'The Prophet and the Proletariat: Islamic fundamentalism, class, and revolution' by Chris Harman (Socialist Workers Party pamphlet)

In Manuel Puig's novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men confront each other in a prison cell, somewhere in South America. One is a trashy movie-loving homosexual; the other a revolutionary, a guerrilla. The book is concerned with the nature of liberation; Valentin, the political activist, learns that Molina, his cellmate, for whom at first he has nothing but contempt, deserves freedom and respect. Valentin is a terrorist, if you like, a member of a militant guerrilla organisation not unusual in the Latin America of the 1960s and '70s, influenced by the Cuban revolution and Che Guevara.
The methods of such guerrillaism, whether urban or rural 'foco', proved disastrous, provoking repression and resulting in the deaths of many revolutionary militants.  But their 'discourse' was one of freedom. Valentin has waged war on the military dictatorship of his unnamed country in the name of freedom; and so he is able to learn, locked in his prison cell, that his notion of freedom was too limited. Molina, in the name of love, sacrifices himself for Valentin's cause. However distant they seem to be, Valentin and Molina are speaking, ultimately, the same language. They have the same aim.
You can imagine a version of The Kiss of the Spider Woman set in a jail perhaps in Egypt, in which one of 52 recently arrested gay men is confined with a member of Islamic Jihad. Perhaps, fictionally, by the end of it, the Islamist - let's say he's one of those responsible for the slaughter of tourists at Luxor a few years ago - has come to love his cellmate, as Valentin does. Or perhaps our Egyptian Molina finds himself ready to die for the Islamist cause. But such an ending involves quite a different kind of understanding than that in Puig's novel. In this case there would be no fused, common language. Either Molina' accepts that his sexuality is a crime against God, and the tourists with whom he has, no doubt, enjoyed liaisons in the past are abominations' deserving death; or Valentin' realises that the project to which he has devoted his life is wrong. There can be no cross-fertilisation, no rejuvenated, single concept of liberty, only a mortal clash of world views in which one or other must win.
It is this specific character of contemporary Islamism which Chris Harman fails utterly to register in The Prophet and the Proletariat. On the contrary, the gist of his argument is to see Islamism as no different, in essence, to other 'contradictory', 'petty bourgeois' movements elsewhere in time and place. Against the view that Islamism is 'automatically reactionary and 'fascist'' and that it is 'automatically anti-imperialist', Harman argues that it is the product of 'a deep social crisis which it can do nothing to resolve'. He concludes that, politically, socialists need to be 'with the state, never; with the fundamentalists, sometimes'. His survey of the different Islamist movements is well-researched, although there are some glaring omissions - the Lebanese movements get a brief mention, there is nothing on Pakistan, and almost nothing on Hamas. What he has to say about them is, on the whole, either true but banal, or false and missing the point.

Harman says that 'the Islamists are not our allies' and 'socialists cannot give support to' them. (p53). But we can't 'simply take an abstentionist, dismissive attitude to the Islamists', because the 'feeling of revolt' of those who suffer under world capitalism and who have turned to Islamism, 'could be tapped for progressive purposes'. There is a lot of verbal ambiguity here ('not support' rather than 'oppose', 'not allies' rather than 'enemies'; who, after all, wants to be abstentionist? And what does 'dismissive' mean?). Harman confuses an assessment of why sections of the 'suffering classes' turn to Islamism with an analysis of the movements as such. His ambiguities hide behind an apparently rigorous Marxist study of social classes and 'contradictions'.
To begin with, the dichotomy Harman presents, the two views of Islamism he sets out to attack, is not a fair one. It is true that many leftists in the Middle East from Stalinist or nationalist backgrounds, and intellectuals in the West, advocate support for 'liberals' or the state against the Islamists. It is true that some commentators describe these movements as 'fascist' without  qualification. Fascism is, largely, a European phenomenon, in its full-blown sense, which (as Harman notes) aims to smash powerful working class movements. Islamism exists in countries without such movements.
But it is not, logically, an inevitable consequence of considering Islamism to be analagous to fascism either that its differences with classical fascism are not understood, or that you would support state repression against it. Failing to deal with the case comparing Islamist movements to fascism, with qualifications, Harman rails only against one, unnecessary, political conclusion, rather than the substance of the argument. Islamist movements, which are organised political forces, are the enemies - the violent enemies, more often than not - of workers, trade unionists, socialists, feminists, women generally, non-Muslim minorities, oppressed nationalities, and so on. This is a fact. It is also a fact, increasingly, that they express their violent hostility through the mobilisation of a mass movement. It is, indeed, a mass movement with its own contradictions; socialists, with tactical skill, could hope to break individuals from these movements; and with success in building powerful workers' organisations hope to influence the mass base of the Islamist groups and marginalise them.
But for the most part imagining ourselves, as Western socialists, as engaged in a tactical battle with the Islamists against a common enemy is a fantasy. We are not. Precisely because, as distinct from European fascism, there are no strong, militant, confident workers' movements in those countries, our first job is to recognise the consequence of Islamist movements taking power, and the types of struggle they engage in now. They are, for sure, contradictory; what social phenomenon isn't? But when it comes to solidarity, our chief aim should be to help those who are opposing the Islamists as well as imperialism and authoritarian, repressive regimes, often at great risk. To imagine that the reactionary programme of the Islamists - with its day-to-day consequences of violence - are merely tragic ideological errors against which socialists would patiently argue, which is the tone of Harman's criticisms, is not to live in the real world.

It is instructive to see what Harman means when he says that the Islamists are not 'automatically anti-imperialist'. Analysing Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and Iran, he argues that being, fundamentally, petty bourgeois in nature, the Islamist movements are pulled in two directions. Essentially, one wing - representing conservative classes - is pulled into an accommodation with capital, imperialism, and so on. The other - representing other layers of the petty bourgeoisie, students for instance, and the poor - becomes dissatisfied with such accommodation. As far as it goes, this is true. But in attempting to subsume Islamism, effectively, into old-fashioned nationalism, Harman misses the point dramatically. Because even where Islamist groups take a 'radical', violently oppositionist stand, this does not demonstrate that their notion of anti-imperialism has anything in common with ours. (1)
Noting that some Islamist actions are progressive, such as demonstrations against the Gulf War in 1991, he writes: 'But even then we continue to disagree... on basic issues. We are for the right to criticise religion as well the right to practise it... We are against discrimination against Arab[ic] speakers by big business in countries like Algeria - but also against the Berber speakers and those... who have grown up speaking French... as well as defending Islamists against the state we will also be defending women, gays, Berbers or Copts against some Islamists'. (p 56).
We 'disagree', 'defend against'... The language here is all as if fictional SWP members in Algeria or Egypt are engaged in some united front with confused reformists, or some version of the Anti Nazi League. When Algerian women who won't wear the veil are gunned down by passing Islamists on motorcycles, are we merely 'disagreeing'?  When supporters of the Iranian Islamic Republican Party abroad used thuggery against leftist opponents, were we merely 'disagreeing'? Perhaps Harman has in mind people, mainly youth, in Britain who are influenced by Islamism, and the pamphlet is aimed at engaging with them. Whether this is a method which succeed strikes me as questionable.
Harman's anxiety to understand the social base for Islamist movements is laudable. But not if it means a failure to understand the concrete reality of these movements in relation to actual, currently existing, real progressive forces, or to see their reactionary programme merely as something to argue with them about (over Turkish coffee in the suq, no doubt).

Two examples illustrate the vagueness of Harman's sense of what is 'anti-imperialist'.
His study of the Islamist groups in Egypt, from the Muslim Brothers which emerged in the late twenties to the contemporary groups, including Islamic Jihad which has - strong - links to Osama bin Laden, stresses the conservative turn of the former, and the radicalisation of the latter. Radicalisation here means specifically that some of them identified the Egyptian regime as the enemy, rather than a vaguer notion of the West: hence the assassination of Sadat in 1981. 'Islam' here then becomes a filter through which more conventional notions of compromise with, or radical struggle against, imperialism and its allies are expressed. Harman knows, of course, that the Islamists generally give a reactionary twist to their 'anti-imperialism'; I am not accusing him of plain ignorance about what the Islamists say they want. But he gives their political programme very little weight.
Listen to Tala'at Fu'ad Qassim, of the Egyptian Islamist group Gama'a Islamiyya, justifying the murder of tourists: '[Tourism]... is a means by which prostitution and AIDS are spread by Jewish women tourists, and it is a source of all manner of depravities, not to mention being a means of collecting information on the Islamic movement. For these reasons we believe tourism is an abomination which must be destroyed. And it is one of our strategies for destroying the government.'(2)  The attack on September 11 also, of course, expresses the same sort of chauvinism. Qassim's group, like Islamic Jihad, has strong links in Afghanistan; Ayman al-Zawahiri of Islamic Jihad is bin Laden's supposed 'deputy', although there is speculation he is in fact the dominant figure. No radical nationalist, petty bourgeois terrorist group in the past has ever attempted actions like September 11, not because they couldn't, but because it would not have occurred to them. The political evolution of the radical Islamist groups is not the same as that of an earlier generation of guerrillaist nationalists, whatever the similarities in the social base of their cadre. They are something new, and something specific.
It is not a matter here of overstating the weight of ideology. Ideologies, of course, can break down suddenly; and a powerful independent socialist or militant workers' movement would have an enormous effect on individuals and broader masses to whom this ideology currently appeals. But it is a question of understanding the nature of these movements.
Hamas is another example. Hamas emerged from the Gaza wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, in the first place concentrating on purely social matters - charitable works, schools, making propaganda for Islamic forms of personal behaviour. For this reason they were looked on favourably, and supported, by Israel as an alternative to the PLO. After the beginning of the original intifada in 1987/8, Hamas took a more political turn. But one of its first ventures into 'opposition to Israel' was to effectively initiate, and sanction, a campaign to force Palestinian women to wear the hijab - a campaign which meant unveiled women were stoned in the street. Eventually, the Palestinian leadership condemned this campaign, although making some concessions to the idea that dressing modestly is a patriotic duty. In fact, throughout the first intifada, Hamas remained aloof from the struggle, naming its own days for specific actions, for instance, and focusing on Islamic rather than national, or political questions.
With the second intifada in 2000, Hamas did not engage in fighting with the Israeli troops; they left that to the nationalist militias, principally of Fatah. Hamas' contribution was to launch suicide attacks inside Israel. More recently, they seem to have begun commando raids, beginning with an attack on a Jewish settlement in Gaza.
Hamas' evolution, in sum, has been from a deeply conservative social movement into one which increasingly does nothing but destroy any possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That Israeli public opinion is so heavily behind Sharon, the most hawkish leader in its history, is largely a result of Hamas' suicide attacks. And it should be clear that the logic behind these attacks is not that of the IRA in the 1970s, for example - bombs will force the oppressor to give up. Rather it is that 'the Jews' have no right to be there, and are legitimate targets. Clearly, Hamas' actions have quite wide support among Palestinians, who are poor, and desperate, and losing. But that doesn't change the reactionary character of these actions.
For Harman, of course, it is a different story. His one comment on Hamas is to remind us of 'the arguments [in Hamas]... abut whether or not they should compromise with Arafat's rump Palestinian administration - and therefore indirectly with Israel...' (p 54) 'Compromise' with Israel, for Harman, is the symbol of capitulation; as long as Hamas does not compromise, it is expressing genuinely radical aspirations. The nature and consequences of its political programme are less important than the fact of its 'militancy' and refusal to 'compromise'.
In other words, when Harman says the Islamists are 'not automatically anti-imperialist', he means that while some Islamists are not anti-imperialist, others are. The task of socialists, therefore, is to sort out which Islamists are anti-imperialists as opposed to those which are not. The substance and nature of their anti-imperialism is a secondary matter.
These movements plainly - nobody is seeking to deny it - articulate social grievances of the masses, the dispossessed poor, layers of students and petty bourgeois, and so on. But they are not merely expressing 'progressive' struggles with a reactionary programme, which is Harman's train of thought. They have channelled struggles which could, under some circumstances, be progressive, in a reactionary direction, mobilised them in a reactionary movement. Anti-imperialism without a democratic programme, without freedom for women, and national minorities, without the space for the working class to develop its own ideas and organisations, this is not inconsistent and limited; in the world as it is today, it is not anti-imperialism at all.

Harman's case that Islamism is nothing special rests on his view of the movements' social base. He identifies four types of Islamism: 'of the old exploiters', 'of the new exploiters', 'of the poor' and 'of the new  middle class'. Islamist ideology, he argues, masks the class conflicts within the movements, but these contradictions explode in the course of events. Rather oddly, he approaches the Iranian revolution, for instance, through the framework of Tony Cliff's theory of 'deflected permanent revolution', according to which, where the bourgeoisie and the working class are both too weak to impose their programme on society, the stage falls vacant to sections of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. Cliff's theory referred to a world in which radical nationalist regimes had allied to the USSR and carried out programmes of state-capitalist nationalisation; the world Harman is describing is substantially different. In the Iranian case, Harman explicitly rejects, for instance, the idea that the Khomeini movement represented 'merely an expression of 'backward', bazaar-based traditional, 'parasitic' 'merchant capital', etc (p41). 'There was nothing specifically Islamic' in the way the Khomeini movement consolidated power.
This analysis enormously downgrades the role played in the formation of the Islamic Republic by the first of Harman's categories of Islamist, the old exploiters, who had suffered under the Shah's land reforms, of the bazaari merchants (though he mentions this) and mosques who had been taxed by the state, and the extent to which, therefore, the revolution in the first place brought together social forces with quite contradictory aims. Of course the Islamic Republic was not merely this: but the dominant social and political forces represented by Khomeini were traditional ones, mobilising a popular base, and of course in the contemporary world having no choice but to 'be capitalist' once in power.
It also downplays the practical, as opposed to abstract- strategic, failures of the Iranian Left. Khomeini mobilised a mass movement physically to destroy the Left. Harman refers to this but seems to draw no conclusion from it other than a descriptive one. The problem for the Left was that it didn't recognise that this mass movement was its homicidal enemy until it was too late. Perhaps even if they had, they would have been to weak to defeat it. But it was not only the government in which the Left had illusions. The violent attacks on them took them by surprise. Again, Harman underrates the problem presented by the Islamists 'on the street', imagining it is all a matter of how to win them over, since they and the left share a common anti-imperialist objective (although in their case inconsistently). The Iranian revolution shows that the problem was rather more severe than that. (3)

Harman refers to the impasse in Middle Eastern societies, the failures of post-war nationalism, such as Nasserism. He explains the rise of Islamism as a consequence of the social crisis in which this political history is embedded. But he fails to answer the question why an alternative to such failed ideologies and movements would be sought in radical Islam, rather than something else. If it was simply the weight of religion in these cultures, it would be a mystery that nationalisms which were fundamantally secular had emerged at all, now to be increasingly eclipsed. He does refer to the consequences of capitalism on traditional societies, exacerbated by global trends in the world system more recently. But he does not adequately register the fact that the defeat of popular movements, especially in Iran but also elsewhere, has played a vital role.
And what is missing from Harman's account is any sense that the growth of the Islamist movements is any cause for alarm. On the contrary, the gist of his case is that since they are 'contradictory', sometimes progressive, and express a 'feeling of revolt' that could be mobilised for progressive ends, there's nothing much to worry about. Sure, they have some unpleasant ideas we 'disagree with' and would 'defend' various people against, but if the workers' movement can move in the region, it will all be all right. This view, of course, informs the SWP's current agitation on the war - that imperialism is the only enemy, not 'fundamentalism', and so on. This pamphlet was written in 1999; but one assumes that were it written now, its main argument would be that the upsurge in Islamism provoked by imperialism was only to be expected, and still not much to worry about. For any sane socialist, on the other hand, the prospect, for instance, of Islamists coming to power in Pakistan is worth worrying about very much indeed.
The rise of Islamism is depressing and dangerous, from a socialist point of view. However 'contradictory', there can be little doubt that the Islamists will be an anti-working class force where the working class does move. We don't have to guess about this: it was proved in Iran; in Sudan, the current military regime, behind which is the Muslim Brotherhood, took power in a period of massive strikes, and to head off workers' demands and a move towards settling the military conflict with the south. An Islamist, pro-Taliban regime in Pakistan will be no friend to Pakistani workers.
Socialists in the West do need to deal with this problem, urgently. We will deal with it by building solidarity with those people currently fighting the Islamists and their other oppressors - feminists, socialists, secular intellectuals, trade unionists, civil rights groups, and so on - who are the leaven for a future socialist movement. We will not do it if we pretend that violent reactionary movements are not really a problem, that their contradictions will sort them out as long as we express our 'disagreements'. The rise of Islamism does not express a confused progressive impetus in the region, even if at a certain level it articulates legitimate social grievances. It represents a terrible threat to progressive, democratic, or socialist developments in the future.

Notes

1.  Harman piles on further confusion by referring to the Iranian People's Mujaheddin, who by 1979 were Marxist-influenced, as if they are part of the same phenomenon as the regime they later took up arms against. They were not. While it is right to distinguish different kinds of Islamism (some of which are moderate; there is a type of Islamism running through Arab nationalism from its inception, although mutedly), it is not helpful to throw into the discussion examples which can only obscure the issue, and the movements, at hand.

2.  Interviewed in 'Political Islam', Joel Beinin and Joe Stork (eds) (IB Taurus 1997) p 321.

3.  Harman refers twice to the later period (1987) in the war between Iran and Iraq, when the US sent in ships, which the SWP at the time regarded as supporting Saddam Hussein. He condemns those Iranian socialists, and others like Workers Libety, who took a 'neutral' position on this, arguing that such a view could only fail to relate to the Iranian masses who knew all about and hated imperialism. Harman's analysis is wrong from the start. Here - it was not the view of the SWP prior to 1987 - he sees Iraq 'starting' the war with Iran merely as 'doing a favour for imperialism', as though Saddam Hussein had no regional ambitions of his own. And anyway, the US fleet's intervention was not 'on the side of Iraq', but an effort at containment of a conflict the US wanted to end. Iranian socialists who maintained their opposition to Khomeini's war were not 'neutral', but consistent internationalists.
This view of Saddam Hussein fails - to put it mildly - to explain how a few years later he was taking 'anti-imperialist' action by invading Kuwait, which was the SWP's take on the Gulf War. If you understand that regimes like Iraq's and Iran's can have their own motivations and regional ambitions, rather than be merely pawns in the conflict between imperialism and anti-imperialism, this contradiction evaporates. Although Harman makes ritual gestures towards a theory of imperialism which recognises the complexity of the 'world system' which is post-colonial, his practical politics follow the SWP's increasing slippage into the simplistic framework of 'imperialism' and 'anti-imperialism' - a slippage begun, or accelerated, by their sudden volte face over the first Gulf War in 1987.

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