[Marxism] Samir Amin: Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism

[Haines Brown]

As Amin himself admits, it is difficult to dismiss political Islam,
for it does in fact mobilize significant numbers of people. And he is
surely right as well that mass mobilization can be for good or
ill. But I must disagree with him that the Left would be wise to
distance itself from political Islam.

A regret for the amalgam of religious values and politics that was
supposedly challenged by the European Enlightenment was indeed once a
mark of political reaction, but should we therefor infer that any such
association is reactionary? I don't think so.

What is religion? Well, a snap, informal and casual reply might be
that it is adherence to values that transcend actual circumstances. If
so, those values can surely be progressive as well as reactionary. And
this is complicated by the fact that a fondness for past values can
serve progressive struggle, just as an appeal to an ideal future can
serve reactionary ends.

Marxism avoids this complexity and ambivalence by representing what
transcends circumstance as a material power existing in the present,
not as a set of ideas drawn from the past or looking to the future. By
represnting the matter in terms of empirical distinctions such as the
values and practices peculiar to Islam, Amin dismisses political Islam
and the very possibility of working-class solidarity even before he
begins.

Just in terms of thought, how can a separation of transcending values
and actual circumstances (as pushed in the Enlightenment) be anything
but reactionary, for then there is no basis upon which to launch a
critique of the present? However, the Enlightenment didn't really do
this. It did not attack religious faith so much as the the privileges
of the religious institution. It proposed a metaphysic that had no
more material basis than religious values, which it called "human
nature". This provided a needed ideological support for its
revolutionary objective, but it was not the source of revolutionary
power. The Enlightenment was progressive, not because it somehow
managed to escape idealism, which it (generally) didn't, but because
it targeted the actual institutions of class power.

It is true, I suppose, that the contested terrain in the case of Islam
entails a sectarian religiosity, which obviously is not universal and
therefore not progressive. But there's danger of allowing the form of
political Islam (and Christian Evangelism, for that matter) to obscure
the content. Behind the form is a desire to actualize the human
potential for a constructive sociability. If we are indeed social
beings, social values become part of our nature, and engaging them is
the way to achieve personal development. At bottom, working-class
struggle in Western terms is a struggle to actualize our social being
and therefore is not fundamentally different than the social
revivalism that is sought in Islam. The forms are different, but the
substance usually much the same.

We can't ignore here the danger of a corporatism that subsumes the
individual under the social whole. In politics, we call this
fascism. The Marxist notion of social being presents the person as a
process that is at once individual and social, and in terms of it, any
such subsumption of the individual would be perverted. Why assume that
Islam is indifferent to individual development and subsume the
individual under the social whole? If the aim is the development of
the social individual, then the Left and political Islamicists should
be able to communicate and offer mutual criticism. A religious
fundamentalism falls short being universal in any material sense, but
it can criticize the working-class struggle for being too narrowly
focused on the economic struggle of the industrial proletariat.

Amin points out:

> On the terrain of the real social issues, political Islam aligns
> itself with the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant
> imperialism. It defends the principle of the sacred character of
> property and legitimizes inequality and all the requirements of
> capitalist reproduction.

I'm afraid this is often the case. But hasn't the labor movement in
the West been too closely tied to imperialism? Yes, there is a sector
of the labor movement that is not, but there is a sector in Islam that
is not as well (the Sufi movement, for example). There is a danger
that a self-appointed elite in one movement passes judgement on the
general behavior of the other movement. Both are imperfect, and it
would be counterproductive to be judgemental as a way to promiote
one's own vision. Social solidarity of the working class is such an
obviously important goal that for each side to dismiss the other
because it is less than universal would be self-defeating. Unity need
not be uncritical, but it can prevail despite our shortcomings and
differences of opinoion if it arises from real solidarity in the
struggle for progress.

The Marxist notion of class is a relation of production, which is a
causal relation of a person and the potential for his development. The
Marxist notion of class defined in terms of a causal relation escapes
the empiricist definition based on shared characteristics. These
empirical characteristics in Marxist terms are only _constraints_ on
the probability distribution of possible class identity. Put in
simpler terms, specific ideas or values should not divide the working
class which has no way to develop other than engaging the social other
and then deal with differences on the basis of real solidarity. To
dismiss political Islam because one disagrees with some of its views
or social practices is to shoot oneself in the foot.

I can't extend this commentary much longer by countering each of
Amin's particular points, but hopefully I've made my position clear in
principle. The Left in the West is heir of a century of ideological
struggle. I'm not inclined to dismiss it as an unfortunate distraction
or being pointless as some are inclined to do. However, the important
thing is that these debates should not be understood as a battle over
ideas, but as an ideological reflection of material circumstances and
its contradictions. Today our material circumstance is the global
working class (which includes more Moslems than Christians), and the
only way we as individuals can develop is through solidarity with the
global working class.

Islam is not some kind of alien faith, but is what we essentially are;
it is us. It represents our human powers, even if we are not Moslem or
even religious. Even if a struggle for human development is
accompanied by social practices of which we can't approve, we have no
choice but to engage that struggle. To object to the treatment of
women, for example, even though the criticism may be just, is to allow
form to obvscure substance. It is likely to impose our judgement upon
a society in terms of values that most in that society would resent
and not understand. Solidarity must come first; mutual criticsm only
then can be constructive rather than divisive.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM