Iran, nationalists.
masses and their struggles.
Islam differs from most religions in that it has fulfilled an essentially political function from its very origin. Most of the Koran consists of prescriptions for legal and social behaviour — it is much more a body of law than a body of theology.
In the years immediately following the death of Muhammed in 632 the Koran served as the codification of the legal system of a state power established first in the peninsula and later over a territory ranging from Spain to India.
From the outset, then, Islam has never played a purely 'religious' role.
theology has always identified, in the minds of believers, with the state power itself.
As Hisham Sharabi observed in his Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World, 'it is important to note that the Koran and Muhammed's teachings emphasise external behaviour, the performance of social duty. rather than intention or inner life. Recognising no distinction between the secular and spiritual, transferred to political and social organisation the basically externalistic character of Muslim dogma."
now can we explam une aunoney and attraction of "Islamic values' for the Muslim masses today? Because of political character, well-placed to thrust forward the mobilisation of the anti-colonial struggles.
In the Middle East, the desire for an independent state, hallmark of the maturing of newly national formations, was permeated by this yearning for a state that would be the property of the Islamic people" (ummah).
Canes of the movement was to contribute further to the tendency of the masses to view the national struggle as Islamic.
"It must be noted', the Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson wrote in the 6 December 1978 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde, *that the masses reinterpreted these ideas in their own Wal.
so happened that foreign domination was the domination infidels or of compatriots in the pay of infidels. This fact did not unnoticed by broad social layers amongst which fidelity to Islam had never been shaken.
'Experienced and perspicacious leaders could not resist adding this singularly effective element to the national and social factors mobilisation.
By nature, however, mobilising capacity of Islam can act only within the narrow confines nationalism, at best. Once nationalist leaderships come to mobilisation of the Islamic masses against the foreign transformed by the new ruling groups into the mobilisation of these same masses against their infidel compatriots, the misguided co-nationals who have fallen under the domination of other VETSIONS of foreign non-Islamic) heresy.
In most cases this has meant the workers movement - identified with 'communism' and therefore ism", a foreign, anti-national ideology deplorable as Ine dominant form of foreign heresy, This has happened in case after case. In Egypt and Syria the working of a dubious identification long upheld other Arabian been Islam Islam was developing workers go of proto-fascist Islamic of Arabia and infidel forces.
(1.e.
dienne government:
*athede ence one previously by Arab class has come under physical attack from the Muslim Brotherhood, based obscurantism and funded largely by the governments of Saudi Libya. Nasser's anti-communist purges were sold to the masses in the name of Islam The Algerian guerillas of the Fifties and Sixties raised the crv of allaht akbar (god is most great) in their attacks on the French occupation But the same cry later served as the ideological basis for the counter-revo lutionary measures of the Boume- takes …ine sweeping purge of the left, the dismantling of the self-management committees, the 'Algerian family' (code word for the most extreme forms of the oppression of women).
the mobilisation against the Phalangists, a political tormation, degenerated - in part leaders of the so-called left - into an Islamic mobilisation against Christians as 'enemies of the Arab nation', frequently and increasingly founded with Islamic nation'.
This Islamic element has been one of the most effective ideological weapons of the ruling class in its efforts to efface class contradictions in favour of a mythical unity of all Muslims against the 'enemy' people and/or state.
If Islam has been an instrument of countries ever since decolonisation, that same risk has arisen all the more rapidly in Iran, for Islam has been the COSClILC and goal preached Khomeini It does not speak well for the analytical clarity of the left that there was - and in some cases still is -great reluctance to recognise this fact.
moTe occasion Khomeini has declared that conception of the Islamic republic its model none of the so-called Islamic states in the world today, but the original Islamic state under the rule of the first four caliphs, whose reigns lasted from 632 to 661 Government, he wrote in his work Islamic Government (published in Iraq in 1970 during his exile there), is properly the business of the mullahs (religious leaders), since gious institutions and state institutions is itself contrary to Islam. Hence his opposition to the placing con- his hatchecord Islamic it belie watchword Islamic since democracy — in the literal sense by the people 'European' concept thoroughly alien to Islam.
He has removal of all 'European criteria from the judicial system. Among such criteria are the laying of specific charges against the accused, the right Arab to a defence, and the right of appeal.
*Every hearing must end in a final, absolute decision in a single phase. It is women, of course, by been most immediately affected by Khomeini's attempts to assert the rule of Islam, just as it is women who have suffered most directly and swiftly from the Islamic national struggles.
How manv times have women in his the Islamic liberation been Westernised prostitutes with the image of the European woman!
Any woman has heard more than once se heard more following line 'progressive' male nationalists: Our women do not want to become like these Western women, whores lacking republic, likewise called for the state religion. the man, boys).
protectors values. to death of adultery, caliphs. ideologies, sanctity and doing so.
who have dimension of mind.
countries speaking of denounced infatuated who has been And than once of argument from class their liberation has been defined in the Koran and the struggle against the Western oppressor; it is this that guarantees their happiness.
In fact, it is in regard to practices concerning women that the Muslim states have been strictest in applying the shari'a, source of Islamic law. In all Arab states except Lebanon, Islam is inscribed in the constitution as the And in most cases, in accordance with Islamic law, it is explicitly stated that every woman, regardless of age social status, or other factors, subject to a male 'tutor" — be it hel father, husband, brother, or some other relative - who controls all decisions concerning her tate Ultimately, this means control over life and death itself. In most states in the Middle East, the • "crime honour' — the execution by a male family member of an unmarried woman suspected of not being a virgin - is officially considered a case of legitimate self-defence on the part of whose honour has been attacked by the behaviour of the Any man can divorce at will, but the grounds for divorce at the request of women are so stringent as to be virtually unrealisable. Any man has the absolute right to take his children from their mother once they reach the age of seven (for girls) or nine (for *Our women are the guarantors and our Arab-Muslim • Our socialism rests on the five pillars of Islam and not on the emancipation of women, with their make-up, etc. Thus the columns of Moujahid, official newspaper of the Algerian government.
Here as elsewhere, the measures demanded by Khomeini - universal re-institution of the veil, abolition of _co-caucanana mastudors. stoning women convicted of aponton or a lyr law restricting polygamy - conform with both the letter of the Koran and the practice of the state of the first four And the women mobilising against the implementation of those measures were denounced by the ayatollah's supporters in the usual terms: whores, American agents, Pahlavi dolls.
Unity of all classes of Muslims against the infidels and their foreign variety; private property; opposition to democracy in the sense popular control over the fundamental decisions of political life; institutionalised male supremacy the consequent extreme oppression of women - such are the basic elements programme advocated by Khomeini, programme which IS indeed consistent with both the letter and the historical practice of Islam.
One thing should be clear, The fact that Khomeini and his supporters uphold this programme and intend to impose it on Iranian society does not mean that they will be successful in That depends on many factors, among which mobilisations like those of the thousands of women who have demonstrated in Tehran in the past few days will be decisive.
But let there be no illusion that the ayatollah and his backers have the establishment of some other regime in It is by no means certain that the Islamic obscurantists will win victory. But to stop them requires that they be recognised for what they are advocates of counter-revolution and combatted as such.
that, In turn, requires recognition that their ideology return to Islamic values - is an effective weapon against the working and the aspirations emancipation of the oppressed layers Socialist Challenge 22 March 1979 page 11
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take forward a struggle for emancipation? The question must sound strange to any revolutionary socialist. It would not even arise were it not for the resurgence, as a result of the upheaval in
The international left has generally interpreted Islam's ability to mobilise masses as positive in and of itself. In doing so it has disregarded the reactionary dangers of Islamic ideology for the