Re: Islam, Political Islam and Women in the Middle East

First, it was not at all clear that the original poster was a member 
of any CP; the message byline appeared to indicate it was from some 
refugee center at first glance. Had I know this my tone would have 
been different--but the content much the same.

The article in question was so riddled with invective aimed squarely 
against Islam, as a social and religious presence per se, and so 
notable only by its absence of any reference to class or historical 
materialism, it is hard for me to believe that it was written by a 
Marxist of any stripe.

Having worked with the Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign 
[www.ptudc.org], I had never encountered this kind of blundering 
approach to Islam in society in any of the documents formulated by 
these leading trade unionists, living in a bastion of both 
fundamentalism and a bourgeois dictatorship.

It is necessary to locate Islamism from a contextual standpoint in 
order to assess it. On the one hand, it is a reflexive reaction to 
imperialism, and on the other it has been nurtured by men like John 
Foster Dulles and agencies like the CIA. But in reality, these two 
hands are much the same--Islamism has been thoroughly vicious to the 
secular left in the past, in the ME and the subcontinent.

But there is Islamism and then there is Islamism; I would separate 
the motives and circumstances of a Palestinian suicide bomber from an 
Iranian cleric, if only to explain the political development and 
levels and turns of consciousness in any given area. *Nothing* along 
these lines is offered in these ranting documents.

This is not a question of being "soft" on anything; in America, as an 
American, the primary goal is to oppose US-led imperialism by 
illustrating the effects of its inevitable excesses to workers not 
just "over there", but also here at home. And insofar as strands of 
Islamism have been nurtured by America, it is worth pointing out and 
referencing.

But this does not give one a license to ridiculously spout off 
against the religion of most of the people being bombed into 
submission around the world and around the clock. That task is best 
suited for our 'free' media agencies. And I use the Palestinian 
comparison because this [Iranian] document is a macrocosmic example 
of moralizing endlessly about Palestinian violence in their struggle 
against Israeli occupation. This is true in the sense that as 
Marxists, I believe it necessary for us to point out the main 
contradictions of imperialism, and its disastrous effects, which 
currently involve:

1. Islamism as a scapegoat for hijacking of civil liberties and 
constitutional rights.
2. Demagogically using the "war on terror" to whip up support for 
increased military spending.
3. Killing civilians elsewhere and installing puppet regimes.

This is theoretically and practically more important than 
castigating "Islam" for the problems of the world. I am sincerely 
amazed that the Iranian CP--(or should I be amazed at any Stalinist 
enterprises these days)--would put forth such an unfocused document, 
castrated from a Marxist analysis of imperialism.


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"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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