanarchist propagandists appealed to Moroccans, inthe Franco army as well as in the colony of SpanishMorocco, by describing the Islamic umma as ananti-imperialist force, much as CI supporters hadintimated at Baku in 1920.

The Palestinian Arab Communist NayatiSidki (1905-?), in Moscow when the Spanish warbegan, was sent by the CI to Spain to conductpropaganda directed at the Moroccans, andpreached, with visible success as reported by theSoviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, that thoseserving Franco were enemies of Islam. Sidki was,however, treated badly by the Spanish Communistleaders, who preferred to see all Muslims asbrethren of Franco’s Moroccan cohorts. Sidki leftSpain after realizing that only the Spanishanarchists – who, even more than the CI, viewedthe umma as a universal area of rebellion againstoppression – the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrerd’Unificació Marxista (POUM), in the militias ofwhich Orwell served, and the Catalan nationalistleft supported liberation of Spanish Morocco fromimperialist control. Sidki published a volume onthe Spanish war inArabic in Damascus in 1938, butwas excluded from the Syrian Communistmovement by its Stalinist leader, Khaled Bagdash(1912-95), who aggravated the humiliation byappropriating Sidki’s book on Spain as if it were hisown work. Sidki was the first Arabic author tocomment significantly on the wartime murder of


International Brigaders arriving in Albacete Hashim al-Atasi, President of the National Bloc on a short visit to Genevaon April 8, 1936, to meet with the Syrian-Palestinian Congress. Front row(from left to right): Ihsan al-Jabiri, unknown, Hashim al-Atasi, ShakibArslan, Saadallaah al-Jabiri. Back row (from left to right): Dr. Abd alKader al-Jabiri, Urfan al-Jabiri and Awnallah al-Jabiri.


Arabs in the Spanish Civil War CIP


Moroccan volunteers with the International Brigades

Juan Garcia Oliver, CNT militant Joaquin Maurin, Gen Sec., POUM

Andreu Nin, later co-founder of thePOUM, while in RussiaBuenaventura Durruti, CNT militant

1934, Puerto de Santa Maria prison: Generalitat government ministers: LluísCompanys, Joan Lluhí Vallescà, Joan Comorera (later Soviet agent), MartíBarrera, and Ventura Gassol, arrested after the insurrections of that year

Left, POUM leaders: Julián Gorkín (editor of the daily La Batalla, secondfrom left) and Andreu Nin (political secretary of the POUM, second fromright)



the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, whosework bears a strong Islamic stamp. Sidki composednew memoirs in Arabic between 1958 and 1975.

Some 50 to 100 Albanian IB members,representing the only Muslim-majority nation inEurope, refused assignment to the South Slavicdetachments of the IB, which were commanded bySerbian officers, and the Albanians were includedin the Italian Garibaldi Battalion. Unfortunately,the Albanians were involved in the suppression ofthe 1937 anti-Stalinist demonstrations in Barcelonaknown as the “May events,”49 recorded by Orwell.In allowing themselves to be so used, theAlbaniansmay have directed fire not only at Orwell but alsoat an Algerian anarchist, Michenet Es’said BenAmar. Bosnian, Macedonian, and other Muslimsfrom Yugoslavia, including a handful of KosovarAlbanians, for their part, had no objection toserving in the South Slav ranks of the IB. SomeTurkish citizens, who may have been eitherMuslims, Sephardic Jews, or Greek or ArmenianChristians, also enlisted in the IB.50

Soviet Communism and Muslim Liberation

MovementsThe aforementioned Shakib Arslan later becameassociated with the notorious Haj Amin Al-Husseini, installed by the British, in usurpation ofthe rights of the local ulema, as “mufti” (chiefIslamic jurist) of Jerusalem, and eventuallyemployed as an agent of Hitler’s Germany. Likeother prominent 20th century ethnic liberationmovements, Arab nationalism had two wingsbetween which it vacillated: one leaning towardsocialist anti-imperialism, the other toward the rivalimperialism of the Germans and other“revisionist”51 powers. For anticolonialistmovements in LatinAmerica, the Middle East, andthe Far East – the latter two areas including manyMuslims – German and Japanese ambitions oftenappeared to represent, rather than fascism andimperialism, a major counterweight to Britain,France, and the Netherlands. The CI, whenengaging with such movements, at first seldomintervened to support the dominance of the leftistfactions – rather, Moscow preferred the

establishment of Communist Parties that woulddraw members from or cooperate with thenationalist milieux, in the belief that, givenhistorical development, the appeal of Communismwould replace that of narrow nationalism.

Thus, the CI did not actively seek to dividethe Irish, Macedonian, Catalan, Chinese, orIndochinese national movements (except, in thelatter cases, ordering their opposition toTrotskyists). Through much of the 1930s, while onone side of the globe the Chinese Communistssought an alliance with the Guomindang, on theother the KPJ cooperated with the Croatian rightist-nationalist Ustaša. By contrast, the Zionist,Ukrainian, and other national movements withconstituencies inside the Soviet Union were targetsof extreme ideological enmity by the Sovietregime. A similar pattern is visible in the Muslimumma: Central Asian and, under Stalin, CaucasianMuslim resistance trends were subjected torepression, while the CI and the Soviet Communistleadership dealt benignly with the competing formsof Arab nationalism – perhaps also because ofSoviet anti-Jewish ideology, disguised as anaggravated anti-Zionism. The Soviet Unionsupported the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali,established by a military coup in Iraq, early in 1941– i.e. during the Hitler-Stalin pact.

With the German invasion of Russia andSoviet alliance with Britain, and then the U.S.,however, the Soviets began an accelerated programfor establishment and expansion of CommunistParties in the Arab world, with the immediate goalof countering Axis influence. In furtherance ofSoviet war aims, the French Resistance movementincluded many Arabs living in the metropole. Butsome of the new Arab Communist Parties werelargely made up of Sephardic or Italian Jews (thelatter living around the eastern Mediterranean)rather thanMuslims. In Egypt, where a CommunistParty operated briefly in the 1920s, several furtherefforts to organize a CP were fostered by the CI inthe 1930s, yet the Soviet-controlled movement wasonly effectively created during and after the secondworld war. Egypt also produced a significantTrotskyist movement.



An Egyptian Trotskyist and surrealistgroup, Art et Liberté (Art and Liberty), establishedin 1939, founded the firstArabic-language socialistnewspaper in Egypt, At-Tatawwur (Evolution).The leading personality in the group was a Copt,Georges Henein (1914-73), who remained an anti-Stalinist.52 Henein’s Cairene radical milieuoriginally included the enigmatic Henri Curiel(1914-78), a Sephardic-Italian Jew who became aprominent Egyptian Communist. Curiel was aclose relative and recruiter of the Soviet spy GeorgeBlake (b. 1922), who escaped from prison inBritain and reportedly still lives in Russia. Curieleventually served as the operational chief of Sovietclandestine operations in Europe, residing in Paris,with special connections to the Arab countries andAfrica; he was prominent in supporting theAlgerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and theAfrican National Congress (ANC) in their periodsof illegality. After his cover was “blown” in theFrench conservative weekly Le Point in 1976,Curiel was assassinated in Paris. The case has neverbeen solved.53

Perhaps because of his Coptic, i.e. ChristianOrthodox, background, Henein, remarkablyenough, perceived that a Soviet-backed revival ofPan-Slavism in 1945 had reestablished anexpansionist nationalism supported by Orthodoxyand redolent of tsarism.A direct line may be drawnbetween that 1945 development and the Sovietinvasion of Afghanistan in 1978, followed byatrocities against Balkan and Caucasian Muslims.This last phase began with the expulsion ofBulgarian Turks and compulsory Slavization ofindigenous Bulgarian Muslims in the 1980s, theincitement of the Armenians against Azerbaijanduring the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horrorssuffered by the Chechens, and the wars ofaggression against the Bosnian Muslims andMuslim-majority Kosova. In the latter cases,Russian antipathy to Balkan Muslims is visible asthis paper is completed, in the position of VladimirPutin’s regime supporting Serbia against MuslimBosnians and Kosovar independence.

Soviet activity in the Islamic umma duringand after the second world war was riven with

contradictions typical of an openly imperialist,rather than a social-revolutionary strategy. Thesedissonant elements included reinforcement of thevisible distinction between aggressive imperialismin the border nations, such as Iran,Afghanistan, andthe Muslim regions of the Caucasus and Balkans,and more cordial alliances with radical Arab statesand movements. From the Islamic viewpoint, theRussian borderlands, which suffered most fromSoviet interference, were countries in which Islamhad long overcome Christian power, and whichwere considered hereditary rivals or enemies ofSlavic Orthodox expansionism. By contrast,Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Arabsocieties included large and often prosperousOrthodox Christian minorities, giving them acertain status as allies for Russian ambitions. Thismay be one of several paradoxical explanations, inaddition to that of a greater appeal offundamentalist Islam amongArab Muslims, for therelative success of Communism per se in the non-Arab components of the umma and its generalfailure among Arabs.

The proclamation of independence byIsrael in 1948 followed the decolonization of Syriaand (imperfectly) Lebanon, both former Frenchcolonies, and was succeeded by the Free Officerscoup of Gamal Abd Al-Nasr and his comrades inEgypt. The Soviet government and the CommunistParties had temporarily supported Israel as anopponent of British influence in the Middle East,but the Soviets quickly decided that aid to theArabs was a more promising option. In addition,Zionist sentiment among Soviet Jews wasconsidered deeply threatening to Stalin’s regime.Blatantly anti-Jewish show trials were held afterthe second world war in Budapest (against LászlóRajk [1909-49] et al)54 and Prague (vs. RudolfSlánský [1901-52] et al). Venomous Judeophobiaon the pretext of anti-Zionism characterized SovietCommunist policy until the end of “really existingsocialism,” and post-Soviet Communist partiessuch as the CP of the Russian Federation (KPRF),headed by Gennady Zyuganov, have perpetuatedanti-Jewish rhetoric.

Arab components of several Communist

Soviet Communism and Muslin Lineration Movements CIP




factions in Israel gained a significant niche aspolitical representatives of the “Arab sector” inIsraeli institutions. But in Israeli Jewish life,Communism also long persisted as a powerfulforce. Communist Parties led by and recruitinglarge numbers of born Muslims burgeoned, duringthe second world war, in Iran (the Party of theMasses or Tudeh, founded in 1941, while thecountry was partitioned between the Soviet Unionand Britain) and Iraq (the Iraqi Communist Partywas originally established in 1934).

The Tudeh was a major factor in the socialagitation preceding the overthrow of MohammadMusadeq in Iran in 1953. It was banned by thegovernment of the Islamic Republic created by the1979 Revolution, and appears extremely weak,now mainly working outside the country. BecauseIran borders on Russia, and given the partition andimplantation of various pro-Soviet statelets onIranian territory (including Iranian Azerbaijan in1920-21 and 1941-46), as well as the role of thesecular and Islamic left in the KhomeiniRevolution, the history of Iranian Communism isextremely complex. At the commencement of theIranian Islamic Revolution, the Soviets wereviewed outside Iran as sympathetic to it. Comical

aspects of this emerged in Western leftist andrightist opinion; the former at first ascribed theleadership of the popular movement to the Tudeh,while the latter feared that the revolution wouldlead to Soviet control of Iranian and even Arabianenergy resources. Both proved wrong.

The Iraqi CP was a key supporter of theregime ofAbd al-Qerim Qassem in Iraq from 1958to 1963. It was ferociously repressed by theBa’athist governments that followed Qassem’soverthrow, and, in yet another Middle Easternparadox, the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam in2003 has led to its large-scale rebirth.

Elsewhere in the Muslim umma, theCommunist Party of Indonesia (PKI), originatingwith the ISDV of Sneevliet, became the world’slargest CP out of power between the achievementof Indonesian independence in 1949 and the bloodyliquidation of the party, with hundreds of thousandsof its supporters killed, in 1965. Tan Malaka, itsmost remarkable figure, was murdered in 1949.The PKI has never been restored to legality and itspresent or potential strength cannot be adequatelyassessed. It also now works mainly abroad.

A Communist Party of the Sudan wasfounded in 1946 and was a leading element in thecountry’s military government under Jaafar Al-Nimeiry, until the CP briefly overthrew the latter in1971; Al-Nimeiry was restored to rule, and the CPwas suppressed. Its current level of mass support,in the complicated environment of a country underthe failed “shariah” regime of Hassan al-Turabi,with considerable north-south and other regionalconflicts, is difficult to gauge.

In the 1950s, the three major figures in the“nonaligned bloc” of anti-colonialist statesrepresented two countries with overwhelmingMuslim majorities and one with a significantMuslim minority: Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasr ofEgypt, and Tito of Yugoslavia. Politicaldevelopment in the core Arab countries fell toNasr-style elites incapable of effecting significantsocial progress. Communist Parties continued theiractivity in Syria and Lebanon, with varyingprospects, and do so today. But fear of Nasr’s


Left to right: Hassan el-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood,assassinated ib 1949; Henri Curiel, founder of the Egyptian CommunistParty, assassinated in 1978


influence, especially after Egyptian aid proveddecisive in the liberation of Algeria, led to thecreation by Saudi Arabia of the Muslim WorldLeague (MWL) in 1962, as a buffer against Nasristexpansion. The MWL united Saudi Wahhabism,the Ikhwan ul-Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood,and Pakistani jihadists, and much later wasimportant in the organization and financing of theanti-Russian Afghan mujahidin as well as theirsuccessors in Al-Qaida.

The Indonesian bloodbath of 1965temporarily ended the period of euphoria in theIslamic wing of the anti-colonialist movement,coming, in the same year, between the overthrow ofAhmed Ben Bella, elected president of therevolutionary Algerian government, and thekidnapping and disappearance in France of MehdiBen Barka, a popular Moroccan leftist supportedby the Soviets.

Soviet Manipulation of Post-Colonial

RegimesNevertheless, the decline of Muslim revolutionaryenthusiasm was quickly followed by another phaseof Soviet manipulation, based on the expansion oftwo well-established tactics: support for Nasr andincitement against Israel. During the Khrushchevand early Brezhnev periods, the Soviet camp andthe countries friendly with or receiving substantialaid from the Soviet Union fell into three groups:

• “People’s democracies” (e.g. Bulgaria)were ruled by Communist cadres;• “National democracies on the road tosocialism” (e.g. Egypt, where Sovieteconomic and military aid and advisers

were of major importance until Nasr’sdeath), were governed by “nationalbourgeois forces;”• In countries “struggling for nationalliberation from imperialism” (includingAlgeria, Guinea, and Mali, which areMuslim in their majority), a “nationalbourgeoisie” had yet to emerge.

In a clear understanding of thiscategorization, only two criteria were applied to allsuch countries: subordination to or pronouncedsympathy with Soviet international strategy, andthe erection of single-party states.

The former South Yemen had thedistinction of being the only Arab country tobecome a fully-defined Soviet satellite, between1970 and 1990, until the state was integrated withthe Yemen Arab Republic. The Yemeni SocialistParty was recognized by Moscow as a Marxist-Leninist cadre organization. South Yemen troopswere sent to Cuba for military training, and someutilized their experience in later joining jihadistcombat elsewhere. One of the most strikingnarratives about the lives of Arab mujahidin inAfghanistan and their introduction into the 1992-95Bosnian war is that of Al-Battaar Al-Yemeni, anexample promoted in the propaganda of thePalestinian-born Abdullah Azzam (1941-89),mentor of Osama bin Laden:

“Al-Battaar was in the Communist army ofYemen and they sent him to Cuba… to train intanks. He learnt the ins-and-outs of tanks untilhe knew nearly every thing about them. Whenhe returned to Yemen, he became a goodpracticing Muslim and, instead of returning tothe Communist Army, he went to Afghanistanand fought there for some time. After that hereturned to Yemen.

Soviet Communism and Muslin Lineration Movements CIP


11 May 1958,Khosrow Roozbeh,the leader of theintelligence branchof the MilitaryOrganization of theTudeh Party, wasexecuted by a firing

squad of the Shah of Iran, who hadestablished dictatorship through the1953 CIA-SIS-backed 28 Mordadcoup d'état against the Musadeqgovernment. Refusing to beblindfolded, Roozbeh shouted to thefiring squad: "Long Live the TudehParty of Iran! Long LiveCommunism! Fire!"

Josip Broz Tito Gamal Abd Al-Nasr Sukarno



“When he heard about the Jihad inBosnia, he traveled there. He had theopportunity to go and he took it. In Bosnia, heset about training all the brothers about tanks.He taught the brothers how to lie under amoving tank, in order to build their confidencewhilst dealing with the Serb tanks on foot. Hisultimate dreamwas to take a tank in the fightingas booty (ghaneema) and use it against theenemy. He wanted to be the first one to capturea tank for the Mujahidin… the brothers caughta tank and they called him on the radio. He wasinjured in his hand at the start of the operationbut, with his hand bandaged... he did not goaway, nor did he rest but he went with his injuryback to the front line. While helping to removean injured brother from an enemy bunker, Allahtook him as shaheed [martyr for Islam] when amortar bomb exploded next to him.

“One brother… said, ‘O al-Battaar! Wedo not deserve martyrdom. We are not goodenough to be shuhadaa [plural for ‘martyrs’].”

While it is often claimed that Western support forthe Afghans fighting against Russian interventionafter 1979 enabled “blowback” with the emergenceof al-Qaida, this episode illustrates how Sovietpenetration of the Muslim world had alreadyproduced a more direct effect.55 Anterior to theemergence of the Afghan mujahidin, Westernerswere wrong in believing that the Soviets would useIran to seize control of the Persian Gulf region;rather, sudden fear in Moscow at the radical-Islamist victory in Tehran contributed to the seriesof decisions in furtherance of a SovietizedAfghanistan, which resulted in the disintegration ofthe Soviet Union.

After the 1967 Israeli-Arab war the SovietUnion reinforced its anti-Israel profile and becamea major sustainer of “rejectionist” Arab states andarmed movements such as the Palestine LiberationOrganization, Popular Front for the Liberation ofPalestine, etc. The Soviet government had alreadyextended support to the PLO at its organization in1964. All of the original Palestinian radical groupswere secularist or Marxist, with many led byChristians rather than Muslims (e.g. GeorgesHabash [1926-2008, dead as this text was written],

Wadi Haddad [1927-78], and Nayef Hawatmeh [b.in the late 1930s], all from Orthodox Christianfamily backgrounds. Hamas, the IslamicResistance Movement derived from the Palestinebranch of the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), didnot emerge as a rival to the PLO and the para-statePalestinian Authority until the 1980s.

The global radicalization of the 1960sproduced a revival of the Turkish left as well asvarious Kurdish radical groups, but in neither casedid Soviet-controlled Communists assume aprominent role, although Turkey fell into a periodof significant violence between its left and socialisttrends and the religious and nationalist right. Acompetent historiography of this phenomenon isabsent in English. Turkish secularism continues toexercise a considerable influence in the country’spolitical life, not least among Alevis, who both inTurkey itself and in the Turkish diaspora in Europeare markedly oriented toward the radical left.56 Inthe same region, Greek governments after 1974participated in the “Orthodox alliance” with theSoviets by opposing U.S. influence in the easternMediterranean, but also assisted the Palestinians aswell as Kurdish radicals. Ex-Yugoslavia providedguerrilla training of Palestinians, while the formerCommunist regime in Romania did the same forthe Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).

The narrative of Al-Battaar Al-Yemeniindicates the single most important fact about thelink between Communism and Islam in the 20thcentury: the complete collapse of Soviet policy,and even of the Soviet social system, following theadventure initiated in Kabul by Leonid Brezhnev.This penultimate chapter in Soviet history began ata moment when, late in the day as it was for theLeninist system, Communism seemed solidlyestablished as a permanent element of the globalpolitical landscape. If anything, the Russiansappeared to have tipped the worldwide balance offorces decisively to their advantage when theirVietnamese clients harried the U.S. and its alliesout of Southeast Asia. Yet at the same time theinternal crisis of the Soviet system advanced,largely misunderstood in the West, through the1970s. The Russian Communists would soon be



compelled to find an internal enemy that could bemanipulated to unify their people and an externaltarget against whom tomobilize their Slav subjects.The “new” foe was the same both within andwithout: Islam.

No sooner had they gained an impressiveapparent victory over the West in Indochina thanthe Communist ship ran aground on the shoals ofhistory. The year 1978 included three decisiveindicators of the future: the seizure of power inKabul by Nur Muhammad Taraki (1913-79), aliterary figure and leader of the People’sDemocratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in April,the commencement of the final agony of theIranian monarchist regime with bloody repressionof student demonstrations in September, and theelection of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, to the Romanpapacy, in October. Each of the three countries inwhich these dramatic events were focussedbordered the Soviet Union, and each had played aspecial role in Communist international politics.Further, each of these states saw events in 1978 thatwere, or appeared, shockingly novel to the world.

Afghanistan had long been considered azone in which Soviet andWestern power competedfor influence, but was the first country to undergoan open Communist coup since the immediateaftermath of the second world war. Unlike Cubaand South Yemen, as well as the later Soviet andCuban satellites in Ethiopia, Guiné-Bissau,Angola,Moçambique, Grenada, and Nicaragua,Afghanistan under the PDPA attempted to leapahead of the usual progression of widening Sovietinfluence. Taraki sought to move from the typical

Soviet-defined position for a country likeAfghanistan, as “struggling for national liberationfrom imperialism” to a full-fledged “people’sdemocracy.” This radical attitude would undermineMuscovite confidence in the rule of Taraki and hisclose comrade Hafizullah Amin (1929-79). Aminwrote incoherently but insightfully:

“If we had waited to follow the same classpattern of working-class revolution through anational democratic bourgeoisie, then we wouldhave followed such a long and thorny road thatit would have required not only years butcenturies.”57

As the same time, it is believed by some that theSoviets had found “national liberation” leadersimitating Nasr unreliable and had decided to returnto a policy of activist intervention by Leninistparties.

The Iranian exploits of the Tudeh in 1953were then still well-remembered, but the IslamicRevolution completely transformed the globalpolitical sensibility of the Muslim umma. Thereassertion of nationalism in Poland in 1956 hadinaugurated the long transition or “de-Stalinization” in the East European people’srepublics, delayed in the aftermath of the Tito splitin 1948 and suppression of the East Berlin laboruprising in 1953. And Wojtyla was the first non-Italian to be elected Pope since the 16th century.Moscow was therefore beset on its frontiers byunpredictable phenomena: the Marxist radicalismof Taraki, who removed his Soviet-subsidized but“neutral” predecessor, Muhammad Daud Khan; the

Soviet Manipulation of Post-Colonial Regimes CIP


Mujahideen, Kunar province. 1985 PKK women guerrilla fighters, Kurdistan



appearance of an incomprehensibly new ideologyin Iran, and the rebirth of a Poland that, a traditionalfoe of Russian power, was inspirited by theunexpected global importance granted it byWojtyla’s ascension to the throne of Peter.

The PDPA, which was less than 15 yearsold in 1978, was split between ethnic and classfactions: the Khalq or “Masses” tendency led byTaraki and HafizullahAmin, made up of rural, poorPashtuns, and the Parcham or “Banner” groupingunder Babrak Karmal (1929-96), associated withurbanized, elite speakers of Dari, a dialect of Farsi.Hafizullah Amin has been widely described as thereal power behind Taraki. Khalqi-Parchami rivalrywas so extreme that it often veered toward, andlater was expressed in, outright intraparty violence.The Khalqis, as illustrated by the previous citationfrom Hafizullah Amin, were notable in their zealfor social reorganization, and their immediatemeasures included adoption of the title“Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,” with astartling Communist-style red national flag,hostility to Islamic religiosity and customary habitsin one of the least-developed and most tribalsocieties in the world, and recourse to brutalrepression, including executions. It is lessparadoxical than illustrative that the Stalinist PDPAof Taraki was more radical in its approach toAfghanistan in the late 1970s than the BolsheviksIlyin-Raskolnikov and Reisner had been insupportingAmanullah Khan during the great age ofLeninism. (Ilyin-Raskolnikov himself had becomea near-Trotskyist by 1937 and was probablyassassinated by NKVD agents in 1939 after hisdismissal from a post as Soviet ambassador toBulgaria.) The Taraki regime proved brief induration; in September 1979 Taraki wasoverthrown and killed by his fellow-Khalqi,Hafizullah Amin. But the Afghan peasants werealready deeply disaffected with the new regime,and the mujahidin had begun combat against theSoviet-style modernization of the country.

At the end of 1979, Hafizullah Amin waskilled in turn, as Russian troops marched intoKabul and installed the ParchamiKarmal in power.Moscow appeared to have become especially

alarmed by events in Iran, where Khomeini hadbeen carried into the summits of authority after theflight of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Parchamis weresaid to be more moderate in their attitude towardIslam than their Khalqi victims, but the arrival ofKarmal was insufficient to calm the mujahidin,whose ranks had swelled as Afghan refugeespoured into Pakistan, where they were organizedand armed, soon with the generous support of theU.S. and Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was, in acertain sense, a parallel to Poland, in its capacity toresist Russian subjugation, althoughAfghan culturewas Islamic and, by comparison with that of thePoles, unworldly. Both the Poles and Afghanswere, nevertheless, imbued with sentiments ofineluctably intense religious duty in defying Sovietpower.

For that reason alone, Afghanistan couldnot be stabilized as a Soviet possession. Karmalhanded over power to Muhammad Najibullah(1947-96), a Parchami Pashtun, in 1986, but theSoviet order in Afghanistan was doomed. ThePDPA changed its name to the Party of the Nation(Hizb-i Watan) and Najibullah went even furtherthan Karmal in seeking to appease Islamicresistance to the Soviet-backed government. By1987, however, Mikhail Gorbachov had decided onthe withdrawal of Russian troops fromAfghanistan. Yet Russian military and financialassistance to Najibullah continued until 1990,fighting the Khalqis as well as the divided (andtherefore often weak) mujahidin. Najibullah’sgovernment outlasted that of Gorbachov; the latteroversaw the Soviet state until its definitivebreakdown in autumn 1991, while Najibullah heldon to power for a half-year more, resigning inApril1992. The revolutionary regime in Afghanistan,with its bloody, gangster-style quarrels andeventual replacement by the fundamentalistTaliban, represents the most ignominious andsqualid chapter in the history of Sovietexpansionism, and expresses the utter decadence ofthe Leninist system.

It is seldom noted that “blowback” from theSoviet incursion into Afghanistan producedsomething new in Soviet history. It provoked



Muslim opposition to Moscow in Soviet Muslimrepublics such as Uzbekistan, from which armyconscripts were sent toAfghanistan to fight, as wellas leading to interference with the Chechens andother oppressed Muslim nationalities of theCaucasus by “Arab Afghans” – i.e., jihadistvolunteers from Arab countries that had joined theAfghan resistance. The Afghan war wrecked anycredibility the Soviets had gained in the umma,devastated the Soviet system, and convinced thejihadists that, having destroyed the world’s secondleading political power, the combat capacity of the“Islamic awakening” could not be restricted.

Concluding ObservationsConcluding considerations have more to do withthe character of radical Islam than of Communism.With the collapse of Soviet Communism, manyacademics, intellectuals, and political or mediafigures worldwide have alleged that the U.S.“needs” jihadism as a “necessary enemy,” fillingthe role formerly occupied by the Communistmovement. The argument is much more accuratewhen applied to Russian, post-Communist politics.Similarly, some analysts interpret jihadism as aform of social protest, based in the economicproblems of the Muslim countries. Much Westerndiscussion of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhoodtypifies this attitude. In my view it is moreappropriate to describe the present-day convulsionsin the Muslim world as products of inevitablemodernization and development, and jihadistmovements as reactionary phenomena comparableto the Black Hundreds in tsarist Russia. I havewritten at some length on “Islamofascism” as thebest construct for understanding jihadism.58

One movement that has embraced a“theoretical” and currently non-violent jihad, theHizb-ut-Tahrir (HuT) or Islamic Liberation Party,was founded by the Palestinian Taqi’ud’din Al-Nabhani (1909-77), and is banned in somecountries, but has focused a serious effort in ex-Soviet Uzbekistan and its neighbors. HuT calls forestablishment of a global Islamic khilafah orcaliphate, in a manner that seems to promise ex-Soviet Muslims a new social system that would

restore or improve public benefits, includingpermanent employment, state-subsidizededucation, and free health care as provided underthe Soviet regime.Above all, a new khilafahwouldallegedly save the Muslims from the post-Sovietinsecurity of globalization. HuT employs arevolutionary vocabulary, organizes according tothe traditional conspiratorial cell system, and hasapparently attracted to its ranks some Westernleftists who became Muslim. It is perhaps the onlyphenomenon to have effectively merged Islam andthe legacy of Communism, notwithstanding itsferocious denunciation of the former atheist regimein Russia.

In a parallel fashion, Central Asian post-Soviet allies of Vladimir Putin such as IslomKarimov in Uzbekistan have replaced the Leninistcult of rulership with a similar exaltation of Islamicfigures such as the 9th century religious scholarImam Bukhari, and the Sufi Bahaud’dinNaqshband and the rulerAmir Timur (known to theWest as Tamerlane), both of whom lived in the 14thcentury. But while Karimov has maintained thepattern of governance of Soviet Communism,including a one-party state, controlled media, apervasive police surveillance, and bloodyrepression of dissidents, his government embracesneither a revolutionary ideology, nor a socialistprogram, nor internationalism of either the pan-Islamic or Soviet type. The samemodel is visible inTurkmenistan andAzerbaijan, to a greater or lesserdegree, and, more benevolently, in Kazakhstan.Tajikistan and Kyrgyzia, among the former SovietMuslim republics, have made significant stepstoward authenticdemocratization – the formerafter a war with Islamistradicals, the latter followingthe “Tulip Revolution” in2005.

After almost threedecades, marked by conflictsin Afghanistan, the Caucasus,and the Balkans, the majorityof Muslim believers aroundthe world despise anythingassociated with Communism.In this regard, the hopes

Concluding Observations CIP




expressed at the 1920 Baku Conference haveresulted in total failure. With political changeadvancing in countries as diverse as Turkey, Iran,and SaudiArabia, wemay anticipate the emergenceof an entirely new intellectual-religious “left” in theMuslim umma. But we must also expect that therise of Putin may render the conflict between theWest and radical Islam merely episodic, and returnthe globe to a polarization between the West andthe Russian empire. In such a context, the history ofCommunism as an expression of Russianambitions would, along with the relations betweenCommunism and Islam, be irrelevant except tospecialists.

* * *

NOTES

1 A remarkable expression of the memory of Muslimpopular social radicalism, transformed into literature, isprovided by the novel The Fortress (Tvrđava), by theBosnian Muslim author Meša Selimović (1910-82), setin Bosnia in the 18th century. Originally published inex-Yugoslavia in 1970, The Fortress, tr. by E.D. Goyand Jasna Levinger-Goy, Evanston, NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1999; Tvrđava has also beentranslated into French and Italian. The better-knownwork of Selimović, Derviš i smrt (The Dervish andDeath), originally pub. in 1966, has been translated intoGerman.2 Massignon, Louis, Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr,Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1994.3 On Hallaj, Massignon, and Durán, see my volumesThe Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to GlobalHarmony, New York, Doubleday, 2008, and The TwoFaces of Islam, New York, Doubleday, 2002.4 “Libertarian” is employed in its original sense offreedom-loving or anarchist, rather than in the narroweconomic context the term has acquired in the U.S. andother Western countries.5 TheWine of Love: Mystical Poetry of ImāmKhomeinī,tr. by Ghulām-Ridā A’wani and MuhammadLegenhausen, Tehran, Institute for Compilation andPublication of Imām Khomeinī’s Works, 2003. p. 53.The cited verse is adapted by Stephen Schwartz..6 Ample literature is available, in many languages, on19th century Salafism, which should not be confusedwith the assumption of the term “Salafi” by SunniMuslim fundamentalists, including SaudiWahhabis, theEgyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan), Pakistanijihadists, and the Taliban, at the end of the 20th century

and beginning of the 21st. This latter-daydisinformation has become extremely troublesome forexperts on Islam as well as observers of radical Islamistideology and extremism. In addition, the very conceptof “Salafism,” based on an equation of recentinterpretations with the original Islam of the ProphetMuhammad (saws), his Companions, and the firstgenerations of his successors, is anathema to traditionalMuslim scholars as an impermissible innovation inreligion or bid’a. This opinion holds that nocontemporary individual should be compared with theProphet, the Companions, the four Righteous Caliphswho succeeded him, or the early Islamic jurists andother scholars. A useful volume on the 19th centurySalafis is Weismann, Itzchak, Taste of Modernity:Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late OttomanDamascus, Leiden, Brill, 2001.7An important and neglected source on theYoung Turkmovement and the transformation of the Ottomandominions is The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal Bey, ed.Somerville Story, London, Constable, 1920. IsmailKemal Bey, also known as Ismail Qemali, was anAlbanian who assumed a leading role both in Ottomandiplomacy and in the Albanian national movement.8 See Khlevniuk, Oleg V. In Stalin’s Shadow: TheCareer of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, Armonk, NY, M.E.Sharpe, 1995, p. 10.9 See Rakovsky, Christian, “The Turkish Revolution”,originally published in French onAugust 1, 1908. Tr. byTed Crawford and included in The Balkan SocialistTradition, special issue of Revolutionary History(London), 2003, p. 106. The latter extensive andgarrulous collection is marred by its attempted defenseof Serbian aggression in Kosova in 1998-99.10 Lenin, V.I., “Inflammable Material in WorldPolitics,” in Collected Works, Moscow, ProgressPublishers, 1973, v. 15, pp. 182-188.11 Lenin, V.I., “The Foreign Policy of the RussianRevolution,” in Collected Works, Moscow, ProgressPublishers, 1977, v. 25, pp. 85-87. Also see James,C.L.R.,World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fallof the Communist International, London,M. Secker andWarburg, 1937, pp. 62-63.12 For example, while Albanophone Sunni clerics inMacedonia oppose and refuse any recognition of theIslamic identity of the Bektashis, the Sunni clergy ofAlbania proper maintain official, friendly relations withthem. In Kosova, Sunni-Bektashi relations areambivalent, notwithstanding the leading role ofBektashis in the Kosovar struggle against Serbia. In the



Albanian diaspora, Sunni and Bektashi clerics maintaina cordial attitude of cooperation.

On Bektashism in the evolution of the Turkishrepublic, Küçük, Hülya, The Role of the Bektashis inTurkey’s National Struggle, Leiden, Brill, 2002. OnBektashism in Albania, see my book The Other Islam(note 2.) Although a significant corpus of scholarlyliterature on Bektashism has appeared in English,French, and other languages in recent decades, mostauthoritative works on Bektashism remain availableonly in Albanian, and are as yet untranslated. Volumes(listed in chronological order of publication) such asPopovic, Alexandre and Gilles Veinstein, eds.,“Bektachiyya,” Revue des Études Islamiques [Paris],1992; Mélikoff, Irène, Hadji Bektach: un mythe et sesavatars, Leiden, Brill, 1998, and Bougarel, Xavier, andNathalie Clayer, Le Nouvel Islam balkanique, Paris,Maisonneuve & Larosse, 2001 are seriously flawed. bytheir authors’ general lack of thorough knowledge ofAlbanian language, culture, and history. The volume ofBougarel and Clayer is also markedly Islamophobic.13 Sijes, B.A., De Februari-staking (The FebruaryStrike), Amsterdam, H.J.W. Becht, [1978]. One of fewvaluable sources in English on Sneevliet is Poretsky,Elisabeth, Our Own People, Ann Arbor, University ofMichigan Press, 1970. Poretsky’s work is a memoir ofher husband, the defected and assassinated Soviet secretagent Ignacy Porecki-Reiss (1899-1937), who wasassociated with Sneevliet when he turned againstStalinism. Sneevliet is also discussed in works on thehistory of Chinese Communism and in the post-exilewritings of Trotsky.14 Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, tr. by Helen Jarvis,Athens, Ohio University, 1991, p. 92. Althoughsupportive of pan-Islamism, Tan Malaka himself wasmore sympathetic to a southeast Asian revolutionismembracing Pilipinos and Chinese along withIndonesians and other Malays. He acquired a Trotskyistreputation although there is no evidence he was everinvolved with the Trotskyists, or that Trotsky was awareof him.15 Congress of the Peoples of the East – Baku,September 1920, Stenographic Report, tr. by BrianPearce, London, New Park Publications, 1977, p. 41.Originally published in Russian, Petrograd, PublishingHouse of the CI, 1920.16 Riazanov, D.B. Marx and Anglo-Russian RelationsAnd Other Writings, tr. by Brian Pearce, London,Francis Boutle, 2003.17 Trotsky, Leon, The War Correspondence: The

Balkan Wars 1912-13, Monad Press, New York, 1980.18 Tucović, Dimitrije, et. al., Srbija i Albanci, PregledPolitike Srbije Prema Albancima od 1878 do 1914Godine (Serbia and the Albanians, An Examination ofthe Policy of Serbia Toward Albanians from 1878 to1914), published by Časopis za kritiko znanosti,Ljubljana, 1989. This collection includes texts ofTucović, Dušan Popović, and Dragiša Lapčević citedhere.19 Cohen, Mark, Last Century of a SephardicCommunity: The Jews of Monastir, 1839-1943, NewYork, Foundation for the Advancement of SephardicStudies and Culture, 2003. Another useful volume onthis topic is Lebel, Jennie, Tide and Wreck: History ofthe Jews of Vardar Macedonia, tr. from Serbian by PaulMunch, Bergenfield, New Jersey, Avotaynu, 2008.20 Durham, Edith, Albania and the Albanians, London,Centre for Albanian Studies, 2001.21 Trotsky, Leon, The Balkan Wars, op. cit., pp. 285-286.22 Ibid, pp. 287-295..23 Tucović, Dimitrije, “Serbia and Albania,” in TheBalkan Socialist Tradition, special issue ofRevolutionary History, periodical cit., p. 225.24 See Novaković, Kosta, “The Colonization andSerbianization of Kosova,” Liria Kombëtare (Geneva),July 13, 1931. Cited in Schwartz, Stephen, Kosova:Background to a War, London, Anthem Press, 2000, p.55.25On the Serbian Social Democrats, KosovarAlbanianrevolutionaries, the Macedonian revolutionarymovement, and the KPJ, Banac, Ivo, The NationalQuestion in Yugoslavia, Ithaca, Cornell U.P., 1988, theoutstanding work on the topic. An important volume onSoviet and CI attitudes toward Albanians, includingKosovars, in the 1920s as well as during theconsolidation of the regimes of J.B. Tito and EnverHoxha, is Lauka, Islam and Eshref Ymeri, Shqipëria nëDokumentet e Arkivave Ruse (Albania in Documentsfrom the Russian Archives), Tirana, Botimet Toena,2006. Also see my article, “Enverists’ and ‘Titoists:’Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova, 1941-1999: From the Partisan Movement of the SecondWorld War to the Kosova Liberation War,” in TheJournal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics,special issue on Muslims and Communists, March2009.26 Banac, Ivo, With Stalin Against Tito, Ithaca, CornellUniversity Press, 1988, p. 64.27 Schwartz, Stephen, “Ante Ciliga: 1898-1992,”

Notes CIP




Journal of Croatian Studies (NewYork), 1992; publishedin Croatian as “Ante Ciliga (1898-1992): Život nopovijesnim raskrižjima,” in Društvena Istraživanja(Zagreb), number 2-3, 1995. The English version isaccessible at www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/[reviewedJanuary 2008].28 Borkenau, Franz, The Communist International,London, Faber & Faber, 1938, pp. 293-294.29 Ghazawat meaning “raiding,” rather than jihad(effort), is the standard Islamic term for wars ofconquest.30 Congress of the Peoples of the East – Baku,September 1920, Stenographic Report, op. cit., p. 67.31 Ibid., p. 167.32 Serge, Victor, Witness to the German Revolution, tr.Ian Birchall, London, Redwords, 2000. p. 34.33 Serge, ibid.34 Porter, Cathy, Larissa Reisner, London, Virago,1988, p. 11635 Porter, Cathy, ibid, pp. 118-120.36 Reisner, Larisa,Gamburg na barrikadakh, a classic inthe bibliography of the CI, tr. by Richard Chappell, asLarissa Reisner, Hamburg at the Barricades and OtherWritings on Weimar Germany, London, Pluto Press,1977.37 Schwartz, Stephen, “Ante Ciliga: 1898-1992”, op.cit.,p. 19138 Platonov, Andrei, The Fierce and Beautiful World., tr.Joseph Barnes, New York, Dutton, 1970.39 Kolarz, Walter, Russia and Her Colonies, New York,Praeger, 1952, p. 297.40 See my Two Faces of Islam, op. cit.41 Kistenmacher, Olaf, “From ‘Jewish Capital’ to the‘Jewish-Fascist Legion in Jerusalem’: The Developmentof Antizionism in the German Communist Party (KPD)in the Weimar Republic, 1925-1933,” published by theonline journal Engage, issues 2 and 3, May andSeptember 2006, accessible atwww.engageonline.org.uk/journal/ [reviewed January2008].42 Messali Hadj, “Response to M. Deloche ofl’Humanité” (1937), in Messali Hadj par les textes, ed.Jacques Simon. Algiers-Paris, Editions Bouchéne, 2000,tr. by Mitch Abidor, accessible in English atwww.marxists.org/archive/messali-hadj[reviewedJanuary 2008]. Trotskyists were also notably active andprominent in French-occupied Vietnam and British-controlled Sri Lanka (then-Ceylon), and supported theindependence movement in the U.S. possession of PuertoRico.

43 See Sánchez Ruano, Francisco, Islam y Guerra CivilEspañola, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2004. Thisvolume is ample but must be used with caution when itsauthor strays from Spanish, Moroccan, and Frenchmatters.An earlier and tendentious work that nonethelessconfirms the statistical level of participation of NorthAfrican Arabs as fighters for the Spanish Republic isBensalem, Abdellatif, “Los Voluntarios Arabes en lasBrigadas Internacionales (España, 1936-39),” Revistainternacional de sociología [Madrid], October-December 1988.44 Cleveland, William L., Islam Against the West,Austin, U. of Texas P., 1985, is a biography of ShakibArslan, but treats Messali Hadj superficially andspeculatively.45 Notwithstanding contemporary reportage, themajority of Spanish military professionals honored theiroaths to the Republican regime, and did not join theFranco insurrection.46 Very few moderate Republicans sided with theFrancoists in the Spanish war.47Arslan, Shakib, quoted inAlonso, N. Paradela, El otrolaberinto español: Viajeros arabes a España entre elsiglo XVII y 1936, Madrid, UAM, 1993.48 Sánchez Ruano, op. cit.49 On Albanians in the IB, see Uli, Prenk, and QemalSarajeva, Asim Vokshi, Tirana, “8 Nentori,” 1982. Theirexperience is also evoked in a popular novel, Hasta laVista by PetroMarko (1913-91), first published in Tirana,Ndërmarrja Shtetërore e Botimeve, 1958. Marko wasjailed under the Enver Hoxha regime in the late 1940s.He is considered a major Albanian modernist and Hastala Vista has remained in print. According to theAlbanologist Robert Elsie, writing in AlbanianLiterature: A Short History, London, I.B. Tauris, 2005,the leading Albanian poet Migjeni (Millosh GjergjNikolla, 1911-38), who was of Slav ethnic origin and hadTrotskyist associations, also wanted to go to Spain tofight but was prevented from doing so by his acutetubercular condition, which led to his early death.Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, describing the “Mayevents” in Barcelona, is a modern classic available inmany languages.50 Kapor, Čedo, Za Mir i Progres u Svijetu (For WorldPeace and Progress), Sarajevo, Sarajevska SkupštinaMeđunarodnih Dobrovoljaca Slobode 1936-39, 1999,includes a list of several hundred Yugoslav veterans ofthe Spanish war, including both Slavic Muslim andethnic Albanian names.51 I.e. “revisionist” in the sense of revision of the global



Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, describing the “Mayevents” in Barcelona, is a modern classic available inmany languages.50 Kapor, Čedo, Za Mir i Progres u Svijetu (For WorldPeace and Progress), Sarajevo, Sarajevska SkupštinaMeđunarodnih Dobrovoljaca Slobode 1936-39, 1999,includes a list of several hundred Yugoslav veterans ofthe Spanish war, including both Slavic Muslim andethnic Albanian names.51 I.e. “revisionist” in the sense of revision of the globalorder after the first world war, rather than of Bernsteinianreformist Marxism, or as the term was applied by theMaoist Chinese against Moscow after 1960.52 On Henein, see Renton, David, Dissident Marxism,London, Zed Books, 2004.53 On Curiel, see Breytenbach, Breyten, The TrueConfessions of an Albino Terrorist, New York, FarrarStraus and Giroux, 1985, and Schwartz, Stephen,Intellectuals and Assassins, London, Anthem Press,2000. Curiel’s papers are held at the InternationalInstitute for Social History in Amsterdam, with usefulnotes accessible at www.iisg.nl/publications.54 Rajk was not Jewish. A fresh review of the Rajk trial

is included in Schwartz, Stephen, Sarajevo Rose: ABalkan Jewish Notebook, London, Saqi Books and TheBosnian Institute, 2005. Bosnian translation: SarajevskaRuža: Bilješke o Jevrejima na Balkanu, Sarajevo, Tugra,2006.55 This text is unsigned but originated with AzzamPublications, the primary global jihadist propagandaagency prior to the events of 11 September 2001, andremains accessible at www.as-sahwah.com/ [reviewedJanuary 2008].56Auseful ethnographic study of present-dayAlevism inGermany is Sökefeld, Martin, Struggling forRecognition: The Alevi Movement in Germany and inTransnational Space, New York and Oxford, 2008. Alsosee the important work by Vermeulen, Floris F., TheImmigrant Organising Process, Amsterdam, AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2006.57 Ewans, Martin, Afghanistan: A Short History of ItsPeople and Its Politics, New York, HarperCollins, 2002.Notwithstanding its considerable importance as apolitical event, the history of pro-Soviet rule inAfghanistan remains poorly documented.58 See my The Two Faces of Islam, op. cit.

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‘Green, how I love you, green! Green wind. Green branches. The ship on thesea and the horse on the mountain.”Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 - 1936)— from the poem "Romance Sonambulo"

Oil on canvas, by Emily Tarleton

Islam&Com-p1-4.pdf 15/6/09 23:57:34 - 29 - (Cyan)Islam&Com-p1-4.pdf 15/6/09 23:57:34 - 29 - (Magenta)Islam&Com-p1-4.pdf 15/6/09 23:57:34 - 29 - (Yellow)Islam&Com-p1-4.pdf 15/6/09 23:57:34 - 29 - (BlacK)

OBEY YOUR COUNTRY’S LAWS!Marje Sistani urges Muslims in West

By Mohamed Ali

MONTREAL, Canada: Iraq's Al-Marje Al-Alaa Ali Sistani sent a message

to Muslims in Western nations, urging them to obey the laws of the

countries in which they live.

The fatwa was delivered at a Montreal news conference of

prominent Shia Muslims on behalf of Ayatullah Sayyed Ali As-Sistani.

"Muslims have undertaken to obey the laws of the country of their

residence and thus they must be faithful to that undertaking," the

statement read.

It condemned all acts of violence and encouraged imams to keep

a watchful eye on what's going on inside their mosques.

Centre for Islamic Pluralism (CIP)

BM 2394, London, WC1N 3XX, UK

1718 M Street NW #260, Washington, DC 20036, USAISBN 978-0-9558779-3-3

C IPCentre for Islamic Pluralism

2009


CIP - Center for Islamic Pluralism · ISLAM and COMMUNISM by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz 2009 CIP...

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