The Failure of Political Islam

So the point of all this is that the book to recommend is called The Failure of Political Islam, by Roy Olivier^***. It is a brilliant book. He is not a Muslim; he is a French intellectual who originally did studies in Afghanistan, but he has studied very seriously the modern political scene in the Muslim world, and he gives a brilliant analysis of what is called fundamentalism. It is called The Failure of Political Islam, by Roy Olivier. It is French: for anyone used to reading French intellectuals, it has a little bit of that in it. They tend to be abstruse, almost purposely.

But the basic gist of his argument is that what happened within the Muslim world is that there was a radical secularisation within the elite, the intellectual elites of the Muslim world. Many of them adopted socialism and communism as ways of dealing with colonialism. Algeria is a good example of this: Ahmed Ben Bella, Boumediene — these are the revolutionaries who freed their countries from the yoke of colonialism. Another example is Libya, the Jamāhīriyyah; he is a socialist in his views. Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasser, who is kind of switching back and forth, but basically a socialist worldview. The Palestine Liberation Organisation, a communist organisation from its inception. The idea was definitely the oppressed versus the oppressor within a dialectical, Marxist dialectic. And so also with Iraq, the Baʿthist party, socialist; Syria, socialist. It is forgotten how deeply this Marxist idea moves into the Muslim world. Yemen, communist: the communists take over Yemen.

Communism traditionally has seen religion as an enemy, the opiate of the masses. In the Muslim world this was a little more difficult, because of the depth of the sacred tradition still within those peoples. And so the type of communism, the socialism, there was almost a: well, let us reinterpret our tradition. The Prophet was a communist. And some of the Western people said this about Jesus, the original communitarian: the disciples are giving up all their possessions for the poor. So now there is, within the Catholic Church, a very strong Marxist tradition, liberation theology. The Sandinistas: many of the people within the Sandinistas were very devout. Ernesto Cardenal was a Jesuit priest^****; he becomes the minister of culture in Nicaragua. So within the Catholic Church, particularly in the so-called oppressed lands like Brazil and these places, one finds within Christianity a Marxist redaction of the Christian teaching.

And it is very appealing. Mixing Marxism and Christianity for the masses — or Marxism on its own — becomes very appealing if one is oppressed, and suddenly one's oppression does not have to be a materialistic thing, but now one can be oppressed for the sake of God. It is a little easier to bear than being oppressed purely.