Unholy Alliance: Muslims and Communists – An Introduction

Abstract

With the victory of the Bolsheviks in October 1917 strategic choices had to be made. Many of the pre-revolutionary Muslim reformers, the Jadids, endeavoured to work within the Soviet system. This was made possible by the moderate policies pursued by the Bolsheviks. They also called on Muslims to engage in a ‘holy war’ against Western imperialism. The 1920s were the heyday of co-operation between the two sides. In Indonesia the revolts of 1926 were both communist and Islamic in inspiration. But the alliance between communism and Islam did not last. After the death of Stalin the way was open for a renewal of the alliance between communists and Muslim movements which secured some temporary successes, in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Indonesia followed everywhere by the anti-communist coups of the 1960s. The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s forced communist parties into isolation and stimulated the rise of political Islam. The collapse of the Soviet Union set communist parties adrift, with the freedom to decide their own policies.

Notes

In B. Lazitch and M.M. Drachkovich, Lenin and the Comintern, Vol. I (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1972), p.379.

Y. Ro'i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev (London: Hurst, 2000).

A. Khalid, ‘Nationalizing the Revolution in Central Asia: The Transformation of Jadidism, 1917–1920’, in R.G. Suny and T. Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.145–62.

V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol.3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p.290; also available in Gerry Byrne, ‘Bolsheviks and Islam, Part 3: Islamic Communism’, Workers' Liberty, 17 March 2004, available at <http://www.workersliberty.org/node/1864/print4>, accessed 26 Nov. 2008.

Bertold Spuler, ‘Djadid’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1965), Vol.2, p.366.

A. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p.8.

A. Bennigsen and Ch. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Les Mouvements Nationaux chez les Musulmanes de Russie (Paris: Mouton, 1960), pp.52–6.

R.G. Landa, Islam v istorii Rossii (Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 1995), p.182, quoting A. Takho-Godi's 1927 book, Revolyutsiya i kontr-revolyitsiya v Dagestane (Makhachkala: Dagestanskoye Gos. Izdatel'stvo).

S.A. Dudoignon, ‘Djadidisme, mirasisme, islamisme’, Cahiers du Monde Russe (CMR), Vol.37, Nos.1–2 (1996), pp.13–40 (p.23).

R. Eisener, ‘Bukhara v 1917 g.’, Vostok, 1994, No.5, pp.75–81.

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia (London: Tauris, 1988), p.168.

Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, p.245.

S.M. Iskhakov, Rossiiskie Musul'mane i revolyutsiya (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Sotsial'no-politicheskaya Mysl'”, 2004), p.362.

Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, pp.288–9.

Ibid., p.294, quoting Fitrat's 1919 tract, Sharq siyasati (Politics of the East).

Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les Mouvements Nationaux, p.101.

Ibid., p.236, quoting Sultan-Galiev's 1921 article on ‘Methods of Anti-religious Propaganda among Muslims’.

Although the final resolutions and Stalin's speeches were published, the minutes of this party conference were kept secret; they came to light 67 years later, and were published in Moscow in 1992 as B.F. Sultanbekov (ed.), Tainy natsional'noi politiki TsK RKP: chetvërtoe Soveshchanie TsK RKP, with an introduction by B.F. Sultanbekov (Moscow: Insan, 1992).

Tainy natsional'noi politiki TsK RKP, pp.84–5.

S.A. Dudoignon, ‘La Question scolaire en Boukhara et au Turkestan russe’, CMR, Vol.37, Nos.1–2 (1996), pp.133–210 (p.186).

A.G. Park demonstrated this in his careful examination of the published literature, The Bolsheviks in Turkestan 1917–27 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), and the picture has not been substantially modified for the 1920s by subsequent writers with access to the documentary sources, such as Shoshana Keller or Terry Martin.

This has been analysed in detail by Terry Martin in The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Waqf (plural awqaf): Muslim charitable institution.

Hans Bräker, ‘Soviet Policy toward Islam’, in A. Kappeler, Gerhard Simon and Georg Brunner (eds.), Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp.157–82 (pp.166–7). Bräker may be putting it too strongly here, first because Soviet policy towards Islam in the 1920s was characterized by an ambiguous mixture of toleration and repression, and second because policy was not always consistent between the different regions of the Soviet Union: in Chechnya, for instance, attacks on Muslim institutions started in 1924, earlier than elsewhere, after the removal of the local party leader, Tashtemir El'darkhanov.

John Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920. First Congress of the Peoples of the East (London: Pathfinder Press, 1993), Appendix 2, p.259.

‘Theses on the Fundamental Tasks of the Second Congress of the Communist International’, in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp.184–201 (p.193).

‘Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Question’, in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.31, pp.240–45 (pp.240–41).

Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.42, p.196.

Stephen White, ‘Communism and the East: The Baku Congress, 1920’, Slavic Review, Vol.XXXIII, No.3 (1974), pp.492–514.

The English translation of the invitation was given in the Weekly Summary of Intelligence Reports Issued by S.I.S. (Constantinople Branch), for week ending 2 Sept. 1920, available at the Public Records Office, London, FO 371/ 5177, pp.29–30.

G.Z. Sorkin, Pervyi s”ezd narodov vostoka (Moscow: IVL, 1961), pp.16–17.

M.N. Roy, M.N. Roy's Memoirs (Bombay and New York: Allied Publications, 1964), p.392.

The Baku congress is discussed in Sorkin, Pervyi s”ezd narodov vostoka; Birinci Dogu Halklari Kurultayi – Baku 1–8 Eylül 1920. Stenoyla tutulmus tutanak; White, ‘Communism and the East’; Mete Tunçay, Türkiye'de Sol Akimlar (Ankara: BDS Yayınları, 1991), pp.209–17; Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Suyu Arayan Adam (Ankara: Öz Yayinlari, 1959), pp.187–98.

Izvestiya, 21 Sept. 1920; Pravda, 8 and 16 Sept. 1920; Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 14 (16 Nov. 1920), col.2941.

Tunçay, Türkiye'de Sol Akimlar, pp.209–11.

Sorkin, Pervyi s”ezd narodov vostoka, p.31.

A.I. Mikoyan, Mysli i vospominaniya o Lenine (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1970), pp.49–50; Tunçay, Türkiye'de Sol Akimlar, pp.215–17.

Published in Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 15 (20 Dec. 1920), cols.3141–50.

Shaumian and 25 other leading Bolsheviks from Baku were arrested and murdered on 20 September 1918. When the news of the massacre reached Moscow, the Bolshevik government accused British officers of being responsible for the death of 26 leading Bolsheviks in Baku: see Bülent Gökay, A Clash of Empires (London: Tauris, 1997), pp.30–35.

Anastas Mikoyan, Memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan: The Path of Struggle, Vol.I (Madison, CT: Sphinx Press, 1988), pp.201–2.

Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn, p.183.

Speech at the Baku Congress, quoted in Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (London: Allen Lane, 1969), pp.170–73 (p.173).

Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism and Asia, p.153. The references to ‘khans’ and ‘mullahs’ were replaced by ‘clergy’ in the Theses as finally issued.

Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism and Asia, p.188.

Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912–1926 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp.285, 296.

Reynaldo Ileto, ‘Religion and Anti-Colonial Movements’, in Nicholas Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol.2, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.193–244 (pp.242–3).

Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p.304.

Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les Mouvements Nationaux, p.98.

The ideology of Sarekat Islam and the evolution of its relations with socialism and communism were analysed in detail in Hans Bräker, Kommunismus und Weltreligionen Asiens. Zur Religious- und Asienpolitik der Sowjetunion. Band I.2. Kommunismus und Islam (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1971), pp.202–34.

The party renamed itself Communist Party of Indonesia in 1924.

Tan Malaka, ‘Der Kommunismus auf Java’, Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, No.29 (21 July 1923), p.700.

Leslie Hugh Palmier, Communists in Indonesia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p.99.

Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, p.188.

I. Baldauf, Schriftreform und Schriftwechsel bei den muslimischen Russland- und Sowjettürken (1850–1937): ein Symptom ideengeschichtlicher und kulturpolitischer Entwicklungen (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993), p.416.

This was the argument put forward by the main promoter of Latinization, the Azerbaijani communist leader Agamali-Oglu.

Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p.238.

S. Keller, To Moscow not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p.116.

Ibid., p.153.

Ibid., p.241.

The campaign against ‘religious survivals’ mounted by Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s was less brutal and less energetic than Stalin's campaigns of the 1930s, and it was in effect broken off by Brezhnev after 1964.

Keller, To Moscow not Mecca, p.248.

Sh.F. Mukhamedyarov and B.F. Sultanbekov, ‘Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev: His Character and Fate’, Central Asian Survey, Vol.IX, No.2 (1990), pp.109–17.

The memoirs of Aymergen, a Daghestani Muslim who fought in the Red Army, shed some light on the situation of the North Caucasian Muslims in this period: see S. Aymergen, Son Kopru (Istanbul: Gulan Grafik, 1992).

Theses adopted by the sixth Comintern congress in September 1928, quoted in Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism and Asia, p.239.

Quoted from the extracts in Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919–43: Documents, Vol.2 (London: Cass, 1971), p.541.

Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.407; this was denounced in 1935 as a serious tactical error.

Extract from the resolutions of the seventh congress of the Communist International, quoted in Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism and Asia, p.248.

Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism and Asia, p.249.

A.G. Samarbaksh claims that the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon (CPSL) continued its anti-fascist struggle from 1939 to 1941, although Batatu tells us that the Syrian communist statement of 1940 on the war, like the Iraqi statement, called for neutrality between the two sides in the war: see, respectively, A.G. Samarbaksh, Le Socialisme en Irak et en Syrie (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1978), p.111, and Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p.453, n.53. The difference may have been simply that there was an explicitly fascist political party in Syria at the time, but not in Iraq, hence an ‘anti-fascist struggle’ of the European type was more meaningful in Syria.

G.D. Overstreet and M. Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1959), p.200.

T.Y. Ismael and J.S. Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), p.33.

S. Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), pp.115–16.

Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p.215.

Ibid., p.240.

G. Procacci (ed.), The Cominform. Minutes of the Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1994), p.251.

A. Popovic, L'Islam balkanique (Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), pp.347–54.

Ibid., pp.42–54.

Ibid., p.103. The author points out that the data on this subject are very fragmentary.

This was the truce made in January 1948 between Amir Sjarifuddin, Indonesian prime minister and minister of defence, and the Dutch authorities, by which the Netherlands retained sovereignty over Indonesia temporarily until a plebiscite decided the country's fate.

Bräker, Kommunismus und Weltreligionen Asiens, Vol.2, p.357.

Masjumi is an acronym which stands for Madjelis Sjuro Muslimin Indonesia (Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims).

Bräker, Kommunismus und Weltreligionen Asiens, Vol.2, p.358.

G. McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952), pp.258–300, provides a detailed account of these events.

Ye. Zhukov, ‘K polozheniyu v Indii’, Mirovoe khozyaistvo i mirovaya politika, 1947, No.7, pp.3–14 (p.10).

Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp.261–73.

T. Maniruzzaman, ‘Radical Politics and the Emergence of Bangladesh’, in P.R. Brass and M.F. Franda (eds.), Radical Politics in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), pp.226–7.

Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p.562.

V. Segesvary, Le Réalisme Khrouchtchévien (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1968), p.140. It would be wrong to overstress the role of instructions from Moscow in the various communist revolts of 1947–51. As C.M. Turnbull has commented, ‘The various revolts and wars in Southeast Asia were no part of a grand pre-planned Soviet strategy’; they reflected rather ‘the confused ambitions of the communists’: see N. Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol.2, Part 1, p.600.

O.M. Smolansky, The Soviet Union and the Arab East under Khrushchev (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1974), p.28.

Quoted in Segesvary, Le Réalisme Khrouchtchévien, p.148.

Quoted in ibid., p.182.

Batatu, The Old Social Classes, p.909, quoting a statement in Ittihad al-Sha'b (The Union of the People), 10 July 1959.

Segesvary, Le Réalisme Khrouchtchévien, p.183. It should be added that Batatu (The Old Social Classes, p.929) sees this as a reflection of the victory of the Right in an internal factional struggle within the ICP rather than a response to Soviet criticism.

See the thumbnail sketch of all four given in Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno. Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp.29–40.

Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, p.48.

Ibid., p.67.

Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.260–61.

Adrian Morgan, ‘Europe's Islamist–Leftist Alliance’, Part II, 28 April 2007, available at <http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=03178FAF-849B-468E-A4D6-6A1EF5D32DF4>, accessed 26 Nov. 2008.

D. Ottaway and M. Ottaway, Algeria: Politics of a Socialist Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), p.234.

Roger E. Kanet, ‘Soviet Attitudes since Stalin’, in Roger E. Kanet (ed.), The Soviet Union and the Developing Nations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.41.

R. Ulianovsky, ‘Marxist and Non-Marxist Socialism’, World Marxist Review, Vol.14, No.9 (1970), pp.125–7.

J. Walkin, ‘Muslim–Communist Confrontation in East Java 1964–65’, Orbis, Vol.13, No.3 (1969), pp.829–30.

R.W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.54.

K.R. Young, ‘Local and National Influences in the Violence of 1965’, in Robert Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings, Monash Papers No.21, 1990 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Press, 1990), pp.63–100 (p.77).

The degree of the PKI's direct involvement in the 30 September coup is a matter of dispute; Rex Mortimer argues that the party's involvement was ‘peripheral’ (Indonesian Communism under Sukarno, pp.392–3).

B.J. Boland, The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p.146.

An estimate of ‘half a million to a million killed’ is given by Y.M. Cheong in N. Tarling (ed.) The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol.2, Part 1, p.434.

Sudan is an exception; here the Soviet government protested strongly in 1971 and in fact broke its ties with that country.

L.C. Brown, Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p.111.

Except in Indonesia, where, as we have seen, the whole of the history of the PKI is marked by the interplay between communism and Islamic political movements.

L. Medvenko, ‘Islam: Two Trends’, New Times (Moscow), No.13 (1980), pp.23–5.

Declaration made in March 1980, quoted in R.O. Freedman, Soviet Policy Toward the Middle East Since 1970, 3rd edn (New York: Praeger, 1982), p.384.

Freedman, Soviet Policy Toward the Middle East, p.389.

Galia Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East from World War Two to Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.189–90.

Freedman, Soviet Policy Toward the Middle East, p.442.

Ismael and Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon, p.148.

The Iraqi Communist Party moved in the opposite direction, taking part in the Governing Council created by the United States-led coalition in Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein: T.Y. Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.302.

Second Cairo Declaration, 14 Dec. 2003, at <http://www.mdsweb.jp/international/cairo_sec/cairo2_dec.html>, accessed 26 Nov. 2008; Eric Walberg, ‘Anti-globalists Reach Out to Islamists’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 5–11 April 2007, at <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/839/sc1.htm>, accessed 26 Nov. 2008.

Marie Nassif-Debs, ‘Hezbollah and Resistance: The viewpoint of the Lebanese Communist Party’, International Viewpoint Online Magazine, Nov. 2006, at <http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1159>, accessed 26 Nov. 2008.

World NetDaily, 18 June 2007, at <http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/archives.asp?AUTHOR_ID=134&PAGE=235>, accessed April 2008.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Fowkes

Ben Fowkes is Honorary Visiting Professor, London Metropolitan University.

Bülent Gökay

Bülent Gökay is Professor of International Relations, School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Keele University.