League by the Saudis from Chechnya to Pakistan and Indonesia, with its greatest impact through small Salafist bands across North Africa and the Middle East.
If you go back and look at the period when Nasserism and the Third World Project were dominant, what you will find are the clerical intellectuals in the midst of ideological battles against radical nationalism and Marxism, all the while borrowing from Bolshevik techniques of party building to amass their own organizational strength. For example, in Iraq, it was the Communist Party that dominated the working-class regions of Baghdad. Unable to fully confront this political force, the clerics of working-class Shi’ism, such as the al-Sadr family, had to evoke a politics through and against the Communists. Baqir al-Sadr’s intellectual work took on Marxism (his Iqtisaduna was a critique of Capital, vol. 1) and his organizational work (through the al-Da’wah al-Islamiyah) was modeled on the Iraqi Communist Party. Clericalism, on the back-foot, had to engage with the dominant tendency, which was radical nationalism and Marxism. If you go farther East you would run into Haji Misbach, an Indonesian cleric, also known as Red Haji, who confronted the dynamic Indonesian Communist Party with his own brand of Islamic Communism in the sugar belt of central Java. Like Baqir al-Sadr, Misbach was perplexed by the popularity of the CP in his society. He wanted to find a way to bring the spiritual to socialism. These are all precursors of Ali Shariati, the great Iranian thinker who was influenced by the Third World Project, and by Marxism, but once more wanted to bring Islam into it. For all these thinkers, the problem was quite the opposite of what it is today: the workers seemed ascendant, driven by the science of secular socialism at least in the domain of politics and production. It terrified the clerics.
The Communists and the radical nationalists crumbled under the weight of several factors. Preeminent among them was the pressure from the camp of imperialism, led by the United States, but with the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs in eager tow. Economic pressure combined with commitments made to Salafi opposition figures (via the World Muslim League) undermined the attempt to create new foundations for these societies. It did not help that the radical nationalists had little solidarity with the Communists, and nor did the Soviet Union, which routinely sold out their local fraternal parties for better relations with the nationalist strongmen, the megalomania of realpolitik eclipsing social justice and internationalism. Repression of the Communists (in Sudan, Iraq and Egypt for example) weakened the left pole in these societies. Additionally, the Atlantic powers built up a strong network of sympathetic countries, the Gulf Arabs at the top of the list at the center of West Asia and North Africa, but with a Maghrebian pro-Atlantic bloc of Tunisia and Libya (the treaty of January 6, 1957) and the Mashriqain Baghdad Pact of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey (the treaty of February 25, 1955). The Pacts and the bloc would wither (after the Iraqi coup of 1958 and the Libyan coup of 1969), but the Atlantic world hastened to create new alliances and allegiances, rooted mainly in the implacable Gulf Arab region (the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab NATO, was formed in 1979, and provided the most resolutely loyal force for the interests of the Atlantic world, and decisively opposed radical nationalism, Communism and eventually the post-1979 Iranian Revolution).
Such pressure from the outside world exaggerated and sharpened the failures of statecraft within the Arab governments. The new regimes were unable to found their society on a platform that included the widest spectrum of rights and responsibilities, from the requirements of decent employment to the provision of safe and stimulating social life, from the imperatives for political freedom to the decency of intellectual development. Paranoid about genuine threats from outside and from the oxygenation of toxic forces within, they held back on political rights and attempted to stifle political and intellectual freedom. They provided social welfare, but did not fully recreate the realm of production to facilitate worker and peasant control over their economic lives. The growth of the neoliberal security state in Egypt is emblematic of this failure to engender a new society that would be able to withstand external threats and to model an alternative path for social development for the other post-colonial states.
The collapse of the national liberation project by the 1980s came alongside the slow demise of the USSR, and its role as the upholder of the Utopian horizon of socialism. With the eclipse of that horizon, it became harder to assert the need for people to risk their lives in struggle for what appeared to be in fundamental retreat, namely socialism. The idea of the inevitability of socialism inspired generations to give themselves over to the creation of the Jacobin force, the Party that would, under relentless pressure, lead the working-class and peasantry to certain revolution. As well, the failure of the national liberation project meant the whittling down of the realm of production, and so the organized working-class found itself cast into the unsavory and unpredictable world of informal work. The main organization force of the Communist parties, the organized working-class, began its slow disappearance from world history.
It is this combustive situation that amputated the socialist dream in the Arab lands, and drew the now informal workers of hitherto Communist strongholds such as al-Thawra (Baghdad) and Haret Hreik (Beirut) into the parties of God, such as the Sadrites and Hezbollah. Religion has an unshakable eschatology, which a post-utopian secular politics lacks. No wonder that religion has inspired action in the Arab lands, even if destructive rather than revolutionary, whereas secular politics has become less inspirational.
With Mubarak gone and the squabbles of the post-Mubarak era in the open, the Muslim Brotherhood seeks its place at the table. It has long turned its back publicly on violence, which was why Ayman al-Zawahiri founded the Islamic Jihad, to absorb the extremist, terrorist space abjured by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s Issam al-Aryan laid out the line for his organization years ago, saying, “The Brothers consider constitutional rule to be closest to Islamic rule. We are the first to call for and apply democracy. We are devoted to it until death.” Which is indeed what one saw at the borderlands of Tahrir Square when it was attacked. As the electoral process unfolded in 2011, it was inevitable that the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafi Al-Nour party would do well. Mubarak’s electoral machine had no more legitimacy. The persecuted left had little of its previous mass character. The liberals generally eschew any mass organizing, and had only a moral claim to make on the population. It was left to the Brotherhood and the Salafis, who did not initiate the protests but who participated in them, to stake an electoral claim. Their activists were familiar with the interior of Mubarak’s prisons, but their parties were tolerated by the state—used when it suited Mubarak, jailed when he willed it. The avuncular support of money and al-Jazeera from the emirate of Qatar also helped the Islamists. In other words, the political Islamists captured a considerable amount of the political space in Egypt.
Election results from Tunisia also followed the predictable path. The Islamist party, Harakat an-Nahda (or Ennahda) faced brutal repression from Ben Ali, with Ennahda’s leader, Rashid Ghannouchi going from prison to exile to prison to exile without losing his political stamina. Before his return from exile in London, Ghannouchi stopped off in Qatar. Even as Ghannouchi has been outspoken against the Saudis (calling the decision to let in US troops in 1990 a “colossal crime”), the Gulf Arabs provided Ghannouchi and Ennahda with the monetary and institutional support essential for its rapid re-emergence in Tunisian society. There was no question that it would trounce the enfeebled left and liberals in an election that catapulted it to victory in November 2011.
Little wonder that the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed confidently on February 4, 2011 that the uprisings would spur on an “Islamic Awakening” across the region.
The calculation for how to deal with the parties of God is fairly simple. They are certainly a legitimate part of the political process, and their role in political life cannot be banned into oblivion. They also appear to be somewhat committed to democratic developments, even if these are narrowed when it comes to their own program. For example, in a place such as Lebanon, as Fawwaz Trabulsi points out, Hezbollah largely restricts its charity to its own sect, and within that sect it promotes private religious education and the obligatory veil at the same time as it erases all awareness of social rights. It is important to offer a scrupulous and forthright criticism of the shortcomings and social degeneration of the parties of God. In 2007, the Communist Parties in India held an anti-imperialist
