This article from Epoch Times is five and a half years old, but it was just brought to my attention, and in light of the fact that all too many people in positions of power and influence today, particularly among those who dissent from the agenda of the dominant Left, assume that what it claims is true, it’s worth answering. Commentary interspersed below.
“Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism (UPDATED),” by The Editorial Team of “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” Epoch Times, June 7, 2018:
…Today, terrorism comes primarily in three forms: state terrorism under communist regimes; terrorist activity carried out abroad by agents of communist regimes with the aim of spreading violent revolution; and fundamentalist Islamic extremism, which in fact owes much of its ideology and methods to communism….
This assertion is self-contradictory. “Fundamentalist Islamic extremism,” we’re told, “owes much of its ideology and methods to communism.” However, the term “fundamentalist,” which properly applies only to certain strains of Protestant Christianity, is generally used to refer to a scrupulous and literalistic adherence to the written text. So if “Islamic extremism” is “fundamentalist,” it doesn’t owe “much of its ideology and methods to communism”; instead, it derives its ideology and methods from the core teachings of the Qur’an. That ideology and those methods align with those of Communism, but they can’t be both “fundamentalist” and derived from Communism.
The most influential form of modern terrorism, however, is the radical Islam nurtured by the Soviet bloc as a means of destabilizing the Muslim world….
There is no doubt that the Soviets nurtured the “Palestinian” jihad. In fact, the KGB helped invent the “Palestinians,” as I explain in The Palestinian Delusion. This was not, however, part of any concerted Soviet effort to nurture “radical Islam.” The Soviets did not, for example, nurture the “radical Islam” of the Afghan mujahedin who fought to free their country from Soviet control in the 1980s.
…While the Soviets and Chinese communists funded many terrorist organizations in the Middle East, actually introducing communism in areas with deeply held religious beliefs proved a steep challenge. The Soviet Union’s efforts to directly export socialist revolution to the Muslim world met with mixed and often temporary results.
While there were multiple Soviet-aligned states in the Middle East, only South Yemen and Afghanistan were under communist rule for varying lengths of time during the Cold War. In 1979, the Soviet Union launched an invasion of Afghanistan and occupied the country for ten years in an attempt to prop up the communist regime it had recently helped rise to power. In 1989, the Soviets gave up and withdrew from the country.
Epoch Times doesn’t take the time to point out the fact that the Soviet’s Communist regime in Afghanistan was opposed to, and opposed by, Afghan jihadis. It was not, in other words, an example of this Communist-inspired “radical Islam” that Epoch Times is claiming exists or existed.
However, while communism itself failed to establish control over the Muslim world, it did much to influence the creation and development of contemporary Islamic extremism.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the threat of Islamic extremism gained prominence, with the actions of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist group becoming front-page news. But the ideological source of bin Laden’s Islamic extremism can be traced back to a man who has been described as the Karl Marx of radical Islam. [9]
a. Sayyid Qutb: The Marx of Islamic Extremism
At first glance, it may seem far-fetched to suggest a relationship between radical Islam and communism, given that Muslims believe in Allah and the prophet Mohammed, while communism is atheistic and aims to eradicate faith in religions. In fact, the theory and methods of modern Islamic extremism are closely linked to Marxism-Leninism.
Some of the confusion on Epoch Times’ part is attributable to the fact that both Islam and Marxism-Leninism are authoritarian, and indeed, totalitarian. Sharia prescribes rules for every imaginable human behavior, asserting a control as total as that exercised by any totalitarian state. Both are intolerant of dissent. Both inculcate passivity in the face of authoritarian rule. But to claim that Islam got all this from Marxism betrays an ignorance of Islamic history and theology.
The pioneer of radical Islam and modern jihad was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian liaison for the local Muslim Brotherhood to the Communist International and the Egyptian communist party. [10][11] Qutb’s ideas were steeped in communist logic and rhetoric. Born in 1906, Qutb studied socialism and literature in the 1920s and 1930s. He studied abroad in the United States for two years in the late 1940s and joined the Muslim Brotherhood after his return to Egypt. [12]
Qutb, like his contemporary and fellow Qur’anic scholar Syed Abul Ali Maududi, skillfully appropriated Marxist language for the purposes of dawah. That is, he clothed the Islamic message in Marxist terminology in order to make the age-old message of the Qur’an appear to be identical to the aspirations of the new revolutionary vanguard. In doing this, he hoped to co-opt the international Left and transform it into a tool of the spread of Islam. He was largely successful in helping to forge the Leftist/Islamic alliance that still continues, but to assume that he was influenced by Marxism in some way that violated the core teachings of Islam, or that created some new version of Islam, would once again be ill-informed and naive.
Qutbism can be described as the pursuit of violence to destroy the old society dominated by “jahiliyyah.” As a religious term, jahiliyyah means ignorance of religious truth, and it originally referred to society before the spread of Islam. Qutb called upon Muslims to lay down their lives in the struggle against jahiliyyah, which would supposedly usher in humanity’s liberation. To articulate his ideas on this struggle, Qutb reinterpreted both the meaning of jahiliyyah and the Islamic concept of jihad.
Upon mention of jihad, many immediately think of “holy war,” but in Arabic, jihad simply means to struggle or to fight. In mainstream Islam, it can be taken to mean internal conflict (self-perfection) or defensive jihad. [13]
No one with any familiarity with the Qur’an or Islamic tradition, as well as Islamic law, could honestly claim this. Yes, jihad means “struggle,” and there are as many uses of the word in Arabic with as many different connotations as there are of “struggle” in English. However, the primary understanding of jihad in traditional Islamic theology is warfare against unbelievers for the purpose of destroying non-Sharia governments and imposing Sharia.
This is clear from the teachings of the four principal schools of Sunni jurisprudence:
Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).
Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that the Islamic State (ISIS) and other jihad groups are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).
Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”
However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)
Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”
The Shi’ites have substantially the same understanding. This is also taught by modern-day scholars of Islam. Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:
The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)
Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.
To claim that Sayyid Qutb, under the influence of Communism, invented this is to betray an ignorance of Islamic scripture, theology and law that is nothing short of breathtaking.
Wellington says
The Epoch Times is a conservative publication and thus this article by Robert Spencer illustrates how even many conservatives still don’t “get” Islam, let alone those on the Left.
Pray Hard says
Now, that’s funny being that islam is way more than a thousand years older than communism.
Kepha says
Context! Epoch Times is run by the Falun Gong, which was founded by one Li Hongzhi, a Chinese dissident who claims to be the Maitreya Buddha (Mile fo 弥勒佛–or Buddha of the future). He is not the first to claim this honor, or to be identified as such. Claimants to being the Maitreya abounded when the Yuan (Mongol ) dynasty was tottering; and some even said that Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, was the Maitreya. Now you can partly understand why the Chinese Communists are highly suspicious of the Falun Gong an persecute them.
In any event, the Falun Gong is fiercely anti-Communist, and will see a Communist hand behind every nefarious thing the crops up. Given that in the parts of China and its empire where they coexist, there is little love lost between Muslims and Buddhists, too.
As for Said Qutb, he was an enemy of what he saw as Western imperialism, and certainly saw the possibility of a common cause with the Eyptian Communists.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
That explains why that newspaper reads so much like a conspiracy rag. Yeah, some of the stuff they write is on target, but a lot is very far fetched. I am usually open to all sorts of conservative arguments, but these guys go way beyond that
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Aside from the Soviet war against the Afghans, another factoid that proves that communism and islam are independent totalitarian ideologies is the fact that in muslim countries, communists look to either the non-muslim, or in the case of multi-sectarian muslim countries, the minority sect for their support. That’s how it was w/ the Ba’ath socialists in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, where sunnis were the minority, the Ba’athists took their support, but in Syria, where sunnis were the majority, they took the support of Alawites, Druze and Christians. Had communists created islam, they’d have pulled their support from anywhere!
Walter Sieruk says
There is a very strange and sinister phenomenon in current times which is known as the “Red /Green ‘Alliance.”
The first time of I saw this from first hand observation was on March 11,2017 at the State Capital of Pennsylvania , Harrisburg, in which ACTFORAMERICA.ORG held a pro-US Constitution
,anti- Sharia Law . The police did the job and kept the the patriots of actforamerica and the Marxist of Black Lives Matter apart . BLM were there is oppose the patriots and I view from my side of the rally that those loud drum beating rabble Marxist/ hooligans of BLM held up two Red Soviet Union flags.
Furthermore, all those BLM protesters had their faces hidden , covered . By contrast none of the other side, the patriots were hiding their faces behind a mask and we held up the American flags.
That was just one small part of the manicing Communist -Islamic alliance. which as stated before is called “The Red/Green Alliance..”
Myron J. Poltroonian says
Mr. Spencer,
This is a mite confusing to me: ” … The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8). … “, for, if I read it correctly, it means that upon the return of Jesus Christ to this earth Islam ceases to exist as a religion. I do know Islam considers Jesus a prophet, I did not know they consider Him to be a divine spirit or divinity.
davidafoot says
It is clear by just looking at the dates that Islam is the precedent for Totskyism and not the other way round, as some say: “There is no god and Marx is his prophet” a joke but in its extreme Marxism is a cult of fanatics just like Islam, hence neither want to tolerate “other” religions.
Possibly Marx was influenced by Islam.
The red/ grreen alliance can go a long way up to the destruction of the unfortunate state which took them both in but in the end they are incompatible and only one can go forward, they have to fight over the spoils.