Islamism and the Left

An essay in two parts

July 23, 2021

This paper seeks to consider the question of the relationship between Islamism (in all its forms) and parts of the Left, not just in France but more broadly. It proceeds from the assumption that such a relationship exists and is not simply tactical.

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Authors

Sir John Jenkins

Senior Fellow

Content

Islamists and the Left: An Ideological Affinity
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Britain and the Islamists
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- The Uses and Abuses of Critical Theory Discourse

Islamists and the Left: An Ideological Affinity

Introduction

The murder of Samuel Paty in France last October dramatically accentuated a set of long-standing concerns about the relationship of various forms of Islamism to the French state and broader French society. It has also raised questions about the position of elements of the French Left, particularly within the universities and the higher commentariat, who were accused of enabling attacks on French laïcité (the constitutional principle of secularism in France) through too great an attachment to the tropes of critical theory. As a result, the Macron government proposed an enquiry into what it called “islamo-gauchisme”.¹Jules Darmanin, French minister wants inquiry into so-called Islamo-leftist bias in academia, 17 February 2021. This has caused uproar.

There is certainly a debate to be had about the precise nature of the relationship between Islamist and Leftist critiques of the established order in France. But that such a relationship exists is hardly in doubt. The same phenomenon exists in Britain. It has gained in strength over the last two decades, fuelled by a blending of what should by any normal standard be objectively incompatible discourses: this happened partly, in the case of the Left, though folly; in the case of Islamists, by stealth.²Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Chicago 2005, Epilogue offer a useful discussion of the way in which luminaries of the Left such as Noam Chomsky, Jean Baudrillard and others saw the events of 9/11 through the prism of a Leftist anti-imperialist discourse while entirely failing to grasp the reactionary ambitions of the perpetrators. We have most recently seen this demonstrated yet again during the protests in London and elsewhere over the conflict between Israel and Hamas, where Islamists and some on the Far Left of British politics employed a common antisemitic discourse.

The question is: how can we now most usefully characterise this relationship and what sort of a challenge, if any, does it pose to the current liberal order in both countries – and more widely?

The two essays that follow examine these issues in detail. They trace the entwined intellectual genealogies of Islamism and varieties of Leftist thought back to 18^th and 19^th century critics of the European Enlightenment and of instrumental reason – not all of them by any means on what has come to be described as the Left. But all of them shape in some way contemporary anti-capitalist, anti-universalist, anti-Eurocentric and anti-liberal theory and discourse. The way in which their ideas penetrated the Islamic world is complex but instructive. It suggests the relationship is not simply tactical: it is integral to a way of thinking about the world that has come to dominate the social sciences in the western academy. It contests the moral and political foundations of the contemporary western state and has been adapted by Islamists for their own purposes. This has led to an epistemic alliance against the liberal order. The result is a closing down of debate and resistance to a wide range of principles and government policies – from counter-extremism and policing to education, social deprivation and disadvantage and individual equality before the law. It is in our collective interest that the French government succeeds in its attempts to turn back the tide. The first step – as Gilles Kepel has passionately argued – is to understand the challenge and confront it with confidence and fortitude.³See Gilles Kepel, The Murder of Samuel Paty, Liberties, Spring 2021. This is also the task that faces the British government.

What else should be done? This will, after all, be a generational struggle. The dominant discourse in the western social sciences and increasingly in the humanities reflects both the identitarian obsession of Islamists and the Left and their essentialist characterisation of the western state as enduringly and purposefully oppressive and unjust. This discourse – most notoriously in the form of what has become known as critical race theory⁴See Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, New York University Press 2017. Pamela Paresky, Critical Race Theory and the “Hyper White” Jew, Sapir, Spring 2021 at https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-and-the-hyper-white-jew/ is a worked example of what this means in practice. There are, of course, many more. – has in the past few years become more widespread in the progressive press, business, the voluntary and cultural sectors, sport and even parts of government. Those who adopt it as protective camouflage will often not fully understand what they are endorsing. There is substantial popular resistance to it.

And even on the Left there are many who reject its implications. But it is dangerous. It is a constant distraction from more urgent tasks. Because it contains no theory of change, simply a range of essentialist positions, granting different privileges to different groups on the basis of an unexaminable taxonomy of victimhood, it is resistant to practical remedies. And most important of all, it corrodes social cohesion, free communication and mutual trust, the underpinnings of any political community. Any government faced with such a challenge to the fundamental principles of the social and political order it represents would need to make a stand.

This is not a matter of legal sanction or coercion. People must be free to make claims of the sort described, even if we believe them to be wrong. But it is equally important that, when they do so, they are required to produce credible evidence which is subject to open debate, rigorous scrutiny and honest challenge. We should ensure – as the government has already undertaken to do⁵Nicola Woolcock and Steven Swinford, New laws to protect university free speech, 12 May 2021. – that those who seek to rebut the claims of others are protected from the intimidation, bullying and often career-ending actions that some have already experienced.

In the end this may require a special body staffed by individuals with the relevant skills and expertise, in order to support those who challenge this increasingly dominant and damaging discourse. The British government could do worse than emulate France and commission its own enquiry into the matter.⁶The excellent recent report by the French National Assembly in March 2021 on the emergence and evolution of various forms of racism and what responses might be made (at https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/rapports/racisme/l15b3969-ti_rapport-information.pdf) is another model. Such an enquiry might be tasked among other things with recommending more robust ways of ensuring a greater range of thought within the country’s educational and research institutions; enabling and safeguarding reasonable criticism; and further strengthening the obligations of university and other relevant authorities to protect freedom and – as importantly – diversity of both thought and speech.

Islamism and the Left

The Genealogies of Discontent⁷

The reforms to the representational and supervisory structures of Islam in France that President Macron has sought to push forward with renewed urgency since the brutal murder of Samuel Paty in October 2020 have encountered significant resistance, not just from Islamists, but more puzzlingly perhaps from many on the Left of French politics and the progressive wing of the French commentariat. Most recently, there has been an outcry over the announcement⁸ by the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, that she would seek to launch an enquiry through the CNRS (the National Centre for Scientific Research)⁹ into what she has characterised as islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-Leftism), which she claims is inflected by the culture wars raging in the Anglosphere.¹⁰ The CNRS, while accepting the commission, quickly distanced itself from its edgier implications.¹¹ Her remarks have been interpreted by many on the Left as a disreputable dog whistle to the supporters of the nationalist Right in France¹² or simple ignorance about the value of the cultural turn in the social sciences.¹³ They deny that anything resembling an alliance between Islamists and the Left exists. It is an illusion, they say, cherished by bad faith actors.¹⁴

This is not a new debate.¹⁵ The term itself seems to have been coined in 2002 by Pierre-André Taguieff, the then director of research at the CNRS, to describe very precisely a phenomenon he documented more extensively in his 2002 book “La nouvelle Judéophobie”.¹⁶ In France, Jean Birnbaum,¹⁷ Alain Finkielkraut,¹⁸ Pascal Bruckner¹⁹ and Gilles Kepel (among others)²⁰ have all, in recent years, addressed the same issue in a wider context: the puzzlingly complaisant attitude of some on the political Left to various forms of Islamism – violent and non-violent. It is not simply a French phenomenon. In 2019, for example, the Swiss-Moroccan writer and secular activist, Kacem El Ghazzali, wrote in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “I criticised political Islam and identity politics. And suddenly I’m a Rightist. Why? The world has simply gone mad. Atheist “progressives” defend the freedom of women to veil. Reactionary Islamists cheer them on. Both agitate against “the white man”. Anyone who doesn’t go along is “radical right”. What’s at stake is enlightenment and free thinking”. ²¹ He goes on to point out that it is only in the West that critics of Islamism are accused of being rightist, reactionary or racist: in the Muslim world they are accused instead of being degenerate or apostate.²² He remarks that liberal Muslims are seen by the western Left as inauthentic: hence their fetishisation of the veil and other markers of identity which they construe as expressing the eternal otherness of the Muslim subject – in a sort of ‘reverse orientalism’ (in the words of the distinguished Syrian scholar, the late Sadik al Azm).²³ In Germany, the indefatigable Bassam Tibi (also of Syrian origin) has made similar points for years.²⁴ As has the distinguished historian and theorist (again Syrian), Aziz al Azmeh, from his perches in Budapest and elsewhere.²⁵

In Britain the argument has mostly been left to polemicists such as Douglas Murray and Nick Cohen to make.²⁶ But all have regularly faced the same criticism – of Islamophobia, racism and irresponsible reification of a non-existent phenomenon.

The aim of this paper is not to relitigate these claims and counter claims. Instead, it seeks to consider the question of the relationship between Islamism (in all its forms) and parts of the Left,²⁷ not just in France but more broadly.²⁸ It proceeds from the assumption that such a relationship exists and is not simply tactical.²⁹

In light of these real and obvious connections, the remainder of this paper argues that it is possible to trace the genealogical connections between the two that reflect the way each has come to understand the world, particularly taxonomies of modernity, power, justice and the state. These connections are complex, often indirect and sometimes contradictory. But they are real and important. They create a commonality not simply of tactics but of worldviews. These worldviews are framed in opposition to what we might consider the modern liberal and democratic order, which its critics often prefer to understand as variously neo-liberal, neo-colonial, unjust, racist and exploitative. We have recently seen fresh evidence of this conjuncture – if any were needed – in the way that Islamists and the British Left have rallied together over matters such as Prevent and indeed the Batley Grammar School affair, not through reasoned argument but simply by asserting that certain forms of “discourse” (a key word in this context) are fuelled by Islamophobia (which they claim is a form of racism and therefore of oppressive power) and therefore subject to anathema.³⁰

This is not new. But for anyone who cares about the future direction of the societies in which we live, it is important.³¹

The Enlightenment

In many ways, a key starting point for thinking about the relationship between ‘the Left’³² and Islamism is the phenomenon that has come to be known as the Enlightenment.³³ For present purposes, I take this to mean the period of economic, cultural and social expansion within Europe from the late 17^th century onwards that transformed social relations, created new space for associationism and led to the spread of literacy, the expansion of the public sphere, greater toleration of religious difference, an emphasis on rational governance and the spread of secular philosophy, science and art. It is often thought to have culminated – for better or worse – in the French Revolution. This process also produced new forms of political organisation which eventually generated, with many twists and turns, a dominant ideology of liberalism³⁴ underpinned by a discursively rich and often universalist ideology of individual rights and freedoms. It is precisely this ideology that Islamism is said to challenge.

This narrative needs to be treated with some caution, of course. First, in English the term “Enlightenment” to describe the period in question was adopted relatively late. It follows the example of those such as Immanuel Kant,³⁵ who saw the defining characteristic of Aufklärung as the application of independent reason to all matters, including religion. The term was then taken up by conservative critics of instrumental reason, who held it responsible for the arrogant excesses of the French philosophes and the disasters to which they had allegedly led.³⁶ Second, there were, it is now commonly held, many different Enlightenments. The “Enlightenment” in practice represented a set of different and temporally spaced historical conjunctures, controversies and currents in a dialectical relationship with each other. And third, this dialectic of enlightenment produced its own most severe critics. Indeed, the intellectual genealogy that is sceptical of the claims of reason and the benign and universalist claims of a Eurocentric and humanist modernity winds its way from (say) Vico,³⁷ through Herder, Hamman, Fichte, Schelling, de Maistre, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lukacs, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Memmi, Geertz, Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Foucault, de Man and Bourdieu to contemporary critical theory. It has in many ways come to represent the most powerful analytical current in contemporary western social thought, particularly in the Anglosphere.³⁸ And that is to say nothing of Marx and his successors and disciples, who represent a rival, often hostile, intersecting, materialist but equally important and seductive intellectual current.³⁹

The Islamic World

It is also worth noting that the European enlightenment was not the only intellectually reformist movement of the time. There was also significant change⁴⁰ within the Islamic world, often associated with shifts in secular power: for example – within Shi’ism – the rise of the Usuli movement in the first half of the 18^th century and – within the Sunni community – that of the Sufi-influenced Sanussiyah in Ottoman North Africa, the Hadith reform programme of Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi in late Mughal India and what some scholars⁴¹ have called the “Protestantisation of Islam” with the emergence of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and the first Saudi emirate in the Arabian peninsula from the 1750s onwards. The emergence of the heterodox Shi’a sect of the Bahai should also perhaps be set in this context.⁴²

The disruptive military reverses suffered during the second half of the 18^th century by various Muslim rulers – the Mughals at the hands of the British, the Turks and Persians at the hands of the Russians, the Egyptian Mamluks at the hands of the French and indeed the anti-Ottoman reform programmes of Muhammad Ali and Ismail Pasha in Egypt – produced a further impulse for temporal change. They created a sense that the Arab and Muslim worlds had fallen behind Europe in technological terms. Combined with indigenous modernisation impulses, this led to a period of critical, erratic but often productive engagement with European thought, largely directed by urban elites, which flourished for well over a century and whose impact is still with us.⁴³ It was further shaped by the French occupation of Algiers in 1830 and the aggressive imperial and colonial policies pursued by most of the major European powers throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which led to most parts of the Muslim world falling under European control of varying sorts. It aroused interest in the new ways of thinking that seemed to have given Europe such a material advantage and led to attempts at reform on allegedly rational European lines within the Ottoman Empire and in Egypt. In parallel, it also led to a prolonged and intense debate on how best to repel European – by definition infidel – encroachments on Muslim territories and infringements of Islamic practices⁴⁴ and to recover the allegedly lost glory of Islam.

The Conjuncture

In due course, criticism by reformist intellectuals of what they saw as Europe’s arrogant secularism, moral degeneracy and elevation of instrumental reason above faith⁴⁵ became central to the way in which the ideological challenge was construed within the Arab and wider Islamic worlds. The process by which this happened was complex. Although usually fiercely Islamic and always anti-colonial and anti-imperial, the emerging resistance to this challenge was inevitably framed by contemporary ideas of the secular state and the national community – including the subsequent deformation of authoritarian Blut und Boden nationalism into what we have come to call fascism.⁴⁶ This shaped the views of significant numbers not just of Muslims but also Christians, often educated within institutions modelled on European lines. It was influenced often at second- or third-hand by Darwin’s and Lamarck’s ideas about evolution, the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer⁴⁷ and the Hegelian historicism developed by Marx, sometimes mapped onto the cyclical account of history given by the great C14th North African scholar, Ibn Khaldun.⁴⁸ It eventually sowed the seeds of what the distinguished French scholar, Olivier Roy, has described as the Islamist “cultural reappropriation of modernity,”⁴⁹ with the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the late 1920s, the first organised and ideologically modernist Islamist mass movement, and the template for all subsequent Islamist social mobilisation.⁵⁰ Also shaped by this process were various forms of Arab nationalism and hyper-nationalism, the Leftist and communist movements that emerged particularly in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and South Asia,⁵¹ and indeed a fascinating strain of modernist and postmodernist but not always liberal rationalism, basing itself on earlier Islamic thought but heavily influenced by European social science and philosophy. This runs from Ali Abdel Raziq, Al Islam wa Usul al Hukm (Islam and the Foundations of Political Power)⁵²Translated by Maryam Loutfi, Edinburgh University Press 2012, with a useful introduction. in 1925 to the “father of Arab Existentialism”, Fouad Zakariyyah,⁵³ the so-called “turathiyyoun”⁵⁴ – Hassan Hanafi and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, author of the hermeneutical Naqd Al-Khitab Al Dini (Critique of Religious Discourse)⁵⁵Translated by Jonathan Wright, Yale, 2018, again with a useful introduction. As its title suggests, the book is itself a critique of Islamist discourse which seeks to reveal its sources and pathologies. Under the tutelage of his teacher, Hassan Hanafi, perhaps the originator of the concept of “Istighrab”/“Occidentalism”, Abu Zayd was influenced by a roll call of significant modern European thinkers also important for semiology (on which he wrote a book), hermeneutics and critical theory such as Dilthey, Saussure, Bergson, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault and Barthes. in 1990 – the neo-Traditionalists⁵⁶ and the works of Muhammad Arkoun⁵⁷ and Shi’a scholars such as Abdol Karim Soroush and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari.⁵⁸

These various trends were in often violent competition.⁵⁹ But at least at the level of elites they shared an array of references, both Islamic and European. And their thought in general, with its emphasis on authenticity (al-asalah)⁶⁰ and its frequent suspicion of European notions of sovereignty and the ideal community, was conditioned by a specific material and intellectual context: the association of post-enlightenment Europe with imperialist violence, cultural alienation, apparent loss of religious faith and political oppression and a desire to differentiate the world of “Islam” from the “West”.⁶¹

In addition, from the 1960s onwards, Arab intellectuals on all sides of the political debate sought explanations for the apparent failure of their leaders to confront Israel successfully, reverse Palestinian dispossession, repel the new American or Soviet imperialisms or achieve domestic social and political development in an even wider array of sources, ranging from Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Taimiyyah and a growing body of Salafi and other Islamist exegesis and jurisprudence to Marx, Hannah Arendt and Tocqueville.⁶²

A Hybrid Discourse of Revolt

Characteristic early examples of the Islamist critique of western modernity can be found in the writings of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna,⁶³ and in those of two of his ideological successors, Abul A’la Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb.⁶⁴ Al-Banna was himself at least superficially familiar with certain currents of western thought.⁶⁵ But Mawdudi, followed by Qutb (who seems to have taken much of his central critique of global injustice from him, through the intermediation of Abu’l-Hassan Ali Nadwi,⁶⁶ particularly the ideas of jahiliyyah and hakimiyyah),⁶⁷The former adapting a Qur’anic term to stigmatise all of contemporary states and societies as “jahiliyy” – that is sinfully resistant to divine truth; the latter referring to the absolute “sovereignty” of God. On all of which see Calvert 2010, Hartung 2013 and Abu Zayd 2006. Abu Khalil 1994 has a brief but pungent discussion of the way in which these ideas arose out of misreading of the classical sources. The concept of Hakimiyyah finds an echo in Carl Schmitt’s political theology where he “affirms sovereignty as the place of the extreme decision…in Schmitt, the sovereign is identified with God and occupies a position in the state exactly analogous to that attributed to the God of the Cartesian system”: (Agamben 2005, Chapter 4: for the reference see Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, Berlin, 2015, Chapter 3). Cavagnis 2012/3 has some very interesting remarks on the connection between Schmitt’s theological conception of sovereignty and Foucault’s glimpse of “political spirituality” in the Iranian revolutionary moment. may have been the most significant conduit for the transmission through Sunni Islamists of key elements in European counter- and post-Enlightenment discourse.⁶⁸

There is a further distinctive relationship between Shi’a Islamists, counter-enlightenment thought and an anti-western, anti-capitalist and anti-liberal discourse of revolt.⁶⁹ This may have been a consequence of the expansion and modernisation of higher education under the Pahlavis and the greater willingness of some Shi’a mujtahids, including Khomeini (especially after the Revolution) to teach and study something that has come in recent times to be generally discouraged in the Sunni schools, namely “philosophy” – a catch-all term that can cover everything from Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus to medieval Islamic metaphysics, the Mu’tazaliyyah, al-Farabi and al-Ghazzali, Kant, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger and indeed Popper, Foucault and Habermas.⁷⁰ But it also hinges on the use that influential theorists such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad (a former communist) or Ali Shariati (who had studied under the mystically-inclined Catholic orientalist, Louis Massignon, in Paris)⁷¹ made, for example, of such diverse western thinkers as Marx, Weber, Fanon,⁷² Sartre, Ernst Jünger⁷³ and Heidegger, from whom Ahmad, via his teacher, Ahmad Fardid,⁷⁴ may have adapted the concept of Gharbzadegeh/ Westoxication, which became so important for the revolutionaries around Khomeini before and after 1979.⁷⁵

The Iranian revolution of that year, with its skilful blending of Shi’a tropes of suffering, oppression and salvation with Leftist slogans about the millennial revolt of the dispossessed and the need for radical social justice, was in many ways a turning point.⁷⁶ Qaddafi may have revered Castro and Che Guevara.⁷⁷ The PFLP read Marx and Lenin in the camps of the Beqa’a. Jean-Luc Godard believed the global revolution would start among the Palestinian fida’yeen in Jordan.⁷⁸ And, the tribal radicals of South Yemen – supported by their fellow-travellers living in the comfort of the Gulf ⁷⁹ – may have thought themselves the vanguard of a global proletariat. But it was probably in Iran, under the sponsorship of an organised neo-Jacobin state,⁸⁰ that both Shi’a and Sunni Islamist ideas and radical European thought were first brought into alignment, widely mobilised and forged into a tool of sustained discursive resistance to alleged global injustice, western oppression and orientalist hegemony.⁸¹

The Nature of the Challenge

This discourse, inflected by a mixture of reimagined Islamic and non-Islamic modernist thought, resonates with the European and American Left precisely because it claims to have the same targets.⁸² It mirrors the assault on the construction of the rational Weberian state, the racial and the West developed in different ways in the second half of the 20^th century by figures such as Fanon, Foucault and Edward Said. They in turn drew on Freud, Heidegger,⁸³ Benjamin,⁸⁴ Adorno, Horkheimer,⁸⁵ Marcuse,⁸⁶ and other critics of Enlightenment rationality, the bleakness of scientism⁸⁷ and the offences against Being of Anglo-American Reklamekultur, ⁸⁸ popular democracy, instrumental rationality,⁸⁹ positivism, mass entertainment and Fordism.⁹⁰ The critical theorists of the New Left see tyranny as a discursively encoded function of state power: so do Islamists.⁹¹ Post-colonial scholars welcome the provincialisation of the Western: Islamists, following Spengler, exult in its inevitable decline.⁹²Nietzsche wrote of the death of God, the slave mentality of Christianity, the twilight of the idols – including the state – and the emergence into the light of unillusioned Truth of the Übermensch.⁹³ Islamists talk of the nullity of the Christian God, their contempt for His followers, the idolatry of the western state and the necessity of a new and revealed Islamist Truth for suffering humanity.⁹⁴ The notorious German jurist, Carl Schmitt, wrote of political theology and the state of exception that reveals the site of a sovereignty that represents an absent God:⁹⁵ Islamists promote a theologised politics and a sacred exceptionalism that reveals God as uniquely sovereign.⁹⁶Antonio Gramsci, followed by Marcuse and Louis Althusser, emphasised the overriding importance for the revolutionary struggle of achieving normative hegemony through language and the ideological apparatuses of the state:⁹⁷ Islamists have learned the lesson. Traditionalists such as the esotericist turned Sufi, René Guénon, saw the western world order in crisis and called for a rediscovery of the spiritual:⁹⁸ so do Islamists.⁹⁹

This relationship began with mutinous colonial subjects searching for weapons to use against the West. It ended with western intellectuals, perhaps attracted by the glamour of insurrection against the existing order and disappointed in a Marxist-Leninism that had so often flattered to deceive, allowing themselves to be seduced by a new revolt of increasingly militant Islamism, which they took to be the ultimate answer to the discredited claims of positivism.¹⁰⁰ It is always more exciting, after all, to be on the metaphorical barricades rather than in the actual (and dusty) archives.

Perhaps the canonical (if the term is permitted in this context) example of this position is Michel Foucault, one of the patron saints of critical theory.¹⁰¹ Foucault visited Tehran twice in 1978 to write a series of articles commissioned by the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera.¹⁰² Deciphering Iranian dreams (as he put it), he was dazzled by what he saw as the revolt of the subaltern¹⁰³ and the return of a political utopianism which Max Weber¹⁰⁴ thought had faded in the bleak light of the rational, bureaucratic state. He was in many ways an acute observer. But strangely oblivious to the hard realities (as opposed to the discursive analytics) of power, he announced the return of a “political spirituality”: the reversal by Khomeini of the Weberian disenchantment of the world.¹⁰⁵ He proclaimed that the revolution had its own truth, found in a distinctive form of unalienated cognition.¹⁰⁶ A few months later he gushed “Leur faim, leurs humiliations, leur haine du régime et leur volonté de le renverser, ils les inscrivaient aux confins du ciel et de la terre, dans une histoire rêvée qui était tout autant religieuse que politique.” (“Their hunger, their humiliations, their hatred for the regime and their willingness to overthrow it – they inscribe all this on the borders of heaven and earth, in a dream of history quite as much religious as political”). ¹⁰⁷ It ended in disaster, of course – not least for women (about whom Foucault rarely wrote sympathetically).¹⁰⁸ But Islamists agreed. They still do.¹⁰⁹

Whatever the exact nature of the confluence of contemporary radical western and Islamist thought, it is plain that both grew out of the same milieu:¹¹⁰ the revolt against Enlightenment rationality, Cartesian subjectivity,¹¹¹ Kantian universalism,¹¹² the late 19^th century intellectual crisis of western modernity, the shocks of imperialism and mass conflict and (in a different tradition) the translation of Marx’s materialist view of the class struggle in industrial economies to suit the different circumstances (and floating signifiers) of advanced global capitalism. This generated new forms of analytical interest in discursive fields such as “governmentality”,¹¹³ the construction of overlapping racial, ethnic and religious taxonomies,¹¹⁴ the ways in which language itself encodes relationships of power, and the nature of the post-colonial order.¹¹⁵ In doing so, it generated new intellectual tools with which to advance the quintessentially Gramscian goal of ideological hegemony.

The emergence of a shared discourse has helped Islamists not simply in their efforts to normalise their claims within Muslim communities (something two excellent reports in 2020, one from the French Sénat¹¹⁶ and another for the ECHR¹¹⁷ have discussed at length). It has also enabled them to become embedded within existing non-Muslim discourses of contestation, often adopting the same organisational techniques – cellular structures, vanguardism and, for example, a Popular Front model. A good recent example of this from France is the letter published in Libération on 1 November 2019, organized by an array of Islamic/Islamist and Leftist figures and groups,¹¹⁸ and signed also by senior members of the left-wing party, La France Insoumise, trades unions, and Leftist academics and journalists. It called for a united front and solidarity against Islamophobia through a demonstration in Paris under a photograph of the slogan – dubious at the time and tone-deaf in the light of what has happened since – l’islamophobie: le silence tue (“Islamophobia: Silence Kills).¹¹⁹ We have seen something similar in Britain with the Stop the War Coalition and the moral support that many on the Left have given to movements such as Hamas and Hizbullah on the basis of their anti-colonialist and anti-globalist pretensions. We see it in their willingness to subordinate women’s rights to the interests of an “anti-imperialist” politics.¹²⁰ We see it too in the fierce opposition by Islamists and otherwise entirely secular Leftist circles to the counter-terrorism policies of successive governments,¹²¹both Labour and Conservative, on the basis that they reflect the sort of oppressive securitisation of politics and the repressive moulding of dissident subjectivity that Foucault claimed to identify in his work on the disciplinary technologies of power.

While Islamists denounce the West and all its works, they draw on many of its basic categories – including the very idea of a unitary “West” itself.¹²² And this idea of a toxic “West” – which in its arrogant lust for forbidden knowledge destroys the human, the spiritual and then the planet – is familiar from certain forms of progressive/leftist discourse. Perhaps the image that captures this attitude best is Walter Benjamin’s Engel der Geschichte – the Angel of History. Unlike Hegel’s Weltgeist, benignly guiding humanity under its own steam to the culminating perfection of the Prussian state, Benjamin’s Angel is a horrified exile from Paradise, helplessly borne backwards on the wings of a secular storm, which brings only destruction in its wake. Benjamin concludes, “That, which we call progress, is this storm.”¹²³

Islamists accept that the Leftist critique of western modernity is just: indeed they often claim that Islam anticipated and contains it all already.¹²⁴ But it is not sufficient on its own. And that is a difficulty. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fanon, Foucault, Said and the Frankfurt Schoolers represent an immanent critique of western modernity within a specific historical context and in a chain of thought that can be traced back through the materialism of Marx, the transcendental historicism of Hegel and the anti-Cartesianism of Kant to the Pre-Socratic philosophers of classical Greece.¹²⁵ Islamists have adapted the critique to support their different purposes within an entirely different tradition, whose chains of authentication stretch back not to the radical scepticism of Heraclitus or Empedocles, but into the mists of divine revelation.

At the heart of this difference is the question of the sacred. Western modernist and postmodernist thought rejects both God and Revelation as appropriate subjects for the public sphere.¹²⁶ Even Heidegger, who trained as a theologian and briefly as a Jesuit, preferred to concentrate on the phenomenology of this world, what the late George Steiner called a “post-theology”,¹²⁷ seeing death as the ultimate affirmation of Being, not a step into transcendence. Nietzsche’s “unbekannter Gott” (“Unknown God”)¹²⁸ is Dionysus, not an Abrahamic Deus Absconditus (Hidden God)¹²⁹As He is for Karl Barth, for example, or for Salafists. Post-modernists – like Islamists – textualise reality.¹³⁰ But unlike them, in the absence of God they aestheticise politics and relativise ethics.¹³¹ In response to this, some seek meaning in a renewed application of disinterested reason¹³² or a classical tradition of virtue.¹³³ Others seek a foundational form of quasi-gnostic knowledge within deep structures of thought and discourse. In doing so they seek to uncover not the divine but a(n in)human will to power – without then knowing what to do other than be ironic. Islamists in contrast, though they will talk easily about “structural Islamophobia”,¹³⁴ are not structuralists at all. They are also wholly unironic. They believe themselves to be prophetically inspired and fuelled not by radical doubt, but by absolute conviction. Nietzsche sought to fill the moral vacuum created by the death of God with the “all-too-human”. For Islamists, submission to an unquestioned if unknowable divinity serves the same purpose.¹³⁵

And this is a major problem. Post-modernists, critical theorists and Islamists may share “a globalised frame of reference and an exaggerated sense of crisis; an ambiguous…relationship to modernity …a selective reappropriation of the past, a mixing of high and low cultures and a dismissal of the need for any justificatory metadiscourse.”^¹³⁶This and the following quotes are from Euben 1999, Conclusion: Cultural Syncretism and Multiple Modernities. This is not to deny that Islamists do not seek to relativise truth themselves. The decision to establish the International Institute of Islamic Thought after an international Muslim Brotherhood meeting in Yusuf Nada’s Lugano house in 1977, with a mission to Islamise knowledge, should be enough to demonstrate that they do. But Islamists would probably see this not so much as relativisation as normalisation. But the postmodern western Left’s critique of enlightenment rationality and its allegedly oppressive and alienating application by a panopticon state is associated with “a radical suspicion of foundationalism and of all notions of truth”.¹³⁷ Central to Islamism is “an antihermeneutic embrace of absolute foundations”. The former sees social order as produced and guaranteed materially: the latter by “a reified form of islam”.¹³⁸

Each position brings its own challenges. The former can corrode the foundations not simply of an epistemic but also of a social and political order in pursuit of a secular utopia without coordinates. The latter can seek to impose a theocratic epistemological tyranny akin to the Anabaptists of Münster.¹³⁹ When the two projects are combined in an assault upon liberal democracy, we risk the destruction of everything valuable in the Enlightenment legacy. This I take to mean the way in which we choose to live and construe ourselves, including free and independent thought, a tolerant and reasoned understanding of complexity, and the tools to change any or all of this for the better by rational public debate, and democratic consent rather than by epistemic rupture.¹⁴⁰

The liberal order is undoubtedly imperfect. It may well not be helpful to talk of “Islamo-gauchisme”, without defining exactly what and who is meant. And the Enlightenment and its consequences are not immune from criticism: they never have been. But neither Islamism nor critical theorists have a persuasive remedy for their imperfections. They call for the replacement of the existing order and the erasure of its monuments and memory. Neither brooks dissent. Each has a quasi-Calvinist belief in ‘election’. Separate, they are disturbing. Combined they are destructive.

In 1962, that dark prophet, Carl Schmitt, delivered two lectures on Die Theorie des Partisanes – The Theory of the Partisan.¹⁴¹ He identified the emergence of ideologically-rooted revolutionary conflict within states as a decisive trend of the age, heralding the end of Europe’s 300-year old political and jurisprudential imperium and the replacement of conflict between nations by conflict within. He concluded the final lecture by saying, “The theory of the partisan flows into the question of the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and of a new nomos of the earth.” He drew, of course, on personal experience of two world wars and his own shameful role in a catastrophically partisan episode in German history. That may have given him a certain clarity – like Oedipus at Colonus. He foresaw the radically unmoored communitarianism of Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hamas and Hizbullah and the unravelling of the Arab state order. He knew only too well how an ideological assault on the very symbols that make it possible for others collectively to imagine a polymorphous but rooted national political community could make it impossible for such a community to be imagined anywhere. Its replacement would need no history, no memory and no physical location, simply a scripture, a sense of absolute virtue and belief in historical inevitability. It would reject the classic liberal position where rights belong to individuals who are equal before the law in favour of a shift to identity-essentialist groups which make untestable claims about unchangeable hierarchies of worth and reject forms of social order associated with an illegitimate ancien régime.¹⁴² This is a model Islamist groups have followed from the beginning. And we now see it spread into the mainstream through the emergence of various often hostile forms of mutually exclusive social pluralism. In the words of Jürgen Habermas, this represents a postmodern revolt against modernity, a “counter-Enlightenment in the garb of post-Enlightenment”.¹⁴³ Whatever else may divide them, that is precisely what Islamism and the self-styled progressive and postmodern Left share.

There is one final point. In a basic sense, class can be measured – for example, through occupation, income and education. Perhaps more importantly, it can be transcended through social mobility and the transitions mapped. More essentialist forms of identity can only be asserted. And they remain static and determinist: if you are “White” you are always “White”, and in turn privileged, racist and oppressive. It is impossible to change, only to repent. If you are “Black” or “Muslim” you are always “Black” or “Muslim” and by definition oppressed by “Whiteness” or a “West” which has turned instrumental reason into a tool of global dominance.¹⁴⁴ There can be no closure, only perpetual resistance. And this resistance is fundamentally epistemic – a war on the way in which we understand the world.¹⁴⁵ That is why for those who reject the Hegelian construction of subjectivity, social identity, dominance and submission through the purposeful gaze of others,¹⁴⁶ auto-ethnography – the assertion of a self-reflexive identity that envelops the world and rejects external interrogation or subjection – is so important. The Islamist construction of an essentialist “Islamic” identity is a characteristic example of this manoeuvre. And it chimes with the wider identitarian obsession of the modern Left. This is precisely where critical theory intersects with Islamism.

You can see the results in the apparently paradoxical way many so-called progressives engage sympathetically with reactionary Islamist positions (for example on questions relating to alleged blasphemy, gender inequality or the veil).¹⁴⁷ You can see it perhaps in shared attitudes towards Israel, Zionism and Jews in general, as emblems of a deranging capitalist modernity.¹⁴⁸ You can also see them in the way the tropes of critical theory are adopted to assert the ontological separateness of “the Islamicate” and therefore the illegitimacy (or at best inadequacy) of any “non-Islamicate” study of the field.¹⁴⁹ The message is clear: questions relating to Islam and Islamism are out of bounds to non-Muslims, non-Islamists and their allies. That way madness lies.¹⁵⁰

We may have thought that the partisan fragmentation of national political communities would always happen somewhere else and we would in any case know how to repair any damage. We were wrong on both counts. Instead, the Enlightenment that produced the modern, individualist and instrumentally rational West, with its systems of private, political and legal liberties,¹⁵¹ also furnished a manual for its ideological detonation.

Both Islamists and the Left essentialise the “West”. They use the same tropes to predict – and welcome – its destruction.¹⁵² Like Schmitt, they deal in a theology of exclusion. In the end you can call this what you like. After all they have been through in recent years, the French are surely right to be worried. As should everyone who cares about the future of liberal and pluralist societies.¹⁵³

Next chapter

Britain and the Islamists

The first essay in this series took the current controversy about Islamo-Gauchisme in France as a starting point to explore the counter-enlightenment and post-modern genealogies of what on the face of it seems an unlikely alliance between Islamists and the radical Left. Could the same thing happen in Britain?

It not only could: it has. In 2001, prominent figures from both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Socialist Workers Party came together in the Stop the War Coalition in opposition to western military intervention in the Middle East.¹⁵⁴ This may at the time have seemed an unlikely alliance of convenience. But in the two decades since the first demonstrations, it has become clear that it is rather more than that. The emergence of the Respect Party, particularly during its period under the leadership of Salma Yaqoob, was a political straw in the wind. Another was the provocative decision by the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, to host the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual figurehead, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi was subsequently banned by the government from re-entering the UK in 2008 because of his support for suicide bombings targeting civilians¹⁵⁵—a decision to which the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) objected.¹⁵⁶

There were other indications of an emergent realignment on the British Left. During the 2006 demonstrations in London against Israel’s war in Lebanon, banners were displayed at Stop the War Coalition protests proclaiming: “We are all Hizbullah now”.¹⁵⁷ At a 2008 rally addressed by Jeremy Corbyn, another speaker, Azzam al-Tamimi, was greeted with enthusiastic acclaim when he told those gathered in Trafalgar Square; “If they deny you life, explode in their faces! There will be Jihad, Jihad, and Jihad until Palestine is free. As-asalamu alaykum.” ¹⁵⁸

Corbyn had, of course, helped to found the Stop the War Coalition. Through the Finsbury Park Mosque in his own north London constituency, he had developed ties with leading figures in the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). During a 2009 meeting in Parliament, he boasted of extending invitations to “our friends” in Hamas and Hizbullah. It appears that in 2014 he took part in a wreath laying ceremony in Tunis at the graves of members of Black September, a Palestinian group implicated in the 1972 Munich massacre (and many other atrocities). Corbyn has claimed that he was only present for this, and that he did not “think” that he was “involved”.¹⁵⁹ These and other problematic associations came back to haunt him in public. But he never convincingly repudiated them. And these long-standing connections seem to have been reflected in significant Islamist support for Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and the emergence of Islamist-linked activists within Momentum and on the Left of the party.

Since Corbyn’s replacement by Keir Starmer the alignment of the radical Left in Britain with Islamist causes has shown no signs of weakening. Indeed in certain respects it is more pronounced than ever; for example, in the sustained assault on the Government’s counter-radicalisation Prevent programme and the increasing prominence given to claims of widespread structural Islamophobia. Many of those involved in campaigning on these issues claim that both Prevent and the so-called ‘securitisation’ of Muslims are simply different expressions of the same Islamophobic pathology. With the withdrawal of British troops from most theatres of conflict in the Middle East, they also serve as convenient and infinitely replicable motors of mobilisation, this time with a focus not on the actions of the British state externally but on claims about its malign dysfunctionality at home. This polarising meta-narrative is now widespread in the mainstream and social media, the academy, the cultural sector and other arenas.

Following the introduction of legislation by David Cameron’s Government that put Prevent on a statutory footing, the Islamist-aligned campaign groups CAGE and MEND, and the Stand Up To Racism network, allegedly linked to the Socialist Workers Party,¹⁶⁰ formed a particularly close alliance. Throughout 2016 and 2017, individuals such as CAGE’s Moazzam Begg—a former Guantanamo inmate—and Azad Ali, Sahar Al-Faifi, and Dr Siema Iqbal, all at the time representing MEND, spoke at Stand Up To Racism events across the country.¹⁶¹ Some of these events were attended by prominent Labour figures such as Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn.¹⁶² In January 2017, MEND and Stand Up To Racism jointly published the pamphlet Prevent: why we should dissent, which included among its contributors Azad Ali, Heena Khaled, Michael Mansfield QC, and several prominent figures from student and teaching unions.¹⁶³

Later that year, in July 2017, the Socialist Workers Party held a four day conference, Marxism 2017, which featured one panel on Islamophobia and women, and another titled Challenging Prevent and Islamophobia.¹⁶⁴ The latter included Azad Ali and Siema Iqbal representing MEND, Moazzam Begg from CAGE, Ameen Hadi of UNISON, and was chaired by Nahella Ashraf,¹⁶⁵ a prominent Stand Up To Racism and SWP activist who had previously stood as a candidate for the Respect Party.¹⁶⁶ Azad Ali claimed that Prevent had institutionalised Islamophobia, and suggested negotiation as an alternative policy for dealing with terrorism. Pointing to the Good Friday Agreement, Ali spoke of the need to “negotiate a political issue,” arguing that “terrorism is by and large a political issue,” that those “carrying it out have some political issues,” and claiming therefore that, “you need to deal with it on a political level.”

More recently, the subject of media representation of Muslims, and allegations of Islamophobia in the mainstream press have become points of convergence for both Far Left and Islamist activists. The media and journalism Byline Festivals of 2017, 2018, and 2019 not only gave prominence to groups like Extinction Rebellion, but also included sessions featuring representatives from CAGE, MEND, and the MCB, with some of these sessions sponsored by, and organised in direct collaboration with MEND.¹⁶⁷ In 2018, festival goers could enjoy events with titles such as, “Monstering Muslims in the Media,” or “Lies, Damned Lies, and Headlines About Muslims – Challenging Islamophobia in the Press.” ¹⁶⁸

Similarly, in 2020 when the Far-Left Media Reform Coalition held its Media Democracy Festival conference, the programme included a session titled “Media, race and religion: silences and scapegoats” featuring Rizwana Hamid, Director of the MCB’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CFMM), and Narzanin Massoumi, an academic who has written extensively on Islamophobia.¹⁶⁹

Rizwana Hamid is also on the advisory committee of Truth Defence, a relatively recent campaign group which has sought to challenge the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s ruling that under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership the Labour Party breached equalities law over antisemitism in the party.¹⁷⁰ Massoumi’s 2017 book, What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements, and the State was published by the radical publishing house Pluto Press and co-edited with David Miller and Tom Mills¹⁷¹—both academics identifiably on the Left. Like Miller, Massoumi has been a speaker for the Iranian-linked Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). She appeared at the IHRC’s 2016 Islamophobia conference “The Environment of Hate and the Police State,” and was listed as a speaker at their December 2019 conference, “Islamophobia and Shrinking Civil Society Spaces.” ¹⁷² The IHRC has consistently served as an important intersecting point for radical Left and Islamist anti-western activism. The group’s annual Al-Quds Day rallies in London — notorious for the open display of Hizbullah flags — have drawn particular public attention and been addressed by such prominent left-wing figures as John Rees, George Galloway, and Jeremy Corbyn.¹⁷³

Among the IHRC’s leadership, the group’s co-founder and head of research, Arzu Merali, is also notable for her involvement with post-colonial or decolonial activism. In 2018, Merali was the author of a “Counter-Islamophobia toolkit”, co-funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality, and Citizenship Programme.¹⁷⁴ In that document she wrote of the “adoption by parts of the academy of the need for decolonised curricula” as a major step forward, and detailed initiatives such as “Why is my curriculum White?”, “Why isn’t my professor Black?”, “#RhodesMustFall”, and the beginnings of a process of “‘decolonisation’ of the English syllabus” at the University of Cambridge.

As well as sitting on the editorial board of the “Decolonising the Mind” book series,¹⁷⁵ in December 2019 Merali chaired an IHRC event with her fellow editorial board member Sandew Hira, also the co-director of the Decolonial International Network. The event, titled “Decolonising Ecology” reportedly featured a “decolonial analysis of Extinction Rebellion,” criticising that movement’s “Eurocentric values”.¹⁷⁶ In the IHRC’s account of that event the “westernised Left” is criticised for merely being anti-capitalist, when apparently what is required is to “decolonise from the Eurocentric views that are informing the production of technology,” and to “decolonise from Cartesian dualism” through “radical transformation of the system.” Modernity itself is a project “of death and destruction of life and earth,” and capitalism exists as a “colonial and civilisational project” that is destructive of “communities and human beings.”

One decolonial group in which both the IHRC and Arzu Merali were initially involved is the Malcolm X Movement (MXM) — described by one of its founders as “building towards a new wave of Global South decolonial anti-imperialist resistance in Britain.” ¹⁷⁷ More recently, the group was involved with organising some of the Black Lives Matter-associated demonstrations that took place in London in June 2020, using social media to promote and celebrate incidents of violence that occurred during those events.¹⁷⁸

In 2015 Merali had been a speaker at one of the MXM’s first events: the Malcolm X Film Festival, which was held across seven cities in the UK.¹⁷⁹ The advertising for the festival featured the IHRC logo along with those of groups such as the Respect Party, and the Islamist-aligned news website 5Pillars. More notably, the festival was also officially endorsed by the PFLP, and one of the listed speakers was the PFLP and Black September plane hijacker Leila Khaled.¹⁸⁰ Other speakers advertised included a representative of the Communist Workers Peasants Party of Pakistan, representatives of ZANU-PF, convicted IRA terrorism offender Gerry MacLochlainn, Malia Bouattia of NUS Black Students, and Moussa Ibrahim—former Information Minister and spokesman for Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. The following year, the MXM was also listed as a supporting organisation for the IHRC’s 2016 Islamophobia conference.¹⁸¹

In 2014, ahead of the MXM’s official launch, the group held an event titled, “Strike the Empire Back: legacies and examples of liberation from neo-colonialism and white supremacy.” ¹⁸² It was announced that the event had been co-sponsored by the IHRC, with Azru Merali being listed as a speaker representing both the IHRC and also the Malcolm X Movement.¹⁸³ During her remarks, Merali told listeners, “We know who the enemy is; we know that it’s the west, it’s the NATO countries.” It was also the “white supremacist structure, or liberal structure”. Merali emphasised the significance of the Islamic revolution in Iran—stressing that there was an “important distinction to be made between the Iranian revolution and the Islamic revolution”—but explaining that there were lessons to learn there about how “ideology operates” and the “types of ideologies we want to be working with.” Hizbullah, she added, was another example. While Merali stated that she was not going to “lionise” Iran’s Islamic revolution, nevertheless, she argued that it was still “one of the most successful events — a proper revolution — in the last 30-40 years that we’ve had, and we are still having a vibrant legacy from that.”

Another panellist at the event, Carlos Martinez who writes for the Morning Star, also spoke of the importance of ideology, pointing to how Sinn Fein and the IRA had “managed to fight the British state to a standstill, to a stalemate,” before adding “yeh, I wish we could fight the British state to a stalemate”. Similarly, referring to the Iranian revolution, Martinez outlined the significance of that ideology; “which was about radical Islam, orientation towards the poor, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism.” The same could be said, Martinez argued, of a group like “Hezbollah; the Lebanese resistance organisation,” which “for the record” he remarked, “is the only fighting force in the world to have defeated Israel on the battlefield”. As well as mentioning past revolutions in Grenada, Cuba, China, and Russia, Martinez stated that “there’s a lot be said at this particular point in time” to looking towards Latin America, to the legacy of Hugo Chavez, as well as that of Qaddafi.

The Uses and Abuses of Critical Theory Discourse

Increasingly, it is as much in the adoption of a certain kind of discourse as in actual political organising that the extent of this emerging Left-Islamist alignment has become visible. A network of academics and community activists seem to be in the process of forming a hybrid ideology. Incorporating a particularly confrontational form of community-based identity politics, it remains as Islamist at its core as it is post-modern and post-colonial in its outer trappings.

Examples can readily be found in the pages of works such as the recent anthology I Refuse to Condemn: resisting racism in times of national security, edited by Asim Qureshi of the Islamist group CAGE, but published by the University of Manchester Press.¹⁸⁴ As Fahad Ansari, one of the anthology’s contributors, put it during an interview following the publication of the book: “the greatest challenge is resisting the performative act of condemning atrocities with which we have no connection save for the perpetrators identifying with the same religion as us.” ¹⁸⁵That interview appeared in an article in the Metro revealingly titled, “How Muslims are challenging Islamophobia by refusing to condemn terrorism”.

References to the “performative”, and to “performativity” are widespread both in that anthology and elsewhere in the milieu to which its authors belong. It is a term closely associated in the Anglosphere with the American feminist and queer theorist, Judith Butler, who has claimed that gender is simply a performative phenomenon. But it has a wider history elsewhere, in the writings, for example, of Jean Francois-Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Islamists and their allies have used it to claim that the alienation of Muslims in the West arises at least in part from the way in which Islamophobic structures and discourses compel them to perform a range of inauthentic behaviours. At other times it is used to stigmatise the way in which the western state disguises its allegedly essential hostility to Muslims and other minorities; evidence, for example, that the Prevent scheme addresses all violent ideologies and not exclusively or specifically Muslims, is often dismissed as “performative”.

While the adoption of such language by Islamist-aligned academics and commentators is striking, perhaps equally remarkable is the way in which critical-theory-infused claims have found their way into documents such as the 2018 report by All-Party-Parliamentary-Group on British Muslims on the definition of Islamophobia. That report spoke of the “intersectional nature of Islamophobia”, “gendered Islamophobia”, “micro-aggressions”, “lived experience”, the existence of a “binary narrative” about Muslims in the media, the “problematization” of “Muslimness”, and the “racialisation” and “othering” involved in representations of Islam. The report highlighted evidence from Akeela Ahmed—chair of the Independent Members of the Cross-Government Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, which sits within MHCLG. According to the report, Ahmed emphasised the “structural nature of Islamophobia”, which allegedly concerns “every aspect of a British Muslim person’s life”.¹⁸⁶

In March this year the MCB released its own report on the APPG’s efforts, which displays an equally practised facility with the vocabulary of critical race theory. It refers to the “categorical othering of Muslims in Britain” and the “normalisation of Islamophobic discourse”, claiming that “individuals may face a multitude of oppressions that overlap”, so “necessitating an intersectional approach when considering whether someone has been subject to Islamophobia”. At one point the report argues that, “defining and seeing Islamophobia only or primarily through the prism of religion” is “particularly problematic (or functional) in so-called secular societies, where criticism of religion is considered a healthy and necessary practice, based on narrow conceptions of freedom of speech, often ignoring power relationships.” It claims that “allegedly progressive discourses” that express concern over illiberal practices in certain forms of Islam, are themselves illiberal. They are instead “examples of ‘neo-racism’ or ‘cultural racism’ and reproduce Orientalist colonial ones, where the separation between the white European – and Christian – west and its racialised other is clear.” ¹⁸⁷

The discourse is reflected in other statements the MCB has issued. Condemning the March 2021 report by the Government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, for example, an MCB spokesperson claimed that the authors of the report were writing off the “structures of institutional racism”, and that doing so was serving no one, other than those “who want to deny that racism is a problem.” ¹⁸⁸

As we have already seen, conferences and public events have long offered convening opportunities for left-leaning and Muslim activist academics as well as Islamists. Such gatherings have increasingly showcased a hybrid discourse of critical theory and Islamism. In March 2021, the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul’s Zaim University held its third international conference on Islamophobia. This year the conference’s co-sponsors included the UK-based group CAGE, as well as the Coalition for Civil Freedoms from the United States. Represented among the conference speakers were Chafika Attalai, a member of the now dissolved Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), David Miller of the University of Bristol, and Farid Hafez¹⁸⁹of Salzburg University and Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative—who has described himself as “a critical scholar analysing racism, speaking truth to power and representing the marginalised”.¹⁹⁰

The conference took as its focus the “War on Terror”, which provided participants with ample opportunity for attacking the UK’s counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies. What is particularly striking is the way in which the event’s organisers framed their conference in the language of post-colonial critical theory.¹⁹¹ The CIGA website explains that the conference has now “moved past theorizing Islamophobia simply as an individual or communal religious prejudice,” but rather argues that in light of “fading American power”, Islamophobia should be understood “against a backdrop of global racial hierarchy which is again trying to impose a future world order.”

CIGA further claimed that, “policies of socio-political nature are often used to cover what are realist power objectives”,arguing that “free-trade became an excuse by colonial powers to peddle drugs and destruction into China”, just as in the contemporary United States the “War on Drugs” has led to the “mass incarceration of African Americans for the past four decades.” According to CIGA, these are examples of how policies “coded in the language of moral certitude result in consequences that allocate its benefits and burdens unequally among the ruled.” Therefore, the conference “isolates the Global War on Terror” which masquerades “as an international policy in the name of security and peace,” while really disguising “an institutional language of animosity against and hegemony over Muslims and other disfavored communities worldwide.”

A notable speaker at CIGA’s previous two international conferences on Islamophobia was Salman Sayyid, Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds.¹⁹² Sayyid appears as a particularly significant connecting point here: it was Sayyid’s formulation that served as the basis for the definition of Islamophobia proposed by the APPG on British Muslims. Sayyid also co-authored the foreword for the MCB’s subsequent report on that definition.¹⁹³ In the past, Sayyid has appeared as a speaker for the Islamic Human Rights Commission on a number of occasions,¹⁹⁴ and more recently is identified as the keynote speaker at an upcoming conference being held by the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh which appears to parallel the conference held by CIGA. Titled, “The Study of Islam and Muslims in the shadow of the ‘War on Terror’: Complexity, Reflexivity and Decolonising Methodologies”, the conference scheduled for June 2021 includes speakers like CAGE’s Asim Qureshi, and a number of others who have previously spoken at CIGA’s Islamophobia conferences, such as Khadijah Elshayyal, who is listed as representing both Hamid Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, and the University of Edinburgh.¹⁹⁵

Adopting the unmistakably post-modern discourse of critical theory, the organisers of the conference claim that, “the ‘War on Terror’ has reinvigorated Orientalist constructions of Muslims, to which academic knowledge production contributed”, and that “depending on their positionalities”, researchers will confront both “securitisation” of Muslim communities, and “Orientalist approaches” as key dynamics shaping the “production of knowledge on Islam/Muslims.” They also argue that despite the “political securitisation of Islam,” there has also been an “upsurge in numbers of researchers who attempt to bring agency to Muslim voices and validate Islamic worldviews and epistemologies.”

Ultimately, the conference describes itself as exploring how the movement to Decolonise the Curriculum in British universities could enable academic staff to “tackle and transcend the aforementioned dynamics present in the study of Muslims and Islam within any discipline in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” The conference programme includes sessions such as: “The Myth of ‘Salafi-Jihadism’, A Critique of the Western-centric Narrative”, “Navigating ‘Islam’ in the Academy: Decoloniality, Muslim Subjectivity, and the Limitations of a Category”, “Decolonializing ‘Introduction to Islam’ Pedagogy: Reversing the Gaze and Cultivating Intersectionality”, “Decolonising Muslim Men: Subverting Grand Structures”.

Salman Sayyid is also involved in organising¹⁹⁶ a forthcoming event titled, “Reorienting the Post-Western: 1^st International Conference on Critical Muslim Studies”, to mark five years since the launch of ReOrient, the journal of Critical Muslim Studies which is published by Pluto Journals, a partner of Pluto Press.¹⁹⁷ The Critical Muslim Studies conference, which is to be hosted by the Centre for Ethnic and Racism Studies at the University of Leeds, states that it will be concerned with the “Western paradigm of knowledge production about what are deemed to be non-Western societies, histories and cultures.” It is claimed that there has been a disparity of efforts among “scholars grappling in different fields against the impasses of positivism, presentism and the entrenchment of disciplines in epistemic cages forged as part of Europe’s worldmaking,” and accordingly this conference seeks to bring together scholarship that “recognises the imperative for epistemic decolonising and decolonisation.”

So far, there has been a call for papers on subjects such as “White Supremacy and Its Enemies”, “Anti-Colonial Struggles And Islamicate Mobilisations”, “Race And Eurocentrism”, “South-South Solidarities And Insurgencies”, “Gender Justice And Decolonial Intersectionalities.” These align well with Critical Muslim Studies and its journal. As the editorial board state in their manifesto, ReOrient encapsulates a “turning away from an Orientalizing gaze”, as part of a “family of concepts and critiques associated with decolonial thinking and its call for delinking from the Western episteme.” Lest there be any confusion, it is made quite apparent that Critical Muslim Studies is not so much concerned with critiquing Islamic thought or the Muslim world, with the manifesto commenting on the prevalence of “Muslim self-criticism,”stating that this is an “element of critique which, however intended, insidiously aligns with dominant inscriptions of the Muslim problem and the crisis of Islam.”

Rather, we are told that there is an embrace of “decolonial thinking,” which calls for “epistemic delinking as the means of delivering on the promise of critical theory in contexts where the dispossessed are not represented by the ‘translation of the proletariat’.” This then is a project that, “places at its heart the ‘wretched of the Earth’ and follows the consequences of this placement for an understanding of the emergence of the current world order and investigations of obstacles to its replacement.” A particular focus for challenge is “Eurocentrism,” which is described as a “project that persistently seeks to articulate the universal as the synonym of Europeanness” and as such “precludes the possibility of Muslim agency” and “forecloses the venture of Critical Muslim Studies.” The editorial board claims that through the critique of Orientalism there “opens the possibility of enquires that understand the complex constitutive interplay between power and knowledge. The project “signals a shift from the ontic towards a more ontological inclined understanding of matters Islamicate.” Critical Muslim Studies we are told “is informed by an ongoing (but not necessarily consummated) suspicion of positivism,” and that for Critical Muslim Studies, “there is no necessary comfort in having ‘the facts and data’.”

And here we have it. By rejecting Eurocentrism, the oppressed of the earth, assisted by the midwives of Islamist identitarianism, are supposed at last to find their authentic voice, which will enable them to level against their opponents the usual data- and fact-free accusations of essentialist prejudice and the damnable misuse of power. Some achievement. Whose interests does it serve?

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Islamism and the Left

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Islamism and the Left

An essay in two parts

Related Publications

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How Not to Tackle Grooming Gangs

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The Genealogies of Discontent7See in general Aziz al Azmeh, l’obscurantisme postmoderne et la question musulmane, Arles, 2004 ; Aziz al Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, Verso, London 2009

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The Genealogies of Discontent⁷