The rise of Islamism
Clive Bradley

‘The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be... the conflict between ‘the West and the Rest’ and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values.’ So wrote prominent American intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, in a much-hyped article in 1993, and later a book, entitled ‘The clash of civilisations’. Influential though the theory was, as the United States and its allies have bombed Afghanistan they have been at pains to distance themselves from it, for fear of alienating allies in the region, mainly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which they fear to be vulnerable to Islamist revolt. Rather, Bush and Blair have defined the war as ‘civilisation’ against terrorism. ‘Civilisation’ (not just ‘Western civilisation’) now includes the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the military dictatorship in Pakistan, the Russian butchers of Chechnya, etc; ‘terrorism’ is a concept to be widened or narrowed as the need arises.
   Indeed, the signs of the revolt they fear are there: Pakistan has seen a significant growth of Islamist opposition to General Musharaf, who has closely identified with Bush. Saudi Arabia’s wealthy, corrupt and repressive ruling family has been scared of Islamists since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamist soldiers as he waved to his troops in 1981, and has spent the years since savagely repressing militant ‘fundamentalists’, is feared to be extremely vulnerable. In Algeria, the Islamist FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) looked set to sweep elections in 1992, prompting a military coup which plunged the country into civil war. 
   Western governments have been obsessed with ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, especially since the end of the Cold War, scared the authoritarian regimes they support in the Middle East could fall to ‘Islam’, and then terrified as on September 11 ‘fundamentalism’ struck right in the heart of America. But the Western Left has tended to take the mirror image view, regarding Islamism as a legitimate expression of anti-imperialism, consequently to be supported. Because the Islamists cry ‘death to America’, articulate regional and popular grievances towards Israel, and generally decry ‘imperialism’, many on the Left, to one degree or another, have identified them as progressive, sometimes progressive, or ‘at heart’, so to speak, progressive. There have been exceptions to this general picture; many of those now keen to find something progressive in Osama bin Laden were, when Russian troops were reducing Afghan villages to rubble, only too delighted to object to fundamentalism as reactionary.
   Neither framework, ‘clash of civilisations’ or ‘anti-imperialism’, grasps the complexity and nature of the Islamist revival. 
   ‘Fundamentalism’ is a misleading term to describe these movements. Christian fundamentalists believe in the literal truth of the Bible. The literal truth of the Qur’an is accepted by all religious Muslims; what distinguishes Islamism is its effort to interpret contemporary political issues in light of the Islamic heritage, and Islamic history. Islamism is quite a wide trend in much political philosophy in the Middle East since the nineteenth century. Today, too, there are different Islamist currents, some moderate, some militant. Osama bin Laden belongs to that wing of Islamism which defines its goals as revolutionary rather than reformist - ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ Islamism. All Islamist trends, moderate and peaceful as well as militant and violent, have grown in the last 25 years. But especially as the attack on Afghanistan has turned bin Laden into a hero in the region, it is the militant varieties which are increasingly in the ascendant. What accounts for the growth of Islamism in all its forms? And what should be the socialist response, internationally, and in those societies?

1. The historical background
The Muslim world was once advanced and sophisticated in comparison with Christian Europe. When Europe was suffering the Dark Ages, Muslim Arab scientists invented algebra (which is an Arabic word) and discovered the zero. Islamic culture as a whole, in art and literature as well, was far more developed. ‘The West’ – Europe – was the source of barbarian hordes who periodically invaded the Holy Land bringing slaughter and intolerance.
   But by the colonial period, the Muslim world, largely dominated by the decaying Ottoman empire, had stagnated, as Europe had undergone bourgeois revolutions, presaged by the Enlightenment. Europe greedily eyed Middle Eastern territory as it watched the Ottoman empire disintegrate. With the collapse of that empire in the First World War, the European powers consolidated their grip, and carved up much of the Muslim world, certainly the Arab part of it (French rule in much of north Africa and Syria/Lebanon; British rule in Egypt and Sudan, and Palestine/Transjordan and Iraq). Further east, Iran remained independent, though Russia and Britain did their best to see otherwise. Huge numbers of Muslims remained under British rule in India.
   The ideas of the bourgeois revolution were taken up by nationalist thinkers, who often combined them with an appeal to their own, Islamic traditions. Secular nationalism largely evolved from this Islamic modernist tendency. Saad Zaghlul, the founder of the Egyptian Wafd Party after World War One, a modernising bourgeois nationalist movement which led a popular uprising in 1919 and dominated the inter-war period, had been a student of the most important early Islamist thinkers, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammed Abduh. Other intellectuals, notably the writer Taha Hussein, came from the Islamist tradition but were forthrightly secular. 
   After the Second World War, there were a wave of popular movements across the Middle East which brought radical, secular nationalist governments to power. ‘Arab socialism’ was declared in Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, whose military government introduced land reform, nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal, resisted a disastrous Anglo-French-Israeli invasion, and then progressively introduced more and more widespread nationalisations, and aligned with the USSR. Nasser was a popular hero across the region, copied in various states (Syria, Libya, Sudan). In Algeria, a massive and bloody war of independence against France brought radical nationalists to power in 1962; this was, indeed, in terms of real mass participation, the most thoroughgoing of the bourgeois revolutions of the period. 
 In Iraq, a popular nationalist movement had taken power in 1958 under Qassim, relying to a significant degree on working-class support; the strong labour movement was dominated by the Communist Party. That regime was overthrown, bloodily; after a few turbulent years, the right wing faction of the Ba’ath Party took power, and is still there. Saddam Hussein’s regime veered between pro-Western and ‘anti-imperialist’ policies, always savagely repressive of opposition movements and the national minorities such as the Kurds.
   In Iran (a mainly non-Arab country; the majority nationality is Persian), a Nasser-type regime under Mossadeq, which nationalised the British-owned oil company, was overthrown, with CIA and British assistance, and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was extravagantly pro-Western, though in fact carried through, for instance in land reform, many policies reminiscent of the radical nationalists. He was overthrown by an enormous revolutionary movement, in which Islamists under Khomeini ultimately dominated, in 1979. (See below).
   Islam played a role in the ideologies of all these movements, to varying degrees: Qaddafi in Libya (whose ‘Green Book’ evokes the symbolic colour of Islam) was considered by some to be an Islamic fundamentalist in the early years. The FLN in Algeria mobilised the cultural symbols of Islam as part of their nation-building project. Nasserist Egypt considered itself the centre of three worlds – the Arab, the African, and the Islamic; Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, made a great issue of his personal piety (he had the characteristic mark on his forehead which results from regular prayer) – though not enough to save him. But the Islamic component in post-war nationalism played second fiddle to the secular, sometimes in a fairly extreme fashion: Tunisia’s president Bourguiba banned the hijab and broke the Ramadan fast on television. Religion was declared a private matter. 
   Secular nationalism scored some important successes, particularly in bringing independence to the Arab world. But by the end of the 1960s it was running out of steam. The Arab states were humiliated by Israel in the June War of 1967. Economically they were facing real difficulties. In the 1970s, Egypt moved towards the USA both diplomatically and economically, opening the country to foreign investment; it also negotiated a peace treaty with Israel (after another war, in 1973, in which the Arab states did considerably better). Other radical states followed suit in economic policy, though not on the question of Israel. The new economic policy – Sadat called it ‘infitah’,  opening – led to an attack on the system which had cemented popular support for the regimes. In 1977 there were strikes and riots when Sadat tried to remove subsidies from basic foods which kept the masses from abject poverty; on that occasion he was defeated, but over the next decade or so the subsidies were largely removed anyway. The state’s promise of jobs to graduates began to prove costly, until soon unemployed students were a major source of discontent. The government of Hosni Mubarak, which succeeded Sadat, became more and more repressive, especially towards Islamists, as resistance grew.
   Elsewhere in the Arab world, a different process was taking place. In the oil-rich Arab states feudalistic/tribal monarchies, with colonial aid, transformed themselves into capitalist classes. In 1973, hiking the price of oil fourfold, the shaykhdoms became immensely wealthy. These ruling classes have enforced strict Islamic codes at the same time as gross inequalities have emerged as a result of oil wealth. In the biggest and most powerful state, Saudi Arabia, a tribal and puritanical Islamic sect, Wahhabism, has been the official religion of the government.
   Both pro-Western and secular nationalist regimes, all of which were authoritarian, often military in origin, sometimes brutally repressive, had lost impetus, or were widely seen to be discredited, by the end of the 1970s. The Islamist movements were growing, entering the mainstream of politics as well as the radical fringes. Who were and are these movements? And why did they grow, rather than radical, secular, socialist or working-class alternatives?

2. The Islamist movements
Modern Islamist groups aim for an Islamic state, that is a government which bases itself on Islamic law, the shari’a. Islam, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, is a religion depending on the law (rather than more abstract theology) and its interpretation, which is the job of the ulema, the clergy. Khomeini, as we shall see, was original in assuming this to mean literally that the clergy should form the government (most Islamist theorists have not been clerics). Organisations have differed in exactly how they define their project.

i.	Egypt

Egypt is the birthplace of contemporary Islamism. Aside from the Islamist flavour to early Arab and Egyptian nationalism already mentioned, it was in Egypt that the first Islamist organisation was founded – the Society of Muslim Brothers, by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Egypt at the time was a British protectorate ruled by an unpopular king. The nationalist movement (principally the Wafd Party) was militant, but had proved unsuccessful, and was thoroughly bourgeois, making little effort to mobilise its popular support around social questions. The Muslim Brothers began as a conservative movement for social reform, aiming to encourage Egyptians – and later Muslims elsewhwere – to rediscover their Islamic heritage and behave like proper believers. Its base, like that of later Islamist groups, was among the urban middle class, the ‘effendis’. Gradually, however, al-Banna’s organisation moved in a more overtly political direction. In the 1936-39 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, they sent fighters, and played a part in making the question of Palestine, even at that early stage, an ‘Arab’ or regional issue. At the same time, the Brothers moved further towards armed, terrorist-type action. They had an uneasy relationship with the nationalist parties, but by the late 1940s, when al-Banna was assassinated, had developed a considerable base.
   Some of the Free Officers, the army group which overthrew the king, took power in 1952, and kicked out the British, had links with the Brothers, and for a short while the latter supported the new regime (Nasser officially took the reigns of power in 1954). But they were hostile to the land reform which broke the power of the landlords, and quite soon the Brothers found themselves under arrest and facing persecution. As the regime became more radical, and began to introduce ‘Arab socialism’, the Brothers, who were against such atheistic heresey, faced intense repression, along with other oppositional forces like the Communist Party. In the mid-sixties, accused of an attempt on Nasser’s life, thousands of them were rounded up.
   One of those, executed along with other leaders of the movement in 1966, was Sayyid Qutb, a lay intellectual who is probably the single most important figure in modern militant Islam, at least outside of the Iranian and shi’a traditions. Qutb had been to America in the 1950s, where he was horrified by social morals, and in particular the sexual aggressiveness of women. After his arrest, Qutb wrote his famous work, Signposts, which is the first clear statement of the aims and worldview of the sects we now think of as Islamist, and is required reading for the cadre of these groups. Qutb identified not only the external, former colonial powers and their neo-colonial influence, or ‘the West’, as the enemy, but defined the regime itself as part of the ‘infidel’ problem. Society was divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan. The Islamist movement was surrounded by a swamp of ignorance and unbelief (jahiliyya, the term used to describe the society of Arabia before the coming of Muhammed). The creation of an Islamic government was not just an alternative, but a divine imperative. The method of creating it would be jihad, or holy war. (Jihad does not necessarily mean violent warfare, but increasingly in its use by Islamist groups, this is what it does mean).
   The main themes of militant Islam are here spelt out, although it’s unclear if Qutb himself would have wholeheartedly approved of the modern groups who claim his legacy.
   The Muslim Brothers were believed to have all but died out as a result of repression. But as Sadat moved away from Nasserist state-capitalism in the 1970s, they re-emerged. Sadat was initially warm towards them. He had broken with the USSR; his new economic policy was unpopular, and opening up dangerous space on his left (both within the regime and outside it), and the Brothers were a useful counterbalance. More, Sadat flirted considerably with using Islam as a source of legitimacy as Nasserist ideology was put out to grass: he made much of his own commitment to the faith, and introduced Islamic laws – stoking communal antagonism between Muslims and Egypt’s extremely large Christian minority.
   As the Brothers grew – although still technically illegal – through the 1970s, more radical schisms began to emerge. A group called the Islamic Liberation Organisation attempted a coup in 1974, seizing the Technical Military Academy in Cairo. Better known, Takfir wa Hijra (roughly, Atonement and Exile – hijra refers to Mohammed’s leaving Mecca for Medina), assassinated a teacher at al-Azhar, Cairo’s prestigious mosque-university, who was also minister for religious endowments. When Sadat made peace with Israel, signing a peace treaty in 1978 at Camp David, he had effectively signed his own death warrant. The militant group al-Jihad had formed cells in the army. In 1981, as Sadat was admiring his troops on the anniversary of the 1973 war, Khaled Islambouli shot him dead.
   There followed a period of intense upheaval. Islamists in the town of Assyut, where they were strong, attempted an uprising which was crushed. The new regime of Hosni Mubarak began to arrest, imprison and torture Islamists or suspected Islamists in huge numbers – thousands of them – a tradition it has continued ever since.
   Chukri Mustapha, an agricultural engineer considered the ‘emir’, or leader, of Takfir wa Hijra, expressed his ideology thus:

God be praised. He will prepare the land for the group of the just by provoking a war between the two great powers, Russia and America... The war is inevitable, they will destroy each other. God will thus have prepared the land for the Islamic state... Following [this war] the forces of the Muslim nation will be about equal to those of its enemies. It is then that the true Jihad will start.

As the gama’at islamiyya, the militant groups, began to grow, the Muslim Brothers moved more into the mainstream. By the end of the ‘seventies, they had formally declared their abandonment of terrorist activity. By the late eighties, although unable to stand in elections, they formed electoral pacts, first with the Wafd, then with the so-called Socialist Labour Party (getting 17% of the vote in 1987). More importantly, they established a network of schools, clinics, and even banks – a pattern typical of Islamist movements – and made huge inroads into Egypt’s professional associations, mainly among engineers, doctors, and by the late nineties, lawyers, winning a majority in the bar association. The Brothers, in other words, sank deep social roots. In student bodies, too, both moderate and militant Islamists have grown; here is one major source of support and recruitment for al-Jihad and other radical groups. Now the Brothers are the best-organised and chief opposition to the Mubarak government. In an attempt to curtail their influence, in addition to repression, the state tried to extend its control over mosques; but there are simply too many of these for such control to be effective.
   The weight of the moderate Islamists, which the Brothers now clearly are, of course provides the ideological context for the radical variants. And these have grown increasingly violent. In the 1990s, the militant groups made a turn to assassinating tourists, beginning with the murder of some Israelis in Sinai, and tourists near the pyramids. Then in 1997, an attack was launched at the ancient temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor which left 68 tourists and three Egyptians dead. Other murders have been carried out of Coptic Christians; the Nobel Prize winning author Neguib Mahfuz was stabbed; the outspoken secular journalist Farag Fuda was murdered.
   Tala’at Fu’ad Qassim, of the Egyptian Islamist group Gama’a Islamiyya, justifies the murder of tourists like this: 

[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.

Indeed, these attacks have crippled Egypt’s tourism industry, one of its chief sources of income and foreign exchange. Qassim’s group, like Islamic Jihad, has strong links in Afghanistan; Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Jihad is bin Laden’s supposed ‘deputy’, although there is speculation he is in fact the dominant figure. Al-Jihad seems to be the largest of the militant groups, and has built up influence in slum areas through study groups, distributing literature and audio cassettes with Islamic speeches, providing welfare services, and so on.
   There is plainly a fraught relationship between the Brotherhood and the militant groups, who look to the work of Sayyid Qutb, and identify the Brotherhood as having deviated from the righteous path.
   Moderate and legalistic as they now are, it should not be thought that the Brothers are a benign force in Egyptian political life. When the Muslim academic Nasr Abu Zaid put forward a theory that the Qur’an was read and interpreted differently according to historical context, the Brothers declared him an apostate, drove him from the university, and tried, through the courts, to force his wife to divorce him. The couple fled to Scandinavia.
   Secular, or secular-ish, and democratic forces remain alive in Egypt: Islamists are probably still a minority, there are legal left and left-of-centre political parties, and prominent intellectuals who oppose the Islamists. On the other hand, when 52 gay men were arrested on a Nile barge this year – the first time, as far as I know, there has been serious state repression of homosexuals – Egyptian civil rights groups refused to take up their case, probably for fear of Islamist-influenced public opinion.
   Over the past twenty years, the Islamists have emerged as a force which many commentators believe, despite the intense repression meted out to them, could topple the Mubarak government.

ii.	Iran

Clearly, a decisive event in the rise of the Islamist movements was the Iranian revolution. There is no space here to go into detail about this momentous event. But it has shaped and influenced the growth of the Islamist groups, sometimes directly as the ‘Islamic Republic’ trained and funded some of them.
   Iran under the Shah had undergone profound social upheaval. The capital, Tehran, for instance, mushroomed in size (although lots of it was unfinished building sites). In the countryside there was radical land reform; and the state led rapid industrialisation. The working class and ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ grew rapidly; old social classes, whether in the countryside or in the bazaar (the market) were squeezed (and heavily taxed, as was the mosque). There was widespread opposition to this so-called White Revolution in the 1960s, and it was then that Ayatollah Khomeini first emerged as an opponent of the regime, forced into exile in Iraq, and later in Paris. His speeches on cassette were to become very popular.
   A variety of social forces came together through the 1970s to oppose the extremely repressive, pro-western Shah. Iran was the richest, most developed, and most heavily armed state in the region, regarded by the United States as its closest ally along with Israel. But the Shah’s rule proved to be far more precarious than CIA experts, for instance, believed possible. 
   The movement which, by late 1978, was challenging the regime, was thus composed of different social actors with incompatible aims. On the one hand there was the urban poor and the industrial working class, especially but not only in the vital oil industry. A general strike was one of the forces which succeeded in toppling the Shah. There was also a large organised Left, although principally in the form of guerrilla organisations – the two most important were the Fedayyin, which was avowedly Marxist (influenced, for instance by Guevarism), and the radical Muslim People’s Mujaheddin Organisation (see below). The pro-Moscow Tudeh Party also played a role, although in the past and future it proved to be one of the most right-wing, pusillanimous ‘communist’ parties on earth.
   On the other hand there were the wealthy bazaari merchants, sections of traditional classes rolled back by the White Revolution, and the mosque. These distinct social forces, with distinct aims and interests, temporarily came together for the single aim of removing the hated Shah; but almost immediately the movement fractured into virtual civil war. It came together on a huge scale. Along with the general strike, the mass demonstrations reached a scale rarely seen even in revolutionary movements: millions of people took to the streets, crippling the army’s ability to repress them, and indeed splitting the army. The guerrilla organisations fought the army with some success.
   For a short period, the working class was centre stage. Creating independent workplace organisations, shoras, which could have been further developed in a ‘soviet’ direction, purging managers, taking ever more radical steps in the factories, the chances for working class revolution were very real. The Left was strong and confident. Yet the shoras were quickly co-opted by the Khomeini movement; the regime almost immediately turned on the Left – and on women, and national minorities – and unleashed their violent, urban mass movement against them. Left-wing organisations had their offices sacked; then the Left’s stronghold, Tehran university, was physically attacked by the Hizb Allah, the fascistic mass movement. Pasdaran, the ‘revolutionary guards’, attacked demonstrations of unemployed workers. ‘Islamic laws’ were introduced, women forced to wear the veil, ‘prostitutes’ and homosexuals executed; the Khomeini regime introduced a reign of terror. ‘Imperialism’ was declared the enemy, and the Left identified as an arm of ‘imperialism’; the American Embassy was seized in a demagogic display of anti-imperialist fervour. Then, when Iraq invaded an area of disputed territory in September 1980, the two countries embarked on a seven year, horrific war, which provided ample ammunition on both sides to identify an external enemy.
   How did Khomeini and the clergy come to dominate this revolution, and crush its alternative potential? The mosque had been an independent space during the Shah’s rule, outside the regime’s capacity for repression, enabling the mullahs to emerge as a leadership for a section of the masses. Religious symbols became powerful means of mobilisation (for instance in the timing of mass demonstrations). Khomeini himself, from abroad, was known as a firebrand opponent of the Shah; by the beginning of 1979 he was seen to ‘personify’ the revolution. 
   Other currents of Islamist thought had also become widely known in the decade or so before the revolution, most importantly that of Ali Shariati. Shariati was a lay intellectual who interpreted the struggle against the Shah in terms of reclaiming an indigenous cultural heritage. His ideas were far from Khomeini’s, a sort of populist Islamism which even talked about socialism, and was heavily influenced by the thinking of Franz Fanon. In turn the People’s Mujaheddin were influenced by Shariati. Other more moderate clerics were associated with Khomeini (some to form successive governments, subordinated to Khomeini himself and his council of experts, who were purged or resigned). Shariati cannot be held responsible for the Islamic Republic; but for sure the general currency of moderate, or even enlightened and secular-oriented Islamism created a climate in which the profoundly reactionary variant could win leadership.
   Khomeini’s Islamism was able to appeal to a number of social groups and classes – to the bazaar, which had historic links to the mosque; to the dispossessed poor; to sections of the intelligentsia; and to sections of the middle class to whom he offered ‘order’. He proposed not merely an Islamic government but government by Muslim clerics – which appealed to the clergy. In the end, the Islamic Republic was a hybrid of this proposed theocracy and a truncated parliament, but with the clergy firmly in control. It was never a totalitarian state, and opposition, especially from a working class whose economic militancy continued throughout the next two decades, and more recently among students, survived. But the organised Left was crushed or driven into exile.
   This Left, famously, never knew what they were dealing with. From the outset, in the main, they supported Khomeini, accepting his ‘anti-imperialism’ as good coin. Some, like the Tudeh, and what came to be known as the Fedayyin Majority, continued to support him as he suppressed the Left, until he turned on them. The Mujaheddin took up arms against Khomeini eventually; but by then it was far too late – and like the secular Left, the Mujaheddin were divorced from the industrial working class. Indeed, the Left as a whole had little implantation among industrial workers, and was unable to affect the struggle over the shoras, for example.
   But the Left’s error was not simply that they supported governments or had a tragic misestimation of what governments were about. They fatally misread the nature of the mass movement itself, failed to understand that a section of the mass movement was the regime’s brutal battering ram against them. The Iranian revolution, certainly from the point of the organised Left, was lost not in text books or speeches, but on the street.
   There was a distinctive Shi’a component to Khomeini-ite Islamism in Iran. The Shi’a are a sect which diverged from mainstream Sunni Islam very early in Islamic history; they are the main sect in Iran, and numerous in surrounding areas (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, some in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf). Unlike the Sunni Islamists, who seek to recreate the period immediately after Muhammed’s death, which they look to as a golden age, the Shi’a reject the legitimacy of the early Caliphs, and see them as usurpers. Shi’a Islam gives more weight to the temporal authority of the ulema (‘mullahs’ in Persian), like Khomeini. It has been interpreted as more intrinsically political and revolutionary than Sunni Islam, placing more stress on the obligation to revolt. The Iranian government has particularly supported Shi’a groups abroad, for example, and prominently, in Lebanon.
   Shi’a or not, though, other Islamists looked to Iran as an example and an inspiration. The most powerful US ally in the region had fallen, and been replaced by an Islamic Republic. It shocked and terrified the West, and testified to the strength of Islam not only as a political force, but a revolutionary one. Almost immediately, Islamist groups turned the inspiration into action – in Saudi Arabia, in 1979, the hajj, or Mecca pilgrimage, saw an Islamist uprising. In the Muslim world and in the West, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ became not just a lurking danger or promise, but a vital force.
   Over twenty years on, Iran is a cause for some optimism. A more moderate president, Khatami, was elected in 1997. Student revolt broke out in 2000 against represssion and censorship. The working class remains militant. And if there is anywhere militant Islamists are unlikely to seize power in the future it is the country in which they have held it, meting out repression, for two decades.

iii.	Algeria

In Pontecorvo’s marvellous film Battle of Algiers, a Muslim woman dons Western clothes and make-up for the first time in order to go into the French quarter of the city and plant a bomb in a trendy cafe. Later we see the awful consequences of the explosion. The Algerian war of independence was indeed a bitterly-fought, bloody business in which perhaps a million people died before the brutal French colonial authorities finally withdrew, in 1962. The war had lasted eight years; colonial rule over a century.
   The new government was formed by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the most important of the nationalist forces. Like others elsewhere, it moved quickly in a state-capitalist direction, first radically under Ben Bella, who was overthrown by Hoari Boumedienne in 1965. He was succeeded by Chadli Benjedid, who held power until the coup of 1992. The Algerian revolution was far more thoroughgoing and radical than similar movements elsewhere in the Arab world, but it was more hesitant in its secularism, partly because the mosque played a role in the struggle against the French. The National Charter declared ‘The Algerian people is a Muslim people... Islam is the state religion.’ 
   But the FLN formed a one-party state. It nationalised religious schools and institutions. It proved to be authoritarian and repressive. An Islamist movement began to emerge in the sixties and seventies, although relatively moderate and reformist; it was influenced by the Muslim Brothers. As popular discontent with corruption and lack of democracy grew, the Benjedid government began to make concessions, promsing liberalisation and democracy. In 1989 it ended the FLN’s monopoly on power, and moved towards creating a multiparty system. But after years on one-party rule, the Islamists, grouped together in the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a coalition of groups led by the Islamist moderate Shaykh Ali Abassi Madani, emerged as by far the largest opposition group.
   As elswhere, the FIS had built its support through work in the community, among the poor and the middle class, through the mosque. They had taken over ‘minor’ mosques in peripheral areas. A big part, for sure, of the support they won was due more to popular discontent with the FLN regime than active support for Islamist ideas. And the FIS declared itself committed to the multiparty system, to democratic institutions, and to minority rights. There were tensions in the FIS between Madani – a Francophone moderate – and Ali Belhadj, an Arab-Islamic militant, originally from Tunisia.
   Still, many Algerians were afraid of their growth. Many still speak French as a first language, and the Islamists were stridently Arabist. There is a large non-Arab, though Muslim, Berber minority who regarded the Islamists with suspicion. Algeria’s significant feminist movement was alarmed. And many Algerians have strong links with the Arab community in France, who are ‘Westernised’ and often relatively secular, and whose youth, for example, are interested in rap and rai music, which the Islamists condemned.
   Unlike other governments which have permitted political liberalisation, the Algerian allowed the Islamists to compete in elections. The FIS’s programme was relatively moderate; in economics it was positively liberal. But the tensions under the surface would explode over the next few years.
   In 1990, in municipal and regional elections, the FIS swept the board. With 65% of the electorate voting, they took 55% of municipal councils and two thirds of the regional assemblies. The FLN did badly – much to their own shock and horror. In all the major cities, the FIS won huge majorities of the vote.
   Governmental elections came – to be fought in two rounds. The first were held in December 1991, the first multiparty parliamentary elections since independence.  The FLN had gerrymandered as much as possible, but the results were a crushing defeat for the party which had driven out the French. The FLN came third, with just 16 out of 231 seats. The FIS won 188 seats, with almost half the total vote. Second was the Socialist Forces Front which took 26 seats. With a second round of elections due, which the FIS was sure to win, the military intervened. There was a coup at the beginning of 1992; the army declared a state of seige, cancelled all elections, banned the FIS and arrested its leaders. More than 10,000 Islamists were held in a concentration camp; their mosques and welfare services were closed. And the country descended rapidly into civil war.
   The civil war was to leave as many as 70,000 dead. It was a war, primarily, between the Islamists and the army, with both sides committing terrible atrocities. But many civilians, leftists, secular radicals and intellectuals, trade unionists and others got caught in the crossfire and were identified by the Islamists as their enemies. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) was responsible for the  most reactionary actions; but the unofficial armed wing of the FIS itself, the Islamic Salvation Army, AIS, carried out similar attacks. 
   The Socialist Forces Front, which had come second in the election, condemned both the repression and the Islamists. Many of its supporters fell victim to Islamist attack. At its peak, Islamist violence was implacable: women not wearing the hijab were gunned down at bus stops, following a warning from the GIA/AIS that this would happen. Men and women were prevented from travelling on trains together. The rai artist Cheb Hasni, was murdered in 1994; thousands demonstrated in protest in the city of Oran. Large numbers of leftists, feminists and others fled the country, mainly to France.
   By the late nineties, things had calmed down. In further elections, though the FIS was banned, other Islamist parties, making a bid for a more moderate image, polled well. 
   As elsewhere, state repression in Algeria had the effect of unleashing the most reactionary elements of, and aspect of, the Islamists. The military’s effort to ‘eradicate’ the ‘fundamentalists’ – an objective it was keen to show off to Western governments – did not, and could not, succeed. The broad Left was placed in a terrible position, vulnerable to both the forces of the state and the Islamists, for whom the refusal of secular women to wear the veil was more important than whether they were opposed to repression. For sure there were splits in the Islamists, whose leaders sometimes condemned the more extreme actions of the military wings. And clearly the FLN government, and then the army, bears a huge responsibility for the civil war. But the Islamists demonstrated their true character in the way their side of the war was prosecuted. As in Iran, they simultaneously opposed, and violently opposed, both the government and the forces of genuine progress.

iv.	Palestine

When the state of Israel was created, first through UN partition, then through war, in 1948, 750,000 or so Arab refugees were created. The West Bank fell under Jordanian rule, the Gaza strip under Egyptian. In the Six Day War of 1967 in which the Arab armies were humiliated, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai in Egypt and the Golan heights in Syria. It gave back Sinai in 1981. 
   Palestine became a cause celebre in the Arab world from the outset, but it was only after the ’67 war that a distinct Palestinian nationalist movement emerged. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was taken over by these nationalist movements, the biggest of which was Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, and embarked upon armed struggle against Israel. It gained some success in putting the issue on the political map, but made little headway in terms of defeating Israel. After the 1973 war, the PLO – which had declared its objective to be a ‘secular democratic state for Muslims, Christians and Jews’ in all of Palestine (meaning the ‘destruction’ of Israel as a state) – moved towards trying to find a diplomatic solution, although a ‘rejection front’ formed which was opposed to this. Crushed in Jordan in ‘Black September’ 1970, the PLO guerrillas retreated to Lebanon, which soon – partly, though by no means entirely, as a result – collapsed into a devastating civil war. Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 left some 20-30,000 dead and drove the PLO leadership from the country. Then an uprising, or intifada in the occupied territories ultimately forced Israel to the negotiating table. A profoundly inadequate peace deal was signed in 1993, though that collapsed in 2000. At the time of writing, the future of ‘peace’ is very uncertain.
   Palestinian nationalism had always been highly secular. There is a Christian minority among the Palestinian Arabs, and some of their important thinkers have come from it. The ‘secular’ nature of the movement’s proposed solution, whatever its limitations, was testimony to their non-Islamist intentions. In the occupied territories, especially the West Bank, the Communist Party had considerable weight, and controlled a number of municipalities from the 1970s onwards. The PLO had a vocal would-be Marxist (although in truth, ultra-nationalist) Left. Partly as a result of the Palestinian people’s dispersal, influence from outside, and Western, intellectual sources was always strong.
   Until the intifada of late 1987, the secular nationalists had never considered the Islamists much of a problem or threat. There was an Islamist movement in Gaza, but it had little weight in the more sophisticated (and less poor) West Bank. Among students, for example at Bir Zeit university, the Islamists were a negligble force.
   Today all that has changed. Islamists are a growing influence even in the West Bank and even among university students. As the post-Oslo Palestine Authority has proved corrupt and repressive, and has failed to bring about meaningful independence, the Left has declined sharply, and the Islamists have grown.
   The biggest Islamist group is Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement. 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, the typical fare of the Islamists. 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
   The Palestinian leadership created this space for them. Arafat’s Authority has more members in the security forces than it has teachers; and a major aspect to the negotiated deal in 1993 was that Arafat take over policing Arab territories from Israel, which increasingly unsure of the point of doing it. Much of the repression is necessarily aimed at the Islamists. In addition to its repressiveness, and failure to bring about a just settlement, the Palestine Authority is notoriously corrupt: in the midst of great, and worsening, poverty, officials flaunt the wealth they have gained through corruption; association with these authorities has tarnished the old-style nationalists.
   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 today heavily behind Ariel Sharon, the most hawkish leader in its history, is largely a result of Hamas’ suicide attacks (and the inability of many Israelis to understand the sources of Palestinian frustration). 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.
   There is, of course, a strong element of straight-forward, non-Islamist nationalism in Hamas’ growth. But they have redefined the national question in religious terms. If the PLO once wanted a secular state, Hamas wants an Islamic one, in which there is no place for Jews; indeed, ‘the Jews’ are intruding on Muslim, not Palestinian, or even Arab, land. Hamas have received financial support from the Saudi regime, which also sees the issue in these terms. It seems likely that images of Palestinian demonstrations holding up Hamas placards and flags exaggerate its real strength. Yet they are, unquestionably, a growing force, beginning to eclipse Fatah.

v.	Others

There is no space here to go in detail into other countries were Islamists have been powerful. But in summary:
   In Sudan, a military coup backed by the Sudanese Muslim Brothers took power in 1989. In Sudan the Brothers had superficially moved in a moderate direction. In practice, they proved as repressive and reactionary as elsewhere. A powerful movement of workers’ strikes had gripped Sudan in the late 1980s, and there were moves by the Khartoum government to end the war with the non-Arab, often Christian forces in the south of the country. It was to head off both these developments that the army intervened. The government has been savagely ‘Islamic’ and brutal towards the southern rebels: famine has gripped the southern areas as a result of the war.
   In Lebanon, Muslims – both Sunni, and (especially) Shi’a – were effectively second class citizens in the sectarian, ‘confessional’ system established after the Second World War. As that system began to break down, and civil war broke out in the mid-seventies, the Shi’a muslims formed a ‘movement of the dispossessed’ with their own party, Amal (Hope). But the civil war – with Israeli and Syrian intervention, crippling action by the various militias, and so on, soon started to reduce the country to rubble. More radical Islamists group, principally the Hizbollah (Party of God) backed – both financially and with personnel, by Iran. It was these groups who attacked US marines, kidnapped Westerners, and eventually drove out the Israeli army from the south. Amal remained more moderate and secular; its leader is a bourgeois lawyer who lives in the United States.
   Tunisia under Bourguiba was one of the militantly secular Arab states, and also with one of the strongest workers’ movements. In 1978 there was a powerful general strike, from which the Islamists, led by Rashid Ghannoushi, stood aside. Later they recognised their mistake, and began to take a more active role in social and political struggles. Although influenced by the Muslim Brothers, Ghannoushi’s Islamic Tendency Movement, now known as the Renaissance Party (Ennahda) moved towards a more ‘Tunisian’ identity. Again, state repression has ‘radicalised’ the Tunisian Islamists.
   Afghanistan is covered elsewhere in this journal, and is outside the scope of this article. In many ways the Taliban and other Afghan Islamists are strikingly different to elsewhere – the product of a more backward society, of Russian occupation, of US and Pakistani financial and military-training support. All these factors have created the most virulently reactionary Islamists of all – both the Afghans themselves, and the non-Afghan forces who have used the country as a base, the so-called ‘Afghan Arabs’ like Osama bin Laden. The differences between the Islamists in Afghanistan are important; but it should be stressed that the country became, even before Taliban rule, a centre for international Islamism. Many of the Islamist groups around the Middle East have sent their fighters to train in Afghanistan, and have strong links with bin Laden.

3. Why Islamism? 
The nature of capitalist development in the region itself in part accounts for the emergence of Islamism. A huge educated or semi-educated middle class has been created which was promised the fruits of development but has not seen them. The working class is relatively small. A large class of pauperised peasants (not quite peasants, but small farmers certainly) remains. Population growth, and migration from the countryside, has produced overcrowded cities in which there are large numbers of marginalised poor. If not ‘relations of production’, certainly pre-capitalist forms of social organisation have survived – the family; the mosque. And as economic crisis has deepened, as the welfare systems put in place by state-capitalist regimes such as Egypt’s have disintegrated, these old social structures have proved their worth to millions of people.
   Secular nationalism itself did not sink deep roots in the population. It coexisted with Islamic traditions even at its most radical. The secular ideology of the bourgeois nationalists remained, on the whole, the preserve of the elites. It did not permeate popular culture, as the Enlightenment did in bourgeois Europe.
   And the nationalist regimes were experienced as bureaucratic, authoritarian, and repressive. The ‘socialist’ vocabulary of many of them means that in some countries, at least, the population has experienced something of a mild form of Stalinism: socialism is identified with a discredited, failed past. There is now a huge crisis of bourgeois culture: the authoritarian, now mainly pro-Western states, which once, like Egypt, were culturally vibrant, are stagnating. In the last year, only around 300 books were published in Egypt – compared to over 4,000 in Israel, for example.
   The Left largely identified itself with the state-capitalist project. This is true both of the nationalist left, and the mainstream communist parties: Egypt’s disbanded to join Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union in the 1960s. Left critics of authoritarian governments have often focused more on economic policy than on questions of democracy or, still less, workers’ rights. And of course with the collapse of the USSR, the Stalinist and nationalist lefts have been adrift and in crisis.
   Culturally, the Islamists appeal to a sense of past glory; it is relevant that the Islamic, and Arab, pasts are imperial ones. The power of the West is viewed as a source of ‘humiliation’. This is an ideology which appeals in particular to the young educated men who tend to form the activist base of the Islamist groups.
   But it should not be thought that the growth of Islamism was automatic or inevitable, nor that alternatives do not exist. There have been powerful moments of working class action in the history of the region. Iran is described above. It is by no means the only example, though it is the most impressive.
   Workers’ strikes were a feature of Egyptian life prior to the 1952 coup. Indeed, one of the regime’s first actions was to execute the leaders of militant strikes. Later, too, workers played a role: in 1977, it was a combination of rioting and a near general strike which forced Sadat to reinstate subsidies on basic foods. Striking workers and the urban poor united to chant ‘O hero of the crossing, where is our breakfast?’
   In Iraq, a period of intense working class militancy followed the 1958 revolution, and the labour movement’s support for the regime was a source of its strength. Its defeat was the foundation of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship which has been in power since 1968. There continues to be a workers’ movement in Algeria. Tunisia is often considered to have the biggest and best organised workers’ movement in North Africa. It was partly to defeat militant trade union action that the Sudanese military took power in 1989.
   Yet it remains true that the Middle East, or the Arab world at least, has never seen working class action on the scale, or of the type, that we have witnessed elsewhere, for instance in South America, South Africa, or south or south east Asia. This absence of militant workers’ movements has shaped political opposition as the bourgeois regimes have gone into crisis. It cannot be stressed enough that just as the victory of the Khomeinite Islamists influenced the subsequent growth of Islamism, so too did the defeat of the working class alternative which was present in the Iranian revolution. Defeats have their cost.
   The sheer youth of the population is also a factor. The majority of people across the region are under 25. They have grown up in a world shaped by the failure of the secular nationalists, the eclipse of Stalinism, and the defeat of the Iranian revolution. And in the years since there has been nothing, except Islamism, to fill the political void.

4. Socialists and Islamism
What sort of movements are the Islamist groups? It is difficult, and wrong, to make sweeping generalisations, and distinctions need to be made between movements, within and between those countries where the Islamists flourish. The Taliban are not the same creature, socially or ideologically, as the Muslim Brotherhood. Khomeini and Shariati were both Islamists, but not the same. Nevertheless, there are features these movements have in common. 
   The distinction sometimes made is between those Islamists which are ‘anti-imperialist’ and those which accommodate to imperialism and local regimes, with the strong implication that the ‘anti-imperialist’ type is preferable. This raises the question as to what is meant by ‘anti-imperialism’, and whether it is meaningful guide for a socialist response. In the case of Islamist groups, there can be little doubt that the more ‘anti-imperialist’ they are, the worse – the more anti-democratic, the more violent towards secular, feminist and progressive opponents, the more chauvinistic towards foreigners, the more repressive they would be in power. ‘Anti-imperialism’ without a positive, democratic and anti-capitalist programme is a reactionary, demagogic force.
   The Islamists appeal to a range of social classes, though their membership and cadre tend to come from the urban, educated middle class. They are the product of modern social and political developments, and therefore in an important sense, modern movements. Though Islamism sometimes appeals to old social classes, and certainly gets support from them (from the bazaar, from some sections of the mosque hierarchy, from the Saudi royal family, from landlords and tribal chiefs in the case of Afghanistan), it is wrong to see it as simply the festering sore of pre-capitalist society. They are the product, on the whole at least, of capitalism. 
   Ideologically, however, although sometimes Islamists address themselves to ‘modern’ political questions, the overwhelming thrust is backward looking – idealising the early Caliphate, glorifying the Islamic past, resenting economic development which can not be reversed. Many militant Islamists identify with the salifiyya tradition. In fact this movement was founded by Muhammed Abduh, one of the early modernising Islamists who advocated, for instance, rights for women. But its stress on the salafi – the early followers of the Prophet – has translated, in later years, into a profoundly traditionalist viewpoint, seeking to recreate the idealised society of early Islam. Politics and ideology have their own weight. There is on the Left a type of sociological reductionism which reads the Islamists as ‘petty bourgeois’, and therefore simply a variant of standard petty bourgeois nationalism. This is quite false. There are, of course, other movements which seek through extreme violence to recapture some idealised past – the Khmer Rouge springs to mind. The Islamists’ ‘discourse’ is, however, quite different from most nationalist movements, certainly from any which have had progressive, liberatory potential.
   In so far as they are a violent reactionary movement, and especially in so far as they can mobilise a mass movement which, as in Iran, can attack and crush the left and the workers’ movement, there are strong parallels between the Islamists and fascism. They are not identical to fascism, but a close enough analogy to be called ‘fascistic’. The significance of this was clear in Iran: relations between the Left and the Islamists were of violent confrontation; the Left’s task was not simply to intervene in an inchoate mass movement and ‘win it over’. The same thing can be seen in Algeria. Often the central issue is day-to-day self-defence.
    Other Islamists are more moderate, and concerned with ‘social reform’ rather than violent politics. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has evolved in this direction. Of course, such movements can evolve suddenly in the other direction, also, as the history of the Brotherhood in Sudan shows. In Algeria, the apparent commitment to democracy of at least a large part of the FIS collapsed when their electoral victory was denied them. European fascism, these days, often has an apparent parliamentary focus, rather than concentrating on fighting on the streets and burning immigrants alive in hostels; that lesson should not be lost on us.
   Even when moderate and reformist, the Islamist groups are best understood as conservative, right-wing movements, concerned with enforcing social conformity, especially on women and ‘apostates’, and a threat to religious and other minorities. The reformist Islamists, are less reactionary than their militant counterparts, but not in any sense progressive. However, the profound challenge for leftist and democratic forces in mainly Muslim countries is that for a decade, perhaps two, the various Islamist tendencies have been, overwhelmingly, the dominant organised opposition to reactionary regimes. What has driven sections of them into frenzied ‘armed struggle’ is largely the repressive responses of those regimes. For the Left, such repression is no solution; on the contrary, the Left needs to at the forefront of defending democratic rights, even of the Islamists. The Algerian Left took the right approach in 1992: indeed, it is hard to see how a FIS regime democratically elected could have been worse than the civil war which followed its banning, especially as such a large element in their electoral support was a protest vote against FLN corruption and repression. Similarly, among the Palestinians, repression of Hamas by Arafat’s security forces, never mind the Israeli army, only strengthens Hamas. Self-defence, of course, is distinct from state repression.
   It should be stressed that being the main opposition is not the same as claiming majority support. Probably most people, most Muslims, remain suspicious, at least, of the Islamists. Outside Algeria, they have not been in a position to win elections.
   Yet the problem for the Left in these countries is that where the Islamists, reformist or militant, have built a solid base in communities, the Left has not. Even in student and professional associations where secular nationalists thought themselves impregnable, they have been outflanked. There are energetic organisations across the region attempting to do grass-roots work – civil rights groups, women’s organisations, trade unions, of course, and so on. But many of these are wilfully unideological bodies, which simply can’t compete with the fleshed out worldview of the Islamists. The poor, the working class, and the middle classes want political answers – the growth of Islamism shows this. So if the Left is to compete it needs to be politically clear.
   A rough analogy (only rough, it isn’t intended to hold in every regard) is South Africa. In the 1970s, leftist activists, including many students, played a vital role in starting and building independent trade unions. By the mid-eighties these were often strong, militant, and well-organised, and with a firm sense of their own independence from the mainstream nationalist movement, the ANC and its internal surrogates. But as the mass movement rose in the late eighties, the limited political tools of the trade unions proved inadequate to resist the power of the bourgeois nationalists and Stalinists; the trade union movement, to a high degree, was co-opted, politically, by the ANC. That type of process is even more likely to occur in mainly Muslim countries where Islamists have established roots in communities. Politics, and socialist ideas firm on democratic and egalitarian principles, are not an optional extra in the building of a genuinely progressive movement. 
   This is not to say that a working class movement could only be built on a revolutionary Marxist programme; far from it. The organic process of organisational growth will take time and effort, and even strong basic trade unionism, for instance, is partial insulation against Islamist influence. But as long as no alternative framework for discussing politics develops – alternative to Islamism and old-fashioned nationalism – the Islamists are likely to keep the upper hand.
   The state and bourgeois liberal parties are no allies in the struggle to do this. But secular and liberal individuals, intellectuals and so on, certainly are, or can be. The strategic task for socialists in Muslim countries is to open the space for working class organisation to flourish and democratic issues come to the fore without losing political independence or subordinating workers’ struggle to some schema (such as ‘first bourgeois democracy, then the struggle for socialism’). One measure of the bankruptcy of the ‘anti-imperialist’ conception is that in focusing on the ‘revolutionary’ aspect of Islamism, and presumably imagining the region to be poised on some sort of revolutionary transformation, it ignores the real questions, for socialists, of how a powerful workers’ movement can be built.
   There can be little doubt that a central aspect of political rebirth will be to question hoary notions of ‘imperialism’ and ‘Zionism’, challenging the idea that all social evils are the fault of Western ‘neo-colonialism’, or identifying Israel as the oppressor of all Muslims, or all Arabs, rather than the Palestinians. A democratic anti-imperialism, the purpose of which is to build international workers’ unity, will recognise the rights of the Israeli Jews, and vehemently oppose the anti-Semitic demonisation of them by the Islamists. It should be said also that an element in popular fury towards Israel, even if it is not the only one, is that the reactionary regimes have been making demagogic use of the issue for fifty years.
   Creating a genuine, democratic anti-imperialism, and working-class movements, is an urgent task. Without such an alternative, the immediate future in the Muslim world looks bleak: either the continuation of existing, authoritarian and repressive regimes (perhaps new ones, slightly modified with US prodding), or Islamic reaction, potentially in a violent and fascistic form, in many countries. The toppling of Hosni Mubarak, for instance, by an ‘Islamic revolution’ led by al-Jihad will not be a blow against imperialism, but a blow against democracy and progress, however awful the regime they replace. The fall of the Pakistani dictatorship at the hands of friends of the Taliban – giving them access to nuclear weapons – will not be something to cheer.
   There is hope. The working class of Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, and potentially other countries like Egypt and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and India and further east, holds out that hope. Our task is to help those forces succeed, where in the past they failed.