Rev Left Radio - Islam and Marxism: A Brief Introduction

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Professor of Medieval history, practicing Sufi Muslim, and Chair of the Religious Studies department at Queens college, Adnan Husain, joins Breht to discuss the interesting intersections of Islam and Marxism!   Outro music: "Ramadan" by Brother Ali   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on the show my good friend and co-host of guerrilla history, Adnan Hussein. And today we're going to be talking about the relationship between Islam and Marxism. Long-time listeners of the show will know this is something I'm interested in. I have many episodes discussing variations of the Revolutionary Left and different religious traditions. I myself have hopefully done some worthwhile work on the Buddhist front and dialectical materialism. We've had on Christians. We've done an episode with Adnan on St. Francis, which was very well received and still one of those episodes I'm very proud of.

And so I want to continue doing this. I don't see it happen a lot on the Marxist left. And I think I find these conversations fruitful and interesting, even if you walk away disagreeing with some core arguments made by me or my guess. I think it's a worthwhile endeavor. So, Adnan, for the two or three people out there who don't know who you are, you just want to give a quick introduction to who you are? Sure, and it's great to be back in conversation with you on RevLeft. Of course, we enjoy our conversations on guerrilla history, but I really also like these opportunities to really think about religion, spirituality, and the Marxist communist traditions. I'm a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

And I also direct the School of Religion. So obviously I'm interested in interreligious relations historically. And yeah, that's really the kind of stuff I work on Muslim Christian Jewish interactions in the medieval world. Cool. Yeah. Could not ask for a. better guest, even if I didn't know you personally, which I do, so that makes you even a better guest. But let's go ahead and get into it. The place I want to start is sort of your personal

experiences. So, I mean, I know you came from an Islamic family, but maybe you can talk about your experiences with both Islam, how you got into it. I mean, often, even as children, we take up the religion that we're born into, but as adults, we actually analyze it and come to a new, more mature relationship with it. So perhaps you could touch on that. And then your relationship and how you got into Marxism politically. Yeah, okay, that's a great question. It's maybe a bit of a mystery to me to really figure out because both parts feel very natural to me

and relate well to one another. But if I think about it, my experience, of course, as you've already alluded, you know, with Islam comes from my family background. my parents were from different parts of the Middle East didn't have language in common really besides English and they're from different cultures so in some ways Islam was the common ground

and was what was most emphasized as the core of our identity so I grew up in a religious household but I think the particular feature that's been important influential for me in addition to broadly just kind of regular Sunni practice is the tradition of Sufism or the Islamic virtual orientation. And we've talked about

Sufism as on Rev Left before. So I came from this particular sort of orientation. And I think I saw in my mother's practice a real concern for service to others. And as part of orientation, what she understood and Islam to mean was standing for justice and serving others. And those two core principles are things I really see as rooted in Islam and in particular in the spiritual orientation. And when it comes to Marxism, a friend of mine once said, I think, that, you know, if Marx hadn't developed his ideas, we would have had to have invented. It, you know, I really feel that there's something to that, that quite apart from the specifics of his theory and analysis of capitalism, his particular theory of history, his arguments in favor of dialectical materialism, the fundamental process of ethics, of responding to that feeling equality among humanity, and seeking a just, fairer, equitable world is just something that's a core ethical commitment

that regardless of whether you want to think of it as Marxism or other ideologies of liberation, there's just something fundamentally true, it seems to me, and has always seemed to me, about the need to confront exploitation, unfairness, oppression. And I think also, you know, I grew up with a real, despite living in the United States, because of having roots and connections to other parts of the world, I had an empathy for the Islamic world, the Middle East. And I grew up during a period where there was a lot of war and conflict in the Middle East, usually, you know, because of the United States proxy wars or direct interventions.

I'll never forget what it was like being in college and university and the first Gulf War beginning. And then later, of course, you know, the global war on terrorism when I was older. but I've always identified with maybe even to some extent with the Iranian revolution with attempts to overthrow these corrupt Western proxy governments on behalf of a better future for the people, just as a broad sense. I think also identification with the cause of the liberation of Palestine. So I had an anti-imperialist orientation. I think politically, even before it was formulated in precise ways through dialectical materialism

and the kind of analysis about capitalism that you receive from Marxism. It's something about core ethics of justice, core ethics of sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and anti-imperialism, and identifying with struggles of the global South even while. you know, I was living in the imperial core. So I think there were some natural interrelationships between these two things and the formation of my own political consciousness. And, you know, at some point in college, I did read, well, actually, even in high school, I read some marks, I read some other anti-imperialist thinkers. And I also started to get interested myself in whether there was way to bring together my religious ethics and practices with these political, broader political

commitments. And I will say that I think during this period, you know, modernist Islam really reframed itself as a kind of ideology that competed with other ideologies on some level. So this idea that religion and spiritual concerns were not separated from social and political commitments is something that was very much a part of Muslim culture during this period, except that really pretty frequently it was seen as an alternative to secular ideologies, including Marxism. So for me, it was more about the fact that I was convinced, however, by, you know, by a sense that there really was a lot of common ground at the core ethical dimensions and analysis, you know, in Islam and in Marxism, that they just felt like a natural fit for me as I grew increasingly in my political consciousness.

Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. Your point about justice and service being, you know, inherent to your. or understanding an experience of Islam and that leading you in the direction of, at the very least, you know, left-wing revolutionary sort of ideologies. And I think a lot of people out there have similar impulses, right? There's like this inside tendency, whether it's religious, secular, anything else, toward, you know, more equality. You know, you're sort of inherently repulsed by injustice, whether that's nature, nurture, or some mixture thereof.

And you go around looking for things to make sense of the world around you, And one of the things that, you know, why Marxism won out for me was not only because of its historical efficacy compared with other ideologies, but that I felt once I really started getting into it, that it was different than mere political ideologies. You know, you could say, right, I'm a liberal, I'm a fascist, I'm an anarchist. And that's all political ideology. What Marxism offers is this incredibly robust analysis and methodology, this way of understanding history, this framework of thinking. that just seems superior to mere ideologies. It has its ideological aspects, of course, but it seemed much more rooted in an actual understanding of the world rather than just, you know, here my values, here's my beliefs, this is what I call myself, this is what I identify politically.

It gave you more than just that, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one thing you mentioned also that I should have mentioned earlier myself is just that understanding of history. So, you know, I do a co-host guerrilla history with you, and I'm very committed as myself, a historian. But I think as I began to study history and I was interested in the early history of Islam in medieval societies and in modern history, I think that was one other thing that attracted me to Marxism was that there was a theory and understanding of history, understanding historical consciousness and material. force of as being intimately interconnected and unfolding over time that gave me some sense of tools as I became more formally engaged in understanding Marxist thought and communist

theories and writings. I mean, you know, even just reading what is to be done as I did maybe in my second year of college, there was anti-imperialist history. you know, that was larger than just the particulars that you might observe in my knowledge and awareness of what was taking place in the Middle East to be able to sense that there was a broader critical orientation and movement that explained how similar things that had happened to, you know, the Middle East in these imperial invasions and earlier colonial eras that this happened in other parts of the world as well, and that there was an analysis that brought that together in history. That was very important to me as well as somebody who

was engaged with and interested in history. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I grew up sort of the religious equivalent of apolitical, meaning it wasn't consciously secular. It wasn't agnostic or atheist it was just none of that stuff was ever mentioned on you know my mom and dad were divorced so i had a stepdad i had multiple stepmothers over the years but nobody i came across had any interest in religion just was never brought up nor was it anti-religious right and then in my early teens 12 13 14 years old i decided by myself that i wanted to become a christian um i asked my parents to get me into a christian school to get me baptized and they were like kind of taken aback like what the hell but okay you know they did it um and then i came in my late

teens to bounce out of that pretty hard and then embrace new atheism. And then my late teens, early 20s, you know, I was sort of socially, I would be like a progressive. I flirted with democratic socialism. I even flirted with anarchism a little bit in line with my atheism. But it was, it's very interesting because what ended up displacing my new atheism was Marxism, particularly around the issues of the war on terror. Because my progressive politics, I mean, I saw straight up, you know, the negative aspect of the war, the nationalist fervor that it, you know, created here in the United States, how people who stood up and spoke against the war were just absolutely torn to shreds by the mainstream media and the mainstream culture in our society. And the new atheist explanation

for why the 9-11 happened and the subsequent war happened. It would, you know, Sam Harris' classic thing of, it's the ideas that are inherent in Islam. Islam is just an inherently barbaric religion and that's why they do things like 9-11 and i that just and then i had this increasing encroachment of these marxist ideas coming in and it's like whoa you know it came at direct odds with that hyper-idealist interpretation of the war on terror you started learning the history of imperialism in the middle east i read osama bin laden's um reasoning for why he did 9-11 and it had nothing to do with the inherent ideas and is like talking about like bombing lebanon and how he saw little kids get murdered and how the you know the imperial beast must be fought at all costs and I was like oh and so it was actually this deeper analysis that Marxism offered that not only transcended my other left wing politics at the time but also displaced my new atheism utterly and I and since that point because I saw that huge hole in them in the middle of new atheism I quickly became a critic of the thing that I was an advocate for before so it's again that depth of analysis that Marxism offered overcame what I

what I see as, you know, a youthful and perhaps useful, but ultimately limited experience with, like, hardcore atheism. So I always found that interesting. Yeah, that is, you know, those, those remarks are really resonant with me because I think the way these things came together for me, in part, was because Islam was so identified for me with resistance against colonialism, against imperialism, against the emerging neoliberal order that already, you know, in the 90s you could see was just oppressing people under a new frame through the extension of global capitalism and the liberalizing of, you know, these economies in places like the Middle East that have had devastating consequences for people. you know, that the form in which resistance was increasingly taking, take, you know, taking was through religious movements that provided the social services, that confronted the idea of, you know, capitalist and Western global hegemony, and because there were these periods of military intervention.

And I have to say, I think the cause of Palestine, was something that ran so strongly in my consciousness as bringing together commitments in the Middle East for social justice. And I know, of course, you know, there were uncomfortable overlaps here between religion and Marxism or left secular ideologies. But for me, I just didn't see, for me, the cosmology, you know, cosmological kinds of claims were never the important thing about religion. I mean, there's a spiritual dimension and there's an ethical and social dimension for me. And some of the other things that are about belief systems and their elaboration, theology, even though I study theology as a scholar of, you know, scholar of. Muslim intellectual history, it just seemed to me that the core ethical dimensions don't conflict with one another.

There are other superstructural elements that may conflict in terms of ideology, but what's important about, for me, what was important about being a Muslim and practicing Islam melded well with these universal commitments to justice and an egalitarian sort of world. So I always thought that, and I think we talked a little bit about this when we were discussing on guerrilla history, religion and Marxism more broadly, is just that a lot of misemphasis on what's really significant or important in each of these traditions tends to pit them against one another when actually I think there's a lot of overlaps and if you focus and concentrate on those as I have typically I think there's a way in which they're compatible and almost I wouldn't say necessary for one another but there's a mutual reinforcing where the spiritual and ethical

dimensions of religion, just recharge your energy and commitment through dialectical material analysis. You know, it's just at that emotional level you still need some sense of wholeness in your experience to continue to engage in not only the analysis, but the activism to be committed revolutionary. And so I've not seen them. I know that on an intellectual, level, people can say, oh, there's these lines of disagreement and incompatibility, but those are not what's most important for me about Marxism or Islam, I guess, is kind of how I felt it in my life. No, I love that, and I think we absolutely have always sort of found common ground on that

part in particular, because when I was a new atheist, what I was going against in religion was precisely these metaphysical claims and these supernatural ontologies. and epistemologies that I felt from like a rational perspective, you know, these are not good and look at the harm that they cause. But as I matured, I realized that that religious impulse within me at least had absolutely nothing to do. It's still to this day, like about claims, like, is there a God? Is there a heaven or a hell? These are, I'm completely agnostic on all of that. It's the spiritual pursuit that I can do in this life, the ethics, the deepening of my own existence that these practices offer that really, you know, lured me into getting very interest.

in this stuff, so I absolutely agree with you about that. But let me go ahead and move in that direction with regards to Islam, and I'm wondering about some core concepts within Islam that might be utilized or brought into relation with Marxism. For example, when I did dialectics and liberation, that speech I gave at ASU, I talked about how both Marxism and Buddhism share a dialectical apprehension of the world. You know, liberation theology takes core concepts within Christianity and says, you know, service, taking care of the poor, we're all equal under God. These are ideas that we can put into social and political practice as well. They're not just religious ideas in our heads. So I'm wondering in that same vein, are there any core

concepts within Islam that you see in particular synergy with core concepts within Marxism or just revolutionary left-wing politics in particular? Yeah, I think there are several core ideas and core values that you find in the Quran for well I guess I would start with one thing which is this idea that the good enjoining the good and forbidding or rejecting the evil which is this injunction that you find in the Quran it's It's always about improving the world and, you know, trying to live ethically in society. And that's another component is that all the ethics, so much of the ethics in Islam are social ethics. So in the Meccaan period, that is the chapters and verses that are from the Meccan period,

they're divided between those revelations that are attributed to the early career of, Muhammad and the later career in Medina. So his hometown of Mecca, these things, these kind of verses really deal with these universal sorts of themes about oppression, about unfairness in society and about the need for social solidarity and generosity in your communities in order for the whole society to function properly. And that was apparently breaking down in that. that era. And so you have this concern for the poor, the vulnerable in society that they need

to be protected and that there's a special kind of duty that everyone has to express that solidarity for those who are suffering. And I guess another one of the key themes is that worse than almost anything other than sort of theological issues of associating partnership with God, right? Because it's a very monotheistic kind of theology. But apart from those, the social theology is really about how oppression is the worst thing. And injustice is the worst thing to experience and to suffer. And so those are the kind of problems, it seems to me, where, you know, it really does reflect what Marx said about religion and how was the cry of the oppressed, right? It is essentially, you know, what the early verses of the Quran are voicing is that dissatisfaction with tolerating inequality, oppression, and injustice in one's society.

And it's not just a kind of spiritual problem, but it's about the way in which these ethical and moral commitments have to be made social. And so that I think is really important. So you find that there are a lot of, you know, resources in some ways in Quranic verses about things like and in early Islamic legal traditions about and the hadith that is the same. sayings that are a kind of secondary source for Islamic ethics and law that come from the example that has been preserved and recorded and transmitted about Muhammad's, you know, activities and teachings and statements and so on, that you find that there is like, you know, a real concern about debt and the fact that debt gives people power, that it's an oppressive power and so that you should try and avoid debt and the abuses that come in finance.

I mean, what would capitalism be without, you know, what would finance capitalism be without, you know, interest, loans, and credit, right? I mean, this was all as anathema in Islamic social ethics was the idea that you would need for credit, right? So there's a real antipathy to the way in which money can operate to exacerbate power differences and undermine an ideal or ethic of egalitarianism, even though, of course, hierarchy is understood as having some natural basis. But there's fundamentally a spiritual egalitarianism that is ideally is translated into social equality as well, that I find that that is a very important core value. And you see that even in the kind of basic

practices. So, you know, one of the five pillars of Islam in terms of its religious practice is this charitable tithing. Well, it shouldn't even be called a charitable tithing because it's like a requirement that you have to, you know, give a certain amount of your savings that you've held for a year to pious purposes of support for others, like, you know, relief and assistance for the poor, supporting students, people who are travelers or, you know, on journeys, like there's a variety of categories of people, i.e. those invulnerable situations to support and help them. And my analysis of this always was that it's clearly an anti- hoarding. That's only what is, you know, what is sort of subject to this

levy is resources that have been kept back in liquid form and are not circulating or being productive in, you know, benefiting society through some kind of enterprise or investment. So it's this kind of ethic that hoarding is terrible. And there are a lot of hadith, for example, about how hoarding, you know, is one of the great evils, you know, so it's attacking this kind of inequity of a social ethics of egalitarianism. And another kind of component that I found very interesting is this kind of sense of the natural world as belonging to everyone. Well, in fact, actually, idea really that's important is that there's a huge critique of wealth. I mean, that's interesting and unique. It's not quite like, you know, the Christian view that a rich man, you know, can't get into

heaven or it's harder to get into heaven than, you know, camels through the eye of the needle sort of ethic. The idea is that it's okay for generation of productive activity that has benefits in society. That self is not the problem. The problem is ownership over it and imagining that you are the owner and that you have abilities to the rest of society. That was one kind of component that I felt was relevant to the ethics of social egalitarianism and secular leftist views, but also this idea that the natural world really, you know, can't. be portioned out in terms of property like you know all the resources that like water has to be shared and of course in the Middle East water was a very scarce resource that had to be distributed very carefully in in society for productive agriculture but there was also this idea that the mineral that what's you know under the earth belongs to the entire people or population and when I think about I would used to think about this in terms of the one key natural resource for which the Middle East is

known, oil, is that clearly an Islamic ethics would have meant that these resources should be shared universally and not appropriated by these corrupt Gulf monarchies and so on. So there were a lot of elements that I found in usually under-emphasized aspects of Islam in the modern world that I saw as flowing very naturally into an anti-capitalist sort of perspective. And so even though Islam is known as a religion that seems to facilitate certain kinds of commerce, the ethics around it seemed to me much closer to an anti-capitalist sort of ideal. And so there were a lot of resources I felt when I studied the Quran and the Hadith for thinking about the way in which the contemporary world was organized as being out of kilter with these ethics of justice and egalitarianism. And, you know, it was part of my earliest critique of capitalism and the injustices of the modern world were thinking through what I thought genuine Islamic ethics were when I studied the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad's example.

Yeah, that's beautiful. That's really, really interesting. I love all those points you made, particularly the one that were in Islamic history, of course, water is this valuable commodity or this valuable thing, this natural resource and the idea that any one person should own it or have property or be able to hoard it and sell it to others is just anathema. Yeah, it's absolutely beautiful. So that's philosophically you can see, as with other religions, although the concepts are different, there is clearly stuff here that you can work with to make a progressive left-wing or even

Marxist critique of capitalism using the language and concepts of the dominant religion in and of itself. but I'm wondering about how the history of these movements of Islam and Marxism have actually played out. So I know that's a book in and of itself, perhaps several books. But can you kind of talk about how historically the Marxist movements have done in Islamic cultures and sort of how that relationship is actually played out in real historical events? Sure, yeah. I did also want to say that I neglected to mention that there are always.

lot of very interesting other economically oriented hadith reports about, you know, teachings of Muhammad that are worth mentioning. I haven't, you know, covered the full gamut by any means. But one thing I do also remember that I did want to mention is that there are a number about workers and about how if you've hired somebody, you should pay them before their sweat is, like immediately, like you should make sure you pay them. And there are a lot of injunctions about paying them fairly, you know, what they deserve so that live and there are a lot of condemnations for the miser who doesn't reward people for the benefit of their work. And so that also flowed very well into thinking about workers, labor organizing, things like that, is just to have a strong

ethics where, you know, there's a value of labor that labor needs to be. you know, valued and treated, treated properly. So, but yes, so this, you know, despite the fact that there's been all these, what I would say, you know, very substantial resources for critiquing capitalism and certain more destructive ideas about property and natural resources and all of that, in the modern world, very frequently these ideological systems, or as as it becomes turned into an ideology through modernist, reformist, thought, and movements, often pitted these sort of traditions against one another because of these theological questions, you know, and differences and because of the nature of secular, you know, left ideologies and their

hostility to historic religious institutions as they emerge and develop in Europe, right? that they do have their particular history. When these were imported into the Middle East and Islamic world, there's some ways in which the incompatibilities of their development exacerbated tensions that I think in some ways don't really need to be there. But nonetheless, there were some, you know, figures who were very, you know, interested in rethinking Islam through the lens of these liberatory, ideologies, including Marxism. So already by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you have traditions like Jadidism in Central Asia, 19th and early 20th century movements for Islamic reform that became relevant when, you know, the Russian Revolution takes place. And similar kinds of left, maybe we might think of the more.

initially as bourgeois revolutions, but constitutional reforms that took place in places like the Ottoman Empire and Turkey and in Iran in the early part of the 20th century that started bringing kind of secular political ideologies and Islamic reformist thought more together, particularly through anti-imperial and anti-colonial organizing. So there's some very interesting figures from these late 19th and early 20th century periods across the Middle East, somebody like Jamal ad al-Afghani, who was actually from Iran, I believe, who was a big influence on Muslim reformers and other parts of the Middle East, including Egypt, and people like Muhammad Abduke. But I think the more close connection with Marxism, you can see in somebody

like Sultanmir Ghalyev, who was, he's a very kind of interesting figure who is from Bashkiria in what is today Russia near Kazan. And, you know, he was a kind of reformist thinker. Marxist who really thought that, you know, this revolution would allow colonized Muslim people to really articulate a new political consciousness for liberation. And so casted kind of sense of the oppressing versus the oppressed nations, he thought all colonized Muslim peoples are proletarian peoples, right? So he saw this kind of sense of, uh, kinship between, you know, Marxist, uh, an act of oppression and, um, a possible project of depletion and

anti-clan peoples. And so he was a very strong supporter of, uh, you know, of the Bolshevik revolution and thought that this revolutionary energy, should be carried forward to, you know, the rest of Asia and Africa to throw off colonialism. And so, you know, he was a Tatar, you know, a Tatar Muslim, who was a committed Marxist and thought that there were symmetries between these, you know, political ideologies. And so he's been a kind of an interesting and influential figure for some of his right. writings and ideologies, but also as an activist that is worth kind of pointing out as a key and interesting figure. Also, I find that somebody like Ali Shariati, who was an Iranian sociologist who, you know, was born in the 30s, I believe, and died before the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1977, but is often thought to have been one of the ideological supports for this anti-imperialist and socialistically oriented form of Islamic resistance

to the Shah of Iran that played a role to some extent in at least the early ideological foundations of the Islamic Revolution. Of course, it's gone in many different directions and you wouldn't say that he was more important, for example, than somebody like, you know, but he's somebody who had a whole set of very interesting

right through the lines of the characteristics and qualities of social justice that he thought were endemic and fundamental and foundational to Islam, but that, you know, hadn't been fully realized and interpreted in light of some modern knowledge about, you know, society, history, economics, and so on. And so he endeavored in many ways to reinterpret it, what we could call a Muslim liberation theology. And I think he might have been, you know, somewhat influenced by some of those important thinkers like Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff, who, you know, were important in Christian or Catholic liberation theology. But I think he imagined seeing something similar. And what I found very fascinating and interesting about his

Adia's as well as that he had some that were very specific to Xi that developed out of the particular history that for the for the Shi

how certain important figures, leaders from the family Muhammad in the generations after the death of Muhammad when the community was driven by political and power struggles, that members of the family who rose up to entest leadership of the early Muslim empire were murdered and killed.

And their martyrdom is a very important part of Shi'i devotional and religious culture. His way of thinking through that was to really understand these key. charismatic early figures as standing for social justice and fighting against oppression. And so he read this kind of earlier sacred history for sheese through the lens of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-oppression, social justice movements. And he's, as I said, was, you know, somebody was very influential, you know, in making some kind of relationship between the secular Marxist kind of analysis and anti-imperial leftist anti-imperial politics and grounding them in, you know, Islam. Like his idea was that cruelly, you know, implementing an understanding of

Islam would bring out, bring about, you know, the classless society and a real society of justice. So he was somebody who was very interesting, you know, in trying to reconcile socialism and Marxism. But, you know, the reason why you thought you needed Islam in this context is that he didn't think that Marxism on its own could really motivate or provide the global South with the ideological means for liberation because they had a different cultural and. historical formation and that Marxism on its own understood narrowly. And of course, he's somebody's writing and thinking, you know, in the 50s and 60s when there were different phases of, you know, kind of Marxist movements that they didn't take into account some of the

emotional and spiritual and historical components of non-Western societies. And so what he was really trying to do was develop a form of Islam and a form of socialism that could meet the particular needs of the Middle East and the Islamic world to bring about what he thought would be a just society by really fundamentally reinterpreting and understanding Islam as a method of achieving social justice. So I think of these two as kind of important, but very different kinds of figures, because I think Shariati had some kind of a critique of Marxism, even though it's clear that he absorbed so much in terms of analysis about economy and society from this kind of leftist, critical, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist tradition.

But he really wanted to infuse and build these Islamic concepts with a capacity, to apply them for social and political reform in the societies where it was present already. It was sort of a kind of revival and reform of Islam through a kind of Marxist analysis of them. Yeah, that's so fascinating. There's so much history there. And, of course, we're merely scratching the surface. I mean, we could spend multiple hours just discussing that. I did wonder, though, before we move on a little bit, if you could touch on a little bit of Marxisms,

influence in the Palestinian struggle in particular. This is something that I know a little bit about. We've done an episode on Palestinian resistance that people can check out. It was in our best of series as well where definitely some of this stuff is touched on. But I was wondering if maybe you could just kind of briefly articulate some of the inner sections there. Well, I think, you know, that there's a long kind of history and tradition within the Palestine liberation cause of Marxist thought and thinkers and some of the most radical programs for resistance have come, you know, particularly in the late 60s and through the 70s and early 80s, you know, from Marxist-oriented traditions and organizations. So you have like the popular

front for the liberation of Palestine. And, um, um, you know, key figures who founded it like George Habaj. And they have always been really the vanguard in some ways of the movement for national liberation in those eras. I mean, we could go into a lot of their history, but they were definitely a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-oriented strand of resistance that were affiliated within the Palestine and liberation organization, which was a broader umbrella organization that included Fata, you know, and other kind of factions and groups. But really, I mean, maybe I'm biased, but I tend to think that the real political agenda and drive that led the Palestine liberation cause during the late 60s and 70s really came out of the PFLP. You know, and George Habash and the, you know, kind of some of the most famous activists, people like Leila Khaled, right, you know, were affiliated with this particular organization and they were really uncompromising in their stands against Western imperialism. And, you know, people like Rassan Kanafani, probably the most important Palestinian writer of this.

era were affiliated with the PFLP faction. So I don't think, really, if you're looking at the history of the cause of, you know, liberation in Palestine, that really can't be written without paying an awful lot of attention to the importance of Marxist and socialist, you know, fighters for liberation. They're really the core in that early period. that in the 80s to 90s, things started to shift. You know, they continue to be active. Well, you have the emergence in that period of alternate organizations that were more religiously oriented and religiously based, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and so on. And it's true that in the earliest period, that there seems to have been a tactical and strategic support in some

ways by Israel, just like the United States was supporting, you know, extreme religious organizations in, you know, the proxy war in Afghanistan and around the world as an, you know, as an alternative to communist parties and socialist parties, some of which were incredibly strong and significant through the Middle East. So if you think of the Today party that had I can't remember the estimates, but, you know, maybe a million members in Iran in the 1950s and 60s before its suppression, you know, under the Shah, you know, in places like Indonesia, you know, where the Communist Party was hugely important and influential, but again, the United States supported, you know, the repression of leftist movements. it also was really keen on supporting religious organizations as an antidote and as a rival. And that happened also in Palestine with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, you know, being, you know, encouraged. I don't know, I wouldn't want to say that they were invented or not at all.

I mean, they're in, you know, they have their roots in, you know, in the Palestinian community, of course. However, they were sometimes allowed to become stronger, you know, as a way to restrict the PFLP and some of the other more radical Marxist and socialist strands of resistance in the Palestinian liberation movement. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, I do want to be sort of conscious of time here, and this is only meant to just be a little sort of short introduction. me and you have many things planned in the futures. We can revisit this topic. I mean, I want to have you on to talk about the crusading society and all of your work around that. We've talked for a while about doing episodes on Rumi, one of the famous Islamic mystics of Islamic history.

We could even do an intro to Islam episode at some point. I would remind listeners in general, if you like hearing discussions between me and Adnan, you could also always join the guerrilla history Patreon in which we really kind of let our hair down and have conversations like this fairly often, especially on the Patreon when we don't have guests. So I did want to get a chance to plug that. But as a sort of final question, just capping up this little discussion we've had so far, you know, one question I would have is we talked about the Islamic foundations from which somebody with progressive or Marxist-minded commitments could use a lot of the stuff

within the Islamic tradition to make sense of a political and social struggle. but I was wondering what your thoughts are on what possibly Marxism might be able to offer Islam. I know you've talked about these movements historically and what it seemed to have offered is an anti-imperialist analysis, the decolonial movement across the world cannot be separated from Marxism wholly. Franz Fanon working within that tradition, sort of decolonization as well as Marxism, drawing from Marxism to make sense of decolonial struggles, etc. But just kind of zooming out a little bit, what do you think Marxism might be able to offer or might be able to offer Islam going forward? Well, you know, in one way, I think Marxism gives greater clarity on what I would consider the important and significant and relevant dimensions of Muslim doctrine and practice.

Like what does Islam mean to people in the modern world? I mean, this has been a contested kind of category. I've alluded to some of these religion reform movements, the rise of new fundamentalist, or maybe we'd call far right, you know, Muslim movements that have taken place. And that is because it is a contested category. Religion is always a dynamic, you know, cultural experience. And religion is not static, even though, of course, it's always a rest of, its authority on the past scripture, you know, but every generation reinterprets these

religion and religious practices and ideas for themselves to make them relevant, even if there is a kind of core ethical set of commitments. These have to be recharged through engagement with one's own world, one's own life. It has to be made relevant. And I feel like the anti-capitalist critique of Marxist thought and theories of history, the idea of how history unfolds through dialectical materialism, is absolutely vital for understanding how and why some of these ethical kind of commitments and, you know, broader ideals of egalitarianism about, you know, confronting oppression, about justice, how they should be interpreted for Muslims. It seems to me that you have to really encompass what is the real evil of this era. And also it can even inform theological analysis in some ways

because, you know, I mentioned the idea of the oneness of God, to heed, and not associating partners. to God's power as a kind of key theological theme. You know, Islam was revealed in the context of an idolatrous, polytheistic, religious culture of the tribal Arabs. And, you know, so this key theme was to mark a distinction between, you know, this new form of monotheistic religion versus idolatry. And I think in some ways, capitalism and consumer culture can be understood.

understood very powerfully and evocatively for Muslims as a form of idolatry, as a form of, you know, distraction from the true ethics of social solidarity and of justice. And that that comes into clear relief when you study and understand capitalism through, you know, communist analysis, Marxist analysis. that can inform, I think, a real understanding of the deep roots of the ethics and principles of Islam. So that's what it has really in some ways to contribute, is to allow us, allow Muslims to see in clearer ways where oppression actually exists in our world today. Like if there's an ideal of standing up for justice and combating oppression, you have to understand what are the unique features and characteristics of oppression and the way it operates in our world today. That's just an absolute requirement. And I think Marxism is the best way of trying to identify how that oppression is working in our world. Beautifully said, as always, Anon, thank you so much for carving out some time to come on the show.

and discuss this with me. This is something I'm very interested in, and I know you and I will have many more conversations on this topic going forward. As always, I really do learn so much from you every time we talk. It's a personal little class with Professor Audenon that I get to take. So I really, I always benefit so much. I really enjoyed the conversation and dialogue, and it just, you know, helps me think about these important issues so much to have an interlocutor like you in a space on Rev. Left Radio. for these things as well as guerrilla history and so thank you for inviting me. I hope we will have more discussions like this in the near future. Definitely. Can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Yeah, you can go to my website, which it is adnanhussein.org and follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-H-U-S-A-I-N. You can follow and listen to my other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S. You can find that. It's anchor.fm-fm-fm-M-J-L-I-S. And, you know, also check out guerrilla history if you haven't already. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much, my friend. I look forward to talking to you soon again.

Thank you. Thank you. Ramadan is leaving. Time is fleeting and my mind is speeding. I'm a seeker, so I believe everything that I'm in need of I'm receiving. I'm trying to get it right while I'm still breathing. And my heart's still beating. O.G. said I don't care about what you call God or think about God, long as you don't think you are God. I feel that. It's real rap. Never claim to have all the answers, but I've seen where they're revealed at and what layers to peel back. Snandrums still smack. Laces in the deed of sneakers are still fat. My pedigree is still facts. Don't ever think that the tailored slacks. Pinky rings and fedora hats mean I'm not spitting the rawest wraps.

I love all these cats. Spit it how you live it. Just forgive me if I'm not trying to. Trying to expose my heart to that. Them drugs done killed too many of my loved ones and handing them and selling them for me to want any parts of that. I don't even know if you're listening right now. You might click and listen to it or you might swipe down. That's how my life sound right now.