Secularism, Islamophobia and the politics of religion.
John Molyneux
First published in Irish Marxist Review 16.
There are moments when a single flash of lightning lights up
the night sky and illuminates the whole landscape below which was previously
shrouded in darkness. Such was the moment when Michael Brown was shot by a US cop in Ferguson,
Missouri on 9 August 2014. And
such was the moment when photographs appeared of armed police forcing a Muslim
woman to disrobe on a French beach. It both illuminated and encapsulated in
concentrated form the whole offensive against Muslims that has been waged by
French politicians and the French state, not just for the last year or so but
for the last twenty years.
Of course this offensive is by no means confined to France and has a thoroughly international character
– essentially it originated in the United States
and is raging in Britain,
and many other places including Ireland.
Nevertheless it does seem particularly intense in France at this point in time
and has the peculiarity of being waged in the name of ‘secularism’ and ‘the
French Republic’ and this ideological device has given it a significant radical
cover and legitimacy and secured for it a degree of ‘left’ support and
acquiescence higher than is generally the case elsewhere. This is because
secularism has long been seen as a ‘value’ or ‘principle’ that the left,
including revolutionary socialists, should defend and advocate. This article is
an examination of the relations between secularism, Islamophobia, racism and
the politics of religion.
As it happens Ireland and Irish history
constitutes an interesting and useful
vantage point from which to start this examination.
The View from Ireland
Because of the pretty much unique position of dominance held
by the Catholic Church in Irish society during much of the 20th
century the issue of secularism is alive and well in Ireland today. It is there in the
Repeal the 8th campaign and in the slogans of the pro-choice
movement: ‘Not the church and not the state! Women should decide their fate!’
and ‘Get your rosaries off our ovaries!’. It is there in way in which the
horrible legacy of the Magdalene Laundries, the Industrial Schools and the
brutal Christian Brothers still haunt the memories of so many of our people.
And it is still there in the inflated power that the Church hierarchy still
exercises over our schools.
On all these issues any socialist will stand full square for
the principles of secularism. There should be a complete separation of church
and state. We are for complete freedom of religious belief and religious
worship but as a private matter. No religion should hold a position of power or
privilege in the state or be state funded. It is also probably the case that
many, though certainly not all, socialists are non-believers and while not wanting
in way to prohibit religion nevertheless look forward, like Karl Marx, to a
world in which people no longer require the services of the opium of the
masses.
But shift the focus back in time to 1916 and the Irish
Revolution. How would we respond to an argument that ran as follows?
“The 1916 Rising was led by Catholics, in particular that
well known Catholic fanatic Padraig Pearse. By far the majority of the
Volunteers were Catholics and even the socialist leader of the Irish Citizen
Army, James Connolly, was a Catholic of sorts. Moreover, the Proclamation which
constituted the programme of the Rising explicitly states that it is written
‘In the name of God’ and that ‘We place the cause of the Irish Republic under
the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessings we invoke upon our arms’.
Therefore it is clear that this was a sectarian Catholic uprising intent on
establishing a traditionalist authoritarian Catholic state and that no
socialist should have given or should give retrospectively any support
whatsoever to such a backward obscurantist movement dominated by a religion
from the middle ages. Indeed objectively it was forces of the British Army,
rough as they may been at times, who represented progress and had to be backed
by all those who value freedom, the enlightenment, and especially the rights of
women”.
The answer that I trust every socialist, beginning with
those ardent atheists Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, would give to this is
argument would be unequivocal. It would be that it is manifestly a manipulation
and abuse of the principles of secularism to provide a justification for
imperialism. The 1916 Rising, regardless of the religious affiliations of its
leaders or the wording of its Proclamation was not fundamentally about religion
at all but about national liberation. It was not about Catholicism versus
Protestantism but about whether or not Britain
should rule Ireland.
And that therefore all socialists (and all democrats and progressives), as
opponents of imperialism and defenders of the rights of oppressed nations to
self determination, should stand unconditionally on the side of Irish freedom
and with the Rising.
From this point of view whether or not the majority of the
Irish, or the British for that matter, were Catholics, Protestants, Hindus or
Jews was an entirely secondary matter and in no way the determining factor in
the conflict. As to whether the ensuing independent Ireland would be
reactionary, oppressive to women and so on that would be determined primarily
not by the religious ideas in the heads of Padraig Pearse or the other
signatories but by which social class emerged from the struggle for
independence as the class in the saddle. If the working class and its leaders
such as Connolly, Markievicz, and Lynn had come out on top then Ireland would
have take its place alongside revolutionary Russia in the vanguard of the
struggle for sexual equality and women’s liberation.
Fast forward to the Troubles and the imagined dialogue above
reappears with a vengeance in the British media. The conflict between
predominantly Protestant Unionism and predominantly Catholic Nationalism is
depicted as primarily a religious conflict with the idea that the conflict is
about religion being seen as evidence of Irish stupidity and backwardness.
After all hadn’t people in ‘civilised’ Britain stopped fighting about
religion in the 18th century? Moreover the role of the British state
in this conflict was to stand outside and above the two irrational warring
tribes and mediate between them, while isolating and defeating the evil
terrorists (the IRA).
The term ‘secularism’ is not much used but popular hostility
to religion and especially religious fanaticism (in Britain) is skilfully
harnessed to mask the obvious fact that this conflict is not at all about the
doctrine of transubstantiation or the infallibility of the Pope but about
whether Northern Ireland should be ruled by Britain or be part of the Irish
Republic and that in turn is fuelled by systematic social, economic and
political discrimination against the Nationalist community. And while this is
obscuring the real nature of the conflict it is simultaneously legitimating the
role of the British army which is actually acting to sustain the sectarian
state and British rule.
Today, however, although the issues of oppression and
British rule have not gone away the fact that the war has ended and that Sinn
Fein is in government with the DUP means that questions related to secularism
like marriage equality, LGBT+ rights and a woman’s right to choose come more to
the fore.
What these examples show is that although secularism is a
goal which socialists support the banner of secularism can be used to serve a
number of purposes, reactionary as well as progressive. Therefore it is
necessary always to make a concrete assessment of the concrete situation to
determine the role being played by this slogan. How does it relate in the given
historical circumstances to the interests of the working class and the struggle
against oppression?
French secularism in
perspective.
Secularism has a long and complex history. Its origins in
Europe stretch back to the beginnings of the scientific revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Copernicus and Galileo took on the
Church and ‘the spiritual dictatorship of the Church was shattered’
Elements of it can be seen in the Dutch Revolt of 1565 – 1600 when religious
tolerance was established in the Dutch Republic in order to unite the Dutch
people against Habsburg Empire based in Counter reformation Spain. It develops
further among the philosophers of the eighteenth century enlightenment
(Diderot, Voltaire etc) and comes into its own with the French Revolution of
1789-94
In August 1789, shortly after the Storming of the
Bastille, the Revolution abolished the privileges of the First (the clergy) and
Second (Nobility) Estates and abolished the tithes gathered by the Church. The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 proclaimed freedom
of religion throughout France.
On October 10 the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties and land held by the Catholic Church and sold them off at public
auctions. In 1790 the Assembly formally subordinated the Roman Catholic Church
in France
to the French government and in September 1792
divorce was legalised and the State took control of the birth, death, and
marriage registers away from the Church.
In 1791, Jews
were emancipated—receiving full civic
rights as individuals but, significantly, none as a group. At the
height of the Revolution during the Jacobin period (1792-94) there was an
active campaign of dechristianisation in which religious statues and icons were
destroyed and an attempt was made to launch a kind of substitute religion in
the form of a ‘Cult of Reason’. There were also riots in which priests were
massacred.
It is should be noted that secularism also featured
in the American Revolution with Thomas Jefferson writing into the American
constitution the amendment that ‘Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof’ as a result of which the US has no established or state religion to
this day.
In contrast to the US
the reaction that followed the French Revolution and rise to power of Napoleon
with his restoration of the Empire also brought with it the restoration of the
Church. However secularism lived on as a republican ideal throughout the
nineteenth century and was also adopted by the working class and socialist
movement. In the Paris Commune of 1871 one of its first decrees separated the church from the state,
appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice
of religion from schools. In theory, the churches were allowed to continue
their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public
political meetings during the evenings but this seems not to have been
implemented.
The Commune, of course, was crushed after only 74 days but in
1881-2 France established a mandatory, free and secular education system that relied
on state-paid professional teachers rather than on Catholic clerics. And in
1905 a new law was passed on the separation of church and state which remains
the legal foundation of French secularity (laicité).
What is evident from this brief
overview is that the struggle for
secularism – in the scientific revolution, the Dutch Republic,
the enlightenment and the French and American Revolutions – was an integral
part of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois democratic revolutions
against feudalism. It was directed, first and foremost, against the Catholic
Church which economically, politically and ideologically was the principle ally
of the feudal aristocracy, absolute monarchy and feudal reaction as a whole.
The consistently reactionary and counter revolutionary role of the Catholic Church from the days of the
Medicis, through to 1789 and 1848 and the Spanish Civil War, also turned the
European workers’ movement against it. In this respect secularism, like the
bourgeois democratic revolutions of which it was a part was thoroughly
progressive.
But this is not the end of the
story. If the bourgeois revolutions against feudalism were progressive it also the
case that, from the moment of its conquest of political power, the bourgeoisie
embarked on a policy of colonial conquest and enslavement of the rest of the
world. Thus the Dutch Republic, within a decade of winning its independence
from the Habsburg empire in what was perhaps the first war of national
liberation, and becoming the most progressive society in Europe at the time,
had established a colonial empire which stretched from Batavia (today’s
Indonesia) in the far east to New Amsterdam (New York) and Pernambuco (Brasil)
in the Americas, which they naturally ran with great brutality. Similarly the
bourgeois revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, had no sooner cut off the head of
Charles I in January 1649 than he embarked in August of the same year on the
conquest of Ireland
with consequences that remain legendary. Bourgeois Britain then went on to
establish the global empire on which the sun never set and the blood never
dried.
France’s war of revolutionary defence in 1793, turned with
Napoleon into a war of conquest, whose oppressive ferocity was shockingly
recorded by Goya in his Disasters of War, while at the same time he invaded
Egypt and
Syria
and attempted to restore slavery in
Haiti. In 1830
France decided to ‘share its culture’
with
Algeria
by invading it in a war of conquest that by 1870 had reduced the Algerian
population by one third. This was the beginning of the extensive French empire
in Africa, second only to Britain’s, that stretched across the Maghreb to
Morocco and down to Senegal, Mali, Congo, Madagascar and elsewhere along with
colonies in Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), New Caledonia in the Pacific,
and in the Caribbean. This was an empire which lasted until after Second World
War and came to an end only with being driven out of
Vietnam by the Viet Minh in 1954
and the horrendously ferocious Algerian War of 1954-62.
As the British
Empire was depicted as ‘the White Man’s Burden’ so the French
colonial project was presented as a ‘civilising mission’ (mission civilisatrice) bringing civilisation to backward and
benighted peoples, and in this context the meaning of secularism changed
profoundly. From being a progressive value directed against oppression it
became seen as a marker of national pride and superiority which could be used
to justify colonialism and all the oppression it entailed.
During the post Second World War
economic boom, ‘les trente glorieuses’ as it was known in France, there was
large scale immigration from North Africa as workers were sucked in to meet
labour shortages in the expanding economy. It was a process very similar to
what occurred in
Britain
during the same period, with the migrant workers in both cases being drawn from
the former colonies
.
In
France
this inevitably meant that a high proportion of these immigrants were Muslim
.
And in this situation ‘secularism’ became a slogan behind which racists and
racist organisations could mobilise anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.
In itself there was nothing
uniquely French to this. The British far right have tried repeatedly to make
things like halal meat and the building of mosques a pretext for racist
campaigns and the notion that immigrants should ‘conform to our values’
whatever they might be, is doubtless a seam mined by racists everywhere.
Nevertheless the specificities of French history made the notion of
‘secularism’ well suited for this purpose. What made it particularly effective
was that it invoked what had been a progressive tradition and this gave it a
purchase among French liberals and sections of the French left, including sadly
some of the far left, that ‘British values’ never had with the British left.
Thus, when in the late eighties the
wearing the hijab or headscarf by school students became an issue, left wing
teachers
were among those making the running in the call for a ban and in the nineties
there were actually some teachers’ strikes over this question- not something
which, to my knowledge, has occurred in other countries.
The ‘progressive’ credentials of
secularism were further augmented by throwing feminism into the mix. In
relation to the hijab and other forms of the Islamic veil (niqab, chador, burka
etc) the argument was made that this was a marker of women’s oppression imposed
on Muslim women by their patriarchal families and their backward misogynistic
religion. It was therefore a blow for women’s liberation to ban the hijab etc
from public institutions.
This argument, not confined to France but particularly potent in France, rested
on several errors. First it was based on a one-dimensional and stereotyped view
of the hijab which refused to listen to what many Muslim women themselves were
saying on the issue. Yes, historically the veiling of women was linked to the
oppression of women but in the world today it is also linked to Muslim identity
(in the way that the ‘Afro’ hairstyle was linked to Black identity in the
sixties) and therefore is often adopted by Muslim women voluntarily and as a
statement of defiance and pride in their identity in the face of racism and
exclusion. Second, it was based on a patronising top down conception of
emancipation in which the liberation of Muslim women was to be handed to them
from above rather than taken by those women themselves. Third, it violated the
very simple democratic principle that people should be allowed to wear what
they want and, indeed, that there should be freedom of religious expression.
Fourth, it lined up progressive feminism in common cause with the growing
forces of the racist and fascist right, especially the Front National. Fifth,
it chimed with a wider deployment of the feminist card by the US state and
others (the likes of Hilary Clinton) to justify imperialist interventions and
wars. ‘We should invade Afghanistan
to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban!’.
Unfortunately the extreme cynicism
and hypocrisy of this last point - the United States has never invaded anywhere
to liberate women, or men for that matter, but only and exclusively in pursuit
of its economic and strategic interests – has not prevented it having a certain
effect. And this effect has been particularly pernicious because the invocation
of the radical values of secularism and feminism has worked to variously
co-opt, confuse and demobilise precisely those progressive, left and socialist
forces who should have been at the forefront of resisting the rise of racism
and fascism in France
which, tragically, have been given a relatively easy ride.
However all of this has reached the
peak it has because it has coincided with a phenomenon that is by neither peculiar
to France
nor French in origin – the global rise of Islamophobia.
The Rise of Islamophobia
White western Europeans
have viewed non- Europeans and people of colour with a combination of hostility
and contempt for approximately five hundred years – that is since Europe began
the process of conquering and enslaving most of the rest of the world. This
means that in the larger scheme of things, as Alex Callinicos has remarked,
‘Racism is a historical novelty’
but half a millennium is nonetheless a long time in the development of our
social consciousness. By comparison Islamophobia is of really recent origin. I
am looking at a 1980 edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary – it does
not contain the word ‘Islamophobia’
A standard sociological textbook from 1990, E.Cashmore and B.Troyna,
Introduction to Race Relations, does not
discuss the phenomenon and has no reference to the word in its index, nor does
Alex Callinicos’
Race and Class from
1993.Of course, the people who are now subject to Islamophobia have long been
the objects of racism, but it was on the basis of their skin colour,
nationality, ethnicity (so-called ‘race’) and alleged culture, not their
adherence to Islam or their Muslim identity. They were seen and labelled as
‘Arabs’ or ‘Pakis’ or ‘Asians’ or ‘wogs’ or ‘blacks’ etc. not as Muslims.
So when, how and why – the
questions are interconnected – did Islamophobia develop? A commonplace view is
that it emerged as a response to 9/11 and an accompaniment to Bush’s ‘war on
terror’. Obviously these were an important turning point and marked a definite
escalation but they were not the origin. Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order was the key founding intellectual text of Islamophobia. It
was published in 1996 and was the working up of an article written in 1993 and
a lecture given in 1992. In the 1993 essay he wrote:
The most important conflicts of the future
will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from
one another. Why will this be the case? First, differences among civilizations
are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each
other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion…
These differences are the product of
centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than
differences among political ideologies and political regimes.
This then gives us an indication as to when and how
Islamophobia began to gain momentum. It was in the early to mid-nineties. I do
not mean by this that Huntingdon through his essay or his book
started the phenomenon or is responsible
for it.
Huntington
was, in the words of Tariq Ali, a ‘state intellectual’
. He
was director of Harvard's Centre
for International Affairs and the White House Coordinator of Security Planning
under Jimmy Carter. This means that his ‘theories’ were from the outset
fashioned to meet the needs of the US ruling class and, in so far as they were
taken up and propagated it was because that class and its representatives in
the White House, the Pentagon and then the media deemed useful.
This particular
theory was then seized upon and disseminated with great vigour and with ever
growing intensity after 9/11. Such is the global hegemony of the US bourgeoisie
in these matters and also the confluence of material interests of British, French
and European imperialism, that the notion of Islam and Muslims as a threat to
our way of life was soon appearing not only from the mouths of leading
political figures but also, at least by innuendo and implication, in the
headlines of innumerable newspapers and TV news broadcasts around the world,
until within a matter of years it had become almost ‘common sense’.
But if that is
when and how, what about why? The two
main background factors were the Iranian Revolution of 1979 with its Islamist
outcome and the collapse of Communism and end of the cold war in 1989-91. The
Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran who, together with his regime,
was a key US ally in the Middle East and
possessed major oil reserves. The Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini which
emerged from the Revolution then gave a huge impetus to Islamist movements
throughout the region. The appeal of Islamism, or political Islam, across the Middle East was aided by the complete failure of
nationalism and communism (Stalinism), which had previously been the predominant
forces, to successfully challenge imperialism in the area. During the Cold War
the West had tended to view the Islamists with indulgence as potential or
actual allies in the fight against the godless communists, as in US support for
forerunners of the Taliban against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
But with the Cold War over and the communist threat eliminated US imperialism increasingly saw Islamism as the main
threat to its interests, above all in the oil rich Middle
East.
Noting the fact that the
Islamophobic drive began before 9/11 is important because it is often presented
as emerging as a response to 9/11. In reality the rise of Islamophobia was,
along with US imperialism’s
general record in the Middle East, one of the causes of the attack on the Twin Towers.
However it is clear that 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ with its
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq ratcheted up the whole vicious cycle of war,
terrorist atrocity, more war, more terror and ever more racism and hatred.
Some observations about how racism
works: first, once a group is stigmatised and demonised by official society
they become a target for all sorts of bigots and bullies. These range from the
bully in playground looking for a child to intimidate to fascist and Nazi parties
trying to build on the basis of hatred. For fascists the ultimate enemy is the
working class movement and socialism but they will use any scapegoat going to
help them attract support to defeat the working class and the left; it can be
Jews, asylum seekers, Poles, blacks, Roma – whoever is being singled out by the
media and the establishment. Once the media identified ‘Muslims’ as ‘the
problem’ every fascist, big or small, leapt on the band wagon even to the
point, in many cases, of becoming pro-Israel.
Second, when a racist band wagon is
rolling it becomes a case of ‘any stick to beat a dog’ – drag in any argument
that lays to hand, especially those you can use to wrong foot or embarrass
ideological or political opponents. Thus, for example, inserted into the
discourse of Islamophobia, is the claim that a marker of Muslims ‘not sharing
our values’ is Muslim homophobia. This
notion is promoted with a straight face as if belief in LGBT+ equality were a
‘traditional’ Western value by people who a decade or two ago would most likely
have been grubby homophobes. And in this toxic context using secularism (with a
dash of misogyny parading as feminism) as a weapon to further estrange and
isolate Muslims was an obvious move.
Two Coups
The issue of the abuse of
secularism as a pitfall which can seriously derail the left and serve reaction
is not confined to France or
Europe. On the contrary it has played a
significant role in two recent major events in the Middle East: the Egyptian
military coup of July 2013 and the attempted military coup in Turkey in July
2016.
To understand how this worked it is
necessary first to dispel a false Islamophobic view of the Middle
East as one vast Muslim Islamist mass. Of course it is true that the
overwhelming majority of people in the Middle East, including Turkey, and across North
Africa are Muslim by faith, much as the overwhelming majority of
Irish were (until very recently) Catholic. Nevertheless there were in the 20th
century and across the region large secularist and modernising political
movements of various kinds. This secularist spectrum ranged from right wing
bourgeois movements and regimes that acted as agents of or collaborators with,
imperialism, through bourgeois nationalist movements and regimes that were to
some degree anti-imperialist to the Communist/Stalinist left. Examples, moving
round the Mediterranean, would include the Algerian FLN (National Liberation
Front), Nasser and Nasserism in Egypt, the PLO in Palestine, the Ba’ath Party
in Syria and Iraq, Mohammed Mosaddegh (PM of Iran till overthrown by CIA coup
in 1953), the various Kurdish parties such as the PKK in Turkish Kurdistan,
Kemal Ataturk and Kemalist parties in Turkey and the Communist Parties of
Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.
The picture is complicated by the
fact that these categories were fluid and the labels often misleading. Thus, a
movement e.g. Kemalism, could begin as to some extent anti-imperialist and
morph into a pro- imperialist force; a bourgeois nationalist movement e.g. the
Ba’ath Party of Saddam Hussein (and that of the Assad family), could describe
itself as socialist and include socialist in its official name, without
harbouring the slightest intention of
opposing capitalism or liberating the working class
and the Communists were quite often largely middle class in terms of their
entire leading layers and pursued a policy of subordinating themselves to
bourgeois nationalists such as Nasser.
But what all these forces had in common was a desire to ‘modernise’ their
respective nations and a perception of the Muslim masses, both peasants and
workers, as a ‘backward’ obstacle to this process. This elitism towards the
mass of ordinary people sank deep roots in large sections of the region’s
‘left’ and ‘progressive’ forces.
One effect of this approach was to
isolate much of the left from the religious masses and consequently make it
easier for the Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development
Party) in Turkey,
to present themselves as the principle opposition to the pro-imperialist
regimes and pro-Western military. However where this particular chicken really
came home to roost was with General Al-Sisi’s military coup of 3 July 2013.
Because the Muslim Brotherhood were
seen by the Egyptian masses as the main opposition to the hated regime of Hosni
Mubarak the victory of the anti-Mubarak revolution in early 2011 and the
holding of Egypt’s first real elections produced a Muslim Brotherhood
government and Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohammed Morsi. But this
government, behaving rather like the Irish Labour Party and other right wing
reformist parties, collaborated with the military, with the state and with
Egyptian capitalism and did nothing at all for the mass of the people who had
elected them. Indeed for the majority of Egyptians things got worse as the
economy deteriorated and state institutions became increasingly dysfunctional. This
in turn produced a mass movement against the government which culminated in
vast anti-MB demonstrations on 30 June.
At this point, and it was clearly
planned in advance (perhaps with the aid of the CIA), the military were able to
take advantage of the mass discontent and stage their coup. When the Muslim
Brotherhood protested against the coup in the name of democratic legitimacy and
organised sit-ins at
al-Nahda
Square and Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. The military responded on August 14 with a deadly massacre at Rabaa
which claimed, in a few hours, somewhere between 800 and 2000 lives. Human
Rights Watch called it, ‘one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in
recent history’
On the basis of this the Al-Sisi regime was able to consolidate its
thoroughgoing counterrevolution and re-establish all the features of the
Mubarak dictatorship.
The tragedy was
that many political forces and individuals who had played leading roles in the
Egyptian Revolution of 2011 now supported the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coup on
the grounds that the military were a lesser evil than the Islamists. Perhaps
the worst case of this was Hamdeen Sabahi, the Nasserist leader who was jailed
seventeen times under Mubarak and who had stood as a semi-left candidate in the
2012 Presidential election, coming third with 21% of the vote. The April 6
Youth Movement, who were a major factor in the street mobilizations in 2011,
also gave partial support to the coup.
As a result there was very little effective resistance to the counter
revolutionary coup.
At the heart of
this failure was the widespread tendency to see the fundamental division in
society as ‘modern’ secularism versus ‘backward’ Islamism, rather than the
class struggle and hence to regard the Muslim Brotherhood, not the military, as
the main enemy.
Another position
taken by many on the Egyptian left is that of the Third Square
which rejects the army and the Brotherhood as both equally reactionary, both
equal poles of counterrevolution.
But this, though clearly preferable to Sabahi’s out right support for the coup,
is still inadequate. To treat two political forces as equal poles of
counterrevolution when one is in power and massacring and imprisoning the other
and when one is the main representative of the ruling class and the embodiment
of the capitalist state and the other is a predominantly petty bourgeois opposition
with a mass base among the poor is, intentionally or not, to give aid to the
oppressor. Instead, in order effectively to build resistance to the al-Sisi
dictatorship it is necessary for socialists to defend all those suffering
repression, regardless of their religion and including the Muslim Brotherhood.
The attempted
coup in Turkey
on 15 July raised similar issues though the outcome was very different. The
similarity lay in the fact that many forces on the left, in Turkey and
internationally, were reluctant to wholeheartedly or actively oppose the coup
because they thought that the Islamist Erdogan government was as bad as (or perhaps
worse than) rule by the secular military . The whole event was over in a matter
of hours so there was little time for parties and movements (still less
academics) to take formal positions, nevertheless the phenomenon I refer to was
evident in terms of who did not come out onto the streets and in the commentary
on social media. Anyone on that night who posted clear anti-coup statements was
immediately assailed by objections from many sides including people of ‘the
left’. And this was despite the fact that the Turkish military had form – that
two previous coups in 1960 and 1980 had been brutal and repressive in the
extreme.
One argument put
forward to justify failure to oppose the coup is that it was a ‘fake coup’
staged by Erdogan himself to strengthen his position. Given the seriousness of
what occurred that night, the bombing of parliament and the presidential place
and the more than two hundred people killed this can be dismissed as fanciful
but the reason for the ‘theory’ (and the fact that it was advanced by many
people with very scant knowledge of Turkey) was clearly that it got people off
the hook of having actually to oppose it.
Another argument
was the notion that Erdogan was/is a fascist. This had been popular, including
in certain anarchist/autonomist circles, at the time of Gezi Park
and it resurfaced in relation to the coup. This characterisation is false for
many reasons. It is an instance of the tendency to call all instances of
capitalist state repression fascist, as in Thatcher was a fascist, Donald Trump
is a fascist and so on. In reality fascism was and is a counterrevolutionary
mass movement that destroys bourgeois democracy and the working class movement
(the trade unions and all the left) - destroys and eliminates not attacks and
weakens. This is the basic distinction between Mussolini, Hitler, Jobbyk,
Golden Dawn and the Front National on the one hand and Thatcher, Trump, Bush,
UKIP, Cameron, Merkel etc on the other. Erdogan and his government do not meet
these criteria at all. In addition calling the AKP fascist has affinities with the
Islamophobic term ‘Islamo-fascism’ used by former leftists like Christopher
Hitchens and Nick Cohen to justify their support for George Bush and Tony
Blair.
The third and
superficially most plausible argument for not opposing the military coup is
that Erdogan has been able to use his victory to reinforce his own power and to
extend that power in an increasingly authoritarian direction. There is no doubt
that this has happened and that the crackdown against those responsible for
coup, the so-called Gulenists and putchist elements in the Military, has
extended way beyond the ranks of those who could have been involved: Erdogan’s Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has
himself stated that the number of arrests has reached 32,000.
Nevertheless this argument is false for two reasons: first because in terms of
scale and severity this does not compare with the repression meted out by the
military. According to The Economist,
‘Turkey’s army has overthrown no fewer than four governments
since 1960. The bloodiest coup came in 1980, when 50 people were executed,
500,000 were arrested and many hundreds died in jail’
Second because progressive and left wing forces would be in a much stronger
position to resist this anti-democratic authoritarianism in so far as they
clearly opposed the coup from the word go.
Why then was the Turkish coup
unsuccessful, while the Egyptian coup swept all before it? Partly because the
Turkish army was not united but mainly because the Turkish masses, primarily
the Turkish working class, came out onto the streets in huge numbers
immediately, on the night of 15 July, to confront the tanks and stop the coup
in its tracks. They did this at the call of Erdogan (though not all who came
out were AKP supporters.. But the reason has little to do with religion and
everything to do with economics. In Egypt the capitalist economy was
deteriorating and so Egyptian Islamism bitterly disappointed many of its
supporters. In Turkey
the capitalist economy experienced an unprecedented boom and this enabled
Erdogan, by means of limited but judicious reforms, to retain and increase its
base in the working class. If we want an Irish parallel we could say Erdogan’s
AKP resembled Fianna Fail in the Celtic Tiger whereas the Muslim Brotherhood
was like Fianna Fail after the crash of 2008.
What both these cases demonstrate
is the folly of seeing secularism versus theocracy as the main dividing line in
society rather than the politics of class conflict.
Marxism and Religion
This article as a whole should be
understood as an application to contemporary events of the basic Marxist
analysis of religion which in turn is part of the general historical
materialist theory of ideology. This is not the place for an exposition of this
underlying theory.
However, two points need to be made here by way of conclusion.
The first is simply that people
make religions not religions people. Religion as a whole and every religion in
particular is a social product, a response to a real set of material
circumstances and therefore as society changes, as material conditions change
so do religions and people’s interpretations of religious texts and doctrines.
This applies equally to Christianity, Islam, Judaism and all the rest. As Chris
Harman has said:
The confusion often starts with a confusion about the power
of religion itself. Religious people see it as a historical force in its own
right, whether for good or for evil. So too do most bourgeois anti-clerical and
free thinkers. For them, fighting the influence of religious institutions and
obscurantist ideas is in itself the way to human liberation.
But although religious institutions and ideas clearly play
a role in history, this does not happen in separation from the rest of material
reality. Religious institutions, with their layers of priests and teachers,
arise in a certain society and interact with that society
.
The second is that in determining the
socialist and Marxist response to political movements with a religious
colouration – of which there are a multitude – the starting point is not the
theology or doctrine of the movement but the social force or forces it
represents and its role in the class struggle. This is the criterion Marxists
have generally applied to movements with a Christian ideology from Martin
Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement to the right wing Moral Majority to
the Easter Rising and the IRA and Chavez in Venezuela. It is the criterion that
must be applied to Islamist movements in their equally great variety. Hamas and
Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Isis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the AKP cannot all be
lumped together in one Islamist pot. It is necessary to make a concrete
analysis of each in its specific circumstances. And exactly the same principle
applies to secularism.
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