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.

The East is a revolutionary cauldron capable of putting a revolutionary torch to all of Western Europe. (Sultan-Galiev, 1920)1

It is difficult to give a brief account of the relationship between communism and Islam, partly because of the vastness of the field, partly because no satisfactory up-to-date guide exists. Yaacov Ro'i has recently produced a detailed study of the period after 1941, but even this is limited to Islam within the Soviet Union.2 Apart from that, one can only construct a summary by working through the many specialized examinations that have been published on aspects of the subject. This deficiency in the literature badly needs to be remedied. There can be no question of doing that here, but we hope in this short introduction at least to indicate some possible lines of approach.

The relationship of the Marxist left to political Islam dates back to the time of the Russian revolution of 1917. The Russian revolution took place in an empire that was home to 16 million Muslims – some 10 per cent of the population. The Bolsheviks inherited the vast multi-national, multi-faith tsarist empire, in which Muslims had suffered very badly at the hands of the regime. The collapse of tsarism radicalized millions of Muslims, who demanded religious freedom and national rights denied them by the empire. The overthrow of tsarism was greeted with enthusiasm by many of the non-Russian minorities; Muslim congresses were held in Moscow and Kazan' in 1917. By agitating in favour of self-determination for oppressed nations and land to the peasantry, the Bolsheviks won sufficient support to carry the revolution into the non-Russian lands. Religious freedom was an important aspect of national freedom promoted by the Bolsheviks for the oppressed peoples of the former Russian empire. Bolshevism became an attractive alternative to many Muslims, who ‘flocked to the new organs of government being built by the Soviet regime’.3 One of Lenin's first decrees was directed ‘to the Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East’, whose grievances the Bolsheviks sought to co-opt. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations (November 1919), Lenin stated: ‘The socialist revolution will not be solely or chiefly a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against its bourgeoisie – no, it will be a struggle of all colonies and countries oppressed by imperialism, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism’.4 The Bolsheviks welcomed left-wing Muslims into their ranks, and as a result approximately 15 per cent of Communist Party members were Muslims; in parts of Central Asia, Muslims constituted up to 70 per cent of the membership. Bolshevik leaders issued a call for a ‘holy war’ against Western imperialism. Lenin asserted that it was necessary to support Islamist movements under conditions in which they contested local ruling classes, colonial control, or both. This ‘astonishing alliance’ was defended by Lenin with great vigour against those who believed that communists should have no dealings with religious activism: he argued that it was vital to persuade such movements in the ‘colonial’ world that their future lay with the workers of Europe against the imperial powers and that a dual approach was required.

Jadidism and Bolshevism

The Muslim reform movement in the Russian Empire emerged during the nineteenth century as the usul-i jadid (‘new method’), a programme of educational reform that gradually developed into a political movement. The most famous Jadid leader was Ismail Bey Gaspirali (alias Gasprinskii), a Crimean Tatar who had a European education and worked as a journalist in Istanbul and Paris. In 1883 he started to publish Tercüman, which became the chief manifestation of the Jadid campaign for the modernization of Muslim practices, addressing a range of issues from the economy to religious institutions. He believed that the rapidly changing political and cultural relationships between Muslims and Western states and peoples created the right conditions for an immediate and rapid Islamic renewal. Ismail Bey visited Central Asia, and under his influence Jadid schools were opened in Andijan in 1897, and in Samarkand and Tokmak in 1898.5

After the 1917 revolution some parts of the Jadid movement turned towards a kind of ‘Islamic socialism’. But, as Adeeb Khalid has remarked recently, Jadidism should not be ‘viewed as a unified movement, as is often done in the existing literature. The Jadids of Central Asia use the same symbols, tropes and metaphors as the Jadids of European Russia in their discourse but they do not mean the same thing by them – meanings are grounded in local realities’.6 We should think rather in terms of Muslim reform endeavours of various kinds, which varied in objectives and outcomes according to their location in the Russian empire. Among the Kazan Tatars, the reform movement took a radical form. It adopted nationalist, socialist and anti-Russian positions and formed the seedbed of Tatar communism, as exemplified by such people as Mulla-Nur Vahitov and Sultan Galiev.7 In Dagestan, by contrast, the Muslim reformers were much more moderate. Their main concern, we are told, was to defend themselves against accusations that their proposals for land reform were not contrary to Islamic law, or shari‘a, in fact that they were truer Muslims than their traditionalist opponents: ‘At the Peasant Congress of August 1917 the shari‘a was treated as the supreme authority, as specific quotations from it were presented stating that the land belongs to those who cultivate it. The shariatists were beaten with the shari‘a of the socialist groups and the land-hungry peasants’.8 In Turkestan, the Jadids who set up the autonomous state of Khokand in December 1917 used rhetoric of a fundamentalist kind, calling for a ‘return to shari‘a’.9 In Bukhara the Young Bukharans were initially unable to overthrow the theocratic rule of the emir, backed as he was by the majority of the population.10 Their policies after they finally came to power in 1920 were distinctly moderate. According to Article 26 of the 1921 constitution of the People's Republic of Bukhara, ‘no law can be in contradiction with the fundamental principles of Islam’.11

Nevertheless, the term ‘Jadid’ retains its value as a form of shorthand, because all these movements did hold certain fundamental features in common, namely rejection of what they saw as superstitious accretions to Islam not justified by either the Qur‘an or valid Hadiths, a drive to modernize Muslim education, and rejection of Western domination. In the Russian context rejection of the West meant the overthrow of tsarist absolutism, but this objective was shared by non-Muslim revolutionaries so there was an opening for co-operation with socialists and communists. The success of the October revolution of 1917 meant that the Jadids had to choose sides: 1917 was, as Adeeb Khalid puts it, ‘The Moment of Truth’.12 The Bolsheviks did not come to power as advocates of Russian domination over Central Asia, rather the reverse, at least in theory, so there were some grounds for Jadids to favour them. The choice was not made immediately, however. The overthrow of the provisional government was not greeted with enthusiasm among the Jadids, as far as one can judge from the evidence. The prevailing mood was one of neutrality. The Young Bukharan ‘Abd al-ra'uf Fitrat wrote in Hurriyat (Freedom): ‘It would be reckless and stupid to go over to either the Bolsheviks or their opponents. We shall not oppose either of them unless they decide to do away with our national rights.’13 The reaction of Soviet Muslims to October was not uniform; attempts made during 1917 to secure a unified approach came to nothing, and each region went its own way. When they were re-unified it was under the aegis of the Soviet state, after the end of the civil war.

It is impossible to estimate how many Jadids decided to support the Bolshevik government after October 1917. In June 1918 the Communist Party of Turkestan was set up, and ‘large numbers of Jadids joined it as soon as it was possible’. The Jadid newspaper Hurriyat became the organ of the Samarkand soviet. By summer 1918 the Tashkent Soviet was dominated by the Jadids. It had ‘counter-revolutionary ulama [religious scholars]’ arrested, thus showing that Muslim society was split down the middle.14 Fitrat, who had been rather ambivalent in October 1917, now threw himself wholeheartedly into the Bolshevik cause. His particular concern now was to denounce European imperialism. In 1919 he wrote that ‘European imperialists have given the East nothing except immorality and destruction. Even though they came to the East saying “We will open schools of civilization and colleges of humanity” they have opened nothing but brothels and winehouses’.15

The Tatar Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, born in Ufa province in 1892, was a journalist with no particular political involvement until 1917, when he greeted the revolutionary events that destroyed the Russian empire as a great opportunity. Along with Mullah Nur Vahitov he developed a theory of Muslim national communism, according to which Marxism would be modified to accord with the particular characteristics of an Islamic society. Historically this tendency lasted from 1918 to 1928. It was a synthesis of various ideologies, sometimes contradictory to one another, including nationalism, communism and anarchism as well as religion, of course. Muslim national communists generally believed that the Islamic way of life and Marxism are not by definition incompatible, but indeed they could coexist and even complement one another. The immediate aim was the establishment of an autonomous state in Central Asia that would be ruled not by the Russians but by a Muslim communist party. Although the party would be communist, it would not introduce socialism, and the social revolution against the exploiting classes, including the ‘backward Muslim clergy’, would be postponed to a distant future.16 Anti-religious propaganda, he said, should be undertaken only among the most advanced Muslim nations of Soviet Russia – the Tatars, the Bashkirs and the Kazakhs. In Turkestan, Khiva and Bukhara it was not advisable, since ‘these peoples have not yet reached the stage of development the Tatars have already passed through’.17 Sultan-Galiev's rapid rise to significant positions within the Bolshevik establishment and his sudden fall from grace and subsequent vilification in Stalin's purges have provided several generations with a metaphor for the promise and frustrations of early Soviet nationality policy.

Sultan-Galiev was an able organizer and public speaker. He served the Soviet state during the civil war as chairman of the Central Muslim Military Collegium, chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of Peoples of the East, and member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Nationality Affairs; this last position made him the highest-ranking person of Muslim origin in a high-level state body in the Soviet Union. Sultan Galiev struggled for his vision for several years, suffering repeated disappointments at the hands of the Bolsheviks in power centrally. He was particularly concerned with Stalin's plans for the new federal government (USSR), which, he considered, would disadvantage Tatars and other Muslim groups that were not granted union republic status. By the end of 1922 Sultan-Galiev had come into direct conflict with Stalin's nationalities policy, and eventually, in May 1923, he was arrested. Although he was soon released, he was stripped of his party membership and all positions in the Bolshevik administration. In June, at the fourth conference of the party Central Committee, he was accused by Stalin of conspiracy and treason.18 The conference expelled him from the party and condemned what it described as ‘the deviation of Sultan-Galievism’ (Sultangalievshchina). Having confessed his alleged crimes, he was, astonishingly enough, released and allowed to work as a journalist until his second arrest in 1928. Following this arrest, Sultan-Galiev was tried in 1930 with 76 others as part of a ‘Sultan-Galievist counter-revolutionary organization’. His death penalty was soon commuted, and he was released in 1934 and permitted to live in Saratov province. However, his third arrest in 1937 was followed by execution in January 1940.

The fall from grace of Sultan-Galiev in 1923 certainly has great symbolic significance: it meant the ending of any official Soviet support for the idea of national communism. But there is no evidence of an immediate shift towards an anti-Muslim policy. Stalin himself denied this at the above-mentioned fourth conference. He attacked ‘leftists who think that one can transplant Russian models into different nations without considering local customs and circumstances’.19 So at this stage it was still possible for Jadids to work within the Soviet system without completely abandoning their convictions. Some chose instead to join the Basmachi rebels, who had been resisting Russian and later Soviet rule since 1916. But, in Bukhara at least, the majority (including Fitrat) opted for legality because they thought they could continue their activities in that People's Republic, which later became part of Uzbekistan.20 Indigenous Muslim communists remained in control of the party apparatus in their localities in the 1920s, pursuing policies of reform and reorganization in line with the directives issued from Moscow.21 This was the era of korenizatsiya (indigenization).22 The radical legislation of 1918 (such as the nationalization of the waqf 23 properties and the elimination of the shari‘a courts) ceased to be enforced after 1922, although it remained on the statute book. Hans Bräker summarizes the period up to 1927 as one of ‘relatively soft treatment’ of Islam on the part of the Soviet state.24

The Alliance with Islam against Colonialism

The 1920s were the heyday of anti-imperialist revolution for the Bolsheviks. An alliance with Islam could be made on the basis of a joint effort both to overthrow the power of the West in the Muslim world and to transform Muslim society. This was possible because Islam could be interpreted in such a way as to stress its socially revolutionary aspect. On 7 December 1917, almost immediately after coming to power, the Bolsheviks issued the Appeal to the Toiling Muslims of the East, which assured them that ‘your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions, are free and inviolable’.25

The relationship between anti-imperialist Muslim radicalism and communism was articulated and generally supported by the founding principles and general direction of the Third (Communist) International. The Communist International (Comintern) was established in Moscow in 1919 to coordinate the activities of the foreign communist parties according to the direction of the Russian Communist Party. At that time, Lenin believed that the revolutionary environment produced by the chaos following the First World War called for an entirely new international communist organization that would foster working-class solidarity and world revolution against the capitalist rulers of the West. The centre of the Comintern was to be in Moscow because it seemed natural that it would be located in the only socialist country then in existence.

The structure of the Comintern was modelled on that of the Russian Communist Party, not because of any sinister design to ensure Russian domination, but simply because the Russian party was the only one to have carried out a successful revolution. However, in 1920 it subordinated all foreign communist parties to Moscow by imposing 21 conditions of admission. Communists were called upon to make propaganda within their own countries' armed forces, make special efforts to win peasant support, and achieve emancipation of oppressed nationalities and colonial peoples. They were urged to remove reformists and centrists from all positions in the working-class movement, and to replace them with communists, denounce pacifism, accept all decisions of the Comintern as binding, take the name ‘Communist Party’, and expel all members who voted against accepting the 21 conditions at a congress called for the purpose of implementing them. Communist parties were also required to structure their organizations on the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, and to support unreservedly the interests of ‘every Soviet republic’.

For better or worse, communist parties emerged in foreign countries as the ideological allies and foreign policy instruments of the Soviet Union. The Comintern, in a radical departure from the precedents set by both the First and the Second Internationals, was no longer to be a series of national parties, but to act more as a single communist party with branches in different countries. Between congresses, the highest authority was to be the Executive Committee of the Comintern, which would have powers parallel to and superseding those of the central committees of the individual parties, which would allow it to be the directive centre of the world revolution.

At first, the Comintern was predominantly a westward-looking organization. A considerable number of recruits came from countries of the West and this strengthened the belief that world revolution in Western industrialized countries was quickly approaching. The Bolsheviks were convinced that the proletarian revolution was afoot all over Europe and sweeping everything before it. But by the autumn of 1920, the Soviet leaders began to fear that revolution in the West might not be imminent after all. Failures in Germany and Hungary, and the establishment of a solid belt of anti-communist regimes between the Soviet Union and the defeated Central Powers, caused them to reconsider their analysis; and, while it did not lead them to abandon the idea of the coming world revolution in the West, it redirected their attention towards considering the revolutionary potential that the East might offer.

Lenin was very concerned with Asia, and as hopes of revolution in the West faded after the war with Poland in October 1920 he turned his attention to the colonies of the Western powers. In them he saw a way of using bourgeois nationalist revolutions to deprive imperialist powers of the raw materials and markets that he believed to be necessary for their survival. In almost all his communications and reports in 1920, he pointedly referred to Asia, observing that ‘one of the chief causes hampering the revolutionary working-class movement in the developed capitalist countries is the fact that because of their colonial possessions and the super-profits gained by finance capital the capitalists of these countries have been able to create a relatively larger and more stable labour aristocracy’.26 If Europe had failed the Bolsheviks, Asia could revive their flagging spirits. The Bolshevik leadership decided that the capitalist world must be undermined by the loss of its colonies before communism could succeed in the West, reasoning that revolution in the East and the destruction of the system of imperial control might have to precede revolution in the West. This was the key element in the revolutionary struggle because ‘about 70 per cent of the world population belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies, as, for example, Persia, Turkey and China’.27 At the Comintern's second congress, in 1920, Lenin officially introduced the new Eastern orientation, the so-called ‘Soviet Eastern Policy’. Lenin went so far as to suggest that with Soviet aid and propaganda, it might be possible for Asia to skip the capitalist stage and move towards socialism before a European revolution:

It must be remembered that the West lives at the expense of the East; the imperialist powers of Europe grow rich chiefly at the expense of the eastern colonies, but at the same time they are arming their colonies and teaching them to fight and by so doing the West is digging its own grave in the East.28

Although Soviet foreign policy never took a wholly Eastern or wholly Western orientation, after 1920 there was increasing interest in Eastern revolutionary prospects and a clear and mostly consistent shift towards an Eastern political tilt.

As part of the Comintern strategy, pro-Soviet communists offered solidarity with the anti-imperialist national liberation movements in the East. For the Bolsheviks, the October revolution had built a bridge between the ‘enlightened’ West and the ‘enslaved’ East, which provided the basis for an appeal by the Soviet leadership to the colonial peoples at the Comintern-sponsored Congress of Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan, in September 1920. After that, the Comintern set up the Council of Propaganda and Actions of the Peoples of the East headquartered in Baku. As a consequence, numerous links were established by the Bolsheviks with the Muslim peoples of the East, and many Asian revolutionaries were trained in the Soviet Union, all of which had profound consequences for the West.29

In the years after 1920, the Bolsheviks tried to strengthen this bridge by advocating a united front between communists and Eastern nationalists against Western imperialism. In doing this, the Soviet government applied a multi-faceted strategy of concurrent alternative policies, which simultaneously combined ‘peaceful coexistence’ and ‘fraternal aid’ to communist parties and movements with collaboration and assistance to reactionary nationalist governments who were suppressing those same parties and movements. This flexible strategy made it possible for the Soviet Union to infiltrate target countries to further its ‘cause’ and its influence. It also permitted the use of all available means – communist parties, international organizations, and even occasionally reactionary parties. In the end, the decisive factor for the Soviet Union was not necessarily the success of a particular communist party, but rather whether the foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union were advanced. World communism remained the publicly stated, long-range maximum goal, but always secondary to the immediate goal of promoting Soviet state interests.

The Baku Congress of Peoples of the East

Between 1 and 7 September 1920, the First Congress of the Peoples of the East met in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. Some 2,000 delegates from more than 20 Asian peoples convened there, to discuss and define with the Bolshevik leaders and delegates of the Western proletariat a common strategy against imperialism and for world revolution. The Baku congress was a highlight of the revolutionary period opened up by the October revolution. Once more, it stressed, for the national and anti-colonial revolutions, the necessity of a ‘double revolution’ strategy (involving the reaffirmation of the working class's leading role), as the keystone which would really unite the struggles of the peoples of the East with those of the proletarians of the West.

The Congress of the Peoples of the East gave much concern to the British. The summons to the congress came from the Comintern and was first published in Izvestiya on 3 July; it was addressed exclusively to the ‘enslaved peoples of Persia, Armenia and Turkey’. Turkish people were called to resist the Allied powers which were controlling Constantinople and Western Anatolia.

Peasants of Anatolia! The English, Italian and French governments have kept Constantinople under the fire of their guns; they have imprisoned the Sultan, have forced him to agree to the dismemberment of purely Turkish territory, and have handed over Turkish finances to foreign financiers, in order to facilitate the plundering of the Turkish people impoverished by six years of war.

Peasants of Anatolia! You are urgently called to the colours under Kemal-Pasha, in order to fight the foreign invasion, but at the same time we know that you are trying to form your own national party, your own peasants' party, which would be able to continue the fight in the event that the Pashas should continue peace with the rapacious Entente.30

Ordzhonikidze and Zinoviev were chosen by Lenin as the main organizers of the congress, assisted by Bolsheviks who had some experience with the Eastern affairs: thus Anastas Mikoyan, Nariman Narimanov and Mir Said Sultan-Galiev made up the ‘Orgburo’, which fixed the rules of participation for the delegates.31

Not all the communists were in favour of convening a Muslim congress with the aim of increasing the prestige of Bolshevism among the peoples of the East. The prominent Bengali communist M.N. Roy, in his memoirs published in India after his death, made it clear that he opposed the idea of the Baku congress. Roy argued with the Bolshevik leaders that it could only serve as a means of agitation, which was not enough by itself to bring about a revolution in the East. He recalls in his memoirs:

Lenin smiled indulgently on my cussedness; Zinoviev was angry at the audacity of the upstart crossing his will; Radek ridiculed my precocious seriousness. It might not yield any lasting results, but why forgo the fun of a picturesque show which was sure to give the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, some sleepless nights.32

The high command of the Bolshevik leadership must have shared Radek's humorous view, and official consent was given to the congress, which opened on 1 September 1920,33 with 1,891 delegates in attendance.34 Of these delegates, 1,273 were said to be communists, 226 non-party; only 55 were women. The Turks were the largest national group with 235 delegates; they were joined by 192 Persian, 157 Armenian and 100 Georgian delegates specifically summoned by the Comintern; there were also eight Chinese, eight Kurds, and three Arabs.35

The essential aim of the congress, it was proclaimed, was to initiate an anti-imperialist platform among the Eastern nationalities.36 The importance of support to national liberation movements such as Mustafa Kemal's was reiterated many times from the platform. It is interesting that the spirit of united front against ‘the foreign imperialist yoke’ was further strengthened by a declaration by the isolated figure of Enver Pasha, and an enthusiastic speech given by the official representative of the Ankara government.37

The Baku Congress approved in principle the issuing of an ‘Appeal to the Peoples of the East’, a document that was obviously drafted for use as an instrument of propaganda throughout the Muslim world. It was directed entirely against Britain, the power regarded by the Comintern as the one great empire that had emerged from the First World War with the strength and intention to dominate the ‘oppressed’ peoples of the East.38

Anti-British agitation rose to its highest level at the last meeting of the Baku congress of the Eastern peoples, when the 26 Baku commissars killed two years previously were praised as the victims of British imperialism. A funeral ceremony was organized that day with the participation of all the delegates together with the families of the 26 murdered commissars.39 Party and state figures from Azerbaijan, delegates to the congress and representatives of the Comintern delivered anti-British speeches in memory of the commissars.40

At the Baku congress, several speakers emphasized that there was no contradiction between Islam and communism. Anatolii Skachko of the people's commissariat for nationalities, for instance, stated that ‘the Muslim religion is rooted in principles of religious communism, by which no man may be a slave to another, and not a single piece of land may be privately owned’.41 Zinoviev made a fiery appeal to ‘the peoples of the East’ to conduct ‘a holy war primarily against British imperialism’.42

A communist decision to seek a Muslim alliance was only a first step. Success or failure depended partly on communist attitudes. Some hindrances were created, quite unnecessarily, by the Bolsheviks themselves. Lenin's ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’, adopted with minor modifications at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, contained passages, such as the following, that could only deter Muslims from giving their support: ‘It is necessary to struggle against Pan-Islamism and similar trends which attempt to combine the liberation struggle with the reinforcement of the positions of the khans, of the landowners, of the mullahs etc.’43 Similarly, Zinoviev, despite his call for a ‘holy war’, pointed out ‘frankly’ to the Baku congress that ‘pan-Islamism and Mohammedanism and all such tendencies are not in our line. We have quite a different policy’. This was correct but undiplomatic. The Indonesian communist Tan Malaka claimed in 1922 at the Fourth Comintern Congress that a great deal of damage had been done to the cause by Comintern attacks on Pan-Islamism.44

As noted above, official attitudes towards Islam and Muslims were generally flexible and conciliatory in the period between the consolidation of the Bolsheviks' power and 1927. With the bitter struggle of 1920–21 still alive in their memory, the Bolsheviks could not afford to antagonize Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union. The socio-economic environment also favoured the continuation of a moderate approach toward the Muslims. The early 1920s was a time of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was based on compromise and did not give rise to any serious national or political disruption in the country. Because the bulk of the Muslims of the Soviet Union consisted of an unusually high proportion of peasants, the pro-peasant NEP effectively worked in their favour.

The anti-colonialist alliance also depended on the readiness of Muslim resistance movements (or Muslim governments, where appropriate) to accept the proffered hand of friendship. Here there was a mixed picture. There is certainly plenty of evidence that Muslim thinkers approved communist aims in principle. In Indonesia, for instance, Hadji Mohammad Misbach was very active in the mid-1920s in developing and publicizing the idea of the alliance between communism and Islam. His articles on ‘Islamism and Communism’ of 1925 display an absolute certainty that the two are identical:

All our friends who profess themselves communists but still like to express opinions aimed at abolishing the religion of Islam are not true communists, or they do not yet understand the communist position. In turn, those who profess Islam but reject Communism, I am not afraid to say that they are not true Muslims, or they do not yet properly understand the position of the religion of Islam.

The basic reason for this, he said, was that capitalism was yet another attempt by Satan to tempt the faithful away from God. ‘Those who have gone astray are those who want only to get food or profit, without considering what is wrong and what is right.’45 Nor was Misbach alone. The communist revolts of 1926 in Java and Sumatra were led by ulama (learned religious leaders) who preached revolution against two evils: ‘Capitalism, which promotes greed and distance from God, and imperialism, which threatens the world of Islam.’46 In Egypt, the leader of Muslim modernism, Sheikh Muhammed Rashid Rida, occasionally gave voice to pro-Bolshevik sentiments: ‘Bolshevism is only another name for socialism. Muslims must hope for its success, since they too are workers and suffer from the same oppression.’ He did however add the reservation that ‘communism is not in conformity with Islamic law’.47 Within Soviet Russia the Tatar intellectual and communist Hanafi Muzaffar wrote optimistically in 1922, ‘everything predisposes the Muslim peoples to join communism’. The Jadid theologian Musa Jarullah Bigi came forward with similar ideas: ‘A great revolution has triumphed in Russia, giving birth to a just and equitable regime. Muslims enjoy equality, security and peace’ he wrote in 1925.48

But there was another side to this. Approval for communist (or socialist) social objectives often went hand-in-hand with rejection of socialism or communism as secular ideologies put forward by unbelievers in their own interest, and, apart from that, certain measures that communists thought desirable – such as the expropriation of waqf properties or changes in the dress and the situation of women – could be construed as attacks on Islam. The Indonesian story is instructive in this regard. Here there was co-operation in the beginning between communists and modernist Muslims in Sarekat Islam (SI), the mass movement founded in 1912 to defend Indonesians against the commercial domination of the Chinese, the religious encroachments of the Christian missions and the political rule of the Dutch.49 This lasted until October 1921, when the Jogjakarta group of the SI seized control of the party at a special congress, which expelled the PKI (Communist Association of the Indies)50 from the central body. The expelled branches of SI (representing, according to Tan Malaka, 30,000 out of 100,000 members)51 now began to call themselves Red SI and came out more openly as communists, and from then on were in conflict with modernist Islam. As Leslie Palmier writes, ‘The fight against the PKI in Sarekat Islam was led by religious Modernists centred on Jogjakarta’.52 It was an apparent paradox that the more traditionalist, rural Muslims of the interior of Java were able to co-operate with the communists, whereas the modernist Muslim movements of the cities saw the PKI as a rival force.

At the same time, in another part of the world, in Central Asia, it was the traditionalist Muslims who opposed communism, while at least a section of the Modernists (the jadid movement) joined the Bolsheviks, and continued to co-operate with them until the end of the 1920s. There were two reasons for this difference of approach. The traditionalism of the abangan Muslims of Java was not rooted in the Qur‘an but in local rituals. In fact, their opponents denied that they were Muslims at all. Moreover, many of the towns were centres of economic development inspired by Western imperialism, and the urban, more orthodox, santri Muslims tended to be better off than their rural counterparts. So in this case ‘traditionalism’ did not signify inherited power and wealth, rather the reverse. In the Central Asian case, in contrast, the opponents of Jadidism were the traditional rulers, both spiritual and secular, of the less developed and still semi-feudal states, and the clan-based societies of the North Caucasus, while Jadidism itself was the work of intellectuals who had an audience in the more modern, partly Westernized urban centres of European Russia.

Fighting Imperialism without Allies

Within a few years after Lenin's death the Bolshevik party and the Stalinized Comintern had abandoned the Muslim-friendly approach of the early years of the revolution. The alliance with Islam became impossible for both internal and foreign policy reasons. The change occurred rather gradually, however. There were various warning signs towards the end of the 1920s of a hardening of the Bolshevik position towards Islam. This was apparent in the cultural sphere, for instance. The movement towards abolishing the Arabic script, used by all the Turkic Muslim languages of the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, was at least implicitly directed against Islamic culture and traditions. This point was recognized by A.K. Abolin, a Soviet official who resisted the proposal in 1926: ‘We must not proclaim this goal [of Latinization] at the Baku Turkological Congress, nor must we allow it to be promoted.’ Religious Muslims would view it with hostility, and ‘we must not give people cause to accuse the central authorities of forcibly imposing a new script on the eastern peoples’.53 There was ‘almost unanimous and irreconcilable opposition to the introduction of the Latin alphabet from most of the representatives of the Turkic peoples’ in 1926. Support was limited to the Turkmens, Azerbaijanis and Bashkirs.54 It should be added that those who favoured Latinization did not admit that they were undermining Islamic culture. They preferred instead to argue that the Arabic script ‘blunted children's analytic capacities’ by making it more difficult to become literate.55 Despite the opposition, Latinization went ahead from 1927 onwards. The year 1927 seems to have been a turning point for Soviet Muslims in many respects.

In 1926 the League of Militant Godless demanded the strengthening of anti-religious propaganda, and Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Communist Party) proposed a campaign to unveil the women of Central Asia as the first step in ending what the communists viewed as women's oppression. This campaign also began in 1927 and was given the name hujum (attack). Local party leaders in Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) were very uncomfortable about this directive from the centre, complaining that they could not persuade even their own wives to go unveiled in public. Still, they had to go ahead with the campaign.56 The veil (parandja) was seen by the local population as a religious obligation and a symbol of loyalty to the community. Hence the attempt by female party activists to carry out their instructions ‘touched off a firestorm of violence against women’, to use Shoshana Keller's evocative expression.57 The campaign for unveiling was part of a more general attack on Islam, involving the removal and exile of many Muslim party officials and the suppression of many religious institutions, such as Muslim schools, Islamic courts, mosques, and awqāf, all of which were scheduled to be eliminated.58 Keller estimates that in Uzbekistan roughly 70 per cent of Muslim clergy (14,000 out of 20,000) were arrested, killed or prohibited from exercising their functions between 1927 and 1939.59 Many mosques were closed. It was not intended, however, that believers should have no place to worship. The law of 8 April 1929 on religious associations in the Russian republic (RSFSR) did not abolish religious groups, but placed them under strict government control. According to Article 36 a mosque could be closed only ‘if closure would not deprive believers of the ability to perform their religious rites’. The campaign against Islam was broken off in 1930, never to be seriously resumed.60 It was replaced by the more urgent priorities of collectivization and industrialization. Hence, Islam continued to be ‘everywhere, only barely out of sight’.61

The unveiling campaign was just one component of the overall ‘great change’ that took place under Stalin. When he emerged, in 1928, as the undisputed leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a severe offensive started against his real and imaginary adversaries within the party and in the wider Soviet hierarchy and society as a whole. Thousands of people were tried and executed, while others simply disappeared. During this period, the Soviet government began the Russification of the Communist Party apparatus in the Muslim territories. Many local Muslim leaders were arrested for ‘national deviation’. Sultan-Galiev's second arrest and trial in 1928 signalled the start of a campaign in all Muslim areas of the Soviet Union – a massive purge of various cultural, scientific, artistic and literary institutions followed.62 Many Muslim communists were thoroughly vilified as ‘deviationists’, ‘traitors’, ‘agents provocateurs’, ‘deserters’, ‘bourgeois nationalists’, ‘enemies of the people’, and members of the ‘Bukharinist–Trotskyist clique’. The purges eliminated almost all original Muslim cadres.63

Outside the Soviet Union, the Comintern's 1928 turn towards ‘class against class’ policies, as announced at the Sixth Comintern Congress, signified an end to co-operation with bourgeois anti-imperialist movements everywhere and a move towards communist isolationism. As the Comintern's 1928 ‘Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies’ noted, ‘Communist parties in these countries should from the very beginning demarcate themselves in the most clear-cut fashion, both politically and organizationally, from all the petty-bourgeois groups and parties’. Nevertheless, ‘a temporary co-operation is permissible with a national revolutionary movement, provided it is a genuine revolutionary movement and its representatives do not put obstacles in the way of the communists’.64 Moreover, when Otto Kuusinen presented his report on the colonies to the congress he ruled out ‘the formation of any kind of bloc between the communist party and the national-reformist opposition’.65 In other words, communists were to stay away from parties of both the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. Only the proletariat could lead the peasantry in the struggle for the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and since (in the Comintern's view) the proletariat barely existed in most of the colonial countries (outside India) this task would have to be taken on by the Communist Party itself whatever its social composition. This policy of isolation went hand in hand with a determination to confront both feudal and bourgeois ideology. Hence in Iraq the newly-formed Communist Party mounted an anti-religious campaign in 1929 involving a call to ‘liberate the Arab woman from the fetters of degradation and ignorance’.66

The Popular Front Changes the Picture

Changes in the world situation – notably the victory of the Nazis in Germany – imposed a change in communist policy. As always with the Comintern, this change was applied across the board. The Popular Front came into being in 1935, as a result of the Seventh Comintern Congress held in that year. The seventh congress transformed communist strategy. Instead of acting alone, communist parties were called upon to ‘create an anti-imperialist people's front’, and also to ‘take an active part in the mass anti-imperialist movements headed by the national-reformists and strive to bring about joint action with the national-revolutionary and national-reformist organizations’.67 Once again an alliance with anti-imperialist and Muslim forces was possible. But it should be noted that this was subordinated to the fight against fascism, and, since a number of imperialist powers (such as Britain, France and the Netherlands) were allies in this fight, anti-imperialism was acceptable only within certain limits. The right of the colonial peoples to self-determination remains valid, noted Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party, but they should not now demand independence, because in the struggle against fascism, ‘the interest of the colonial peoples lies in their union with the French people, and not in an attitude which could favour the undertakings of fascism’ in such areas as North Africa or Indochina.68

The Popular Front lasted until August 1939, when the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed, and the Comintern line changed again. The word ‘fascism’ temporarily dropped out of the Third International's vocabulary. In the Middle East this period between 1939 and 1941 was not long enough or significant enough to make a difference. In general, for the communist parties of the East the change from anti-fascism to neutrality in what was now described as the ‘Second Imperialist War’ was far less traumatic than in the West. Anti-imperialism had always been the main plank in their programme, and the events of 1939 required no change in this.69 In fact, in India the Communist Party took advantage of the new line by abandoning its previous position of calling on Muslims to join the Indian National Congress. Instead it ‘demoted the Congress to a position of parity with the Muslim League’, calling on the former to agree to the Muslim League's demand for the partition of the country into two sovereign states.70

Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 quickly opened the way to a restoration of the alliance with bourgeois democracy, under the new name of the ‘National Front’, and the communist parties of the world adopted the new line. There were considerable tactical problems in this area, however, because the alliance with the West could be maintained only by walking a fine line between giving support to movements of national liberation (which were anti-Western and therefore implicitly pro-Axis) and helping the Allied war effort (which was Stalin's primary objective). Generally speaking, the communist parties of the East succeeded in this act of tightrope-walking. Khalid Bakdash's presentation of the National Charter of the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon (1943) is a good example: ‘We are not in the first place a party of social reform. This allegation has been pinned on us by people who are bent on relegating us to the margin of national life, so as to have the national movement all to themselves.’71

In the euphoria that followed the end of the Second World War, and the apparent continuation of the grand alliance between Stalin and the West, the way seemed open for continued broad alliances between communist parties and other groups in the Muslim world dedicated to getting rid of colonial rule. After the Second World War, many Third World leaders – from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia – were drawn to Marxism-Leninism as a natural channel for translating nationalist sentiments into a plan of action for economic growth, political equality and social progress. A good number of these leaders were from Muslim communities in Asia and Africa. Even where states were independent, as in the case of Iran, communist policy was exceedingly moderate. Thus in August 1946 the Tudeh Party (which was the revived Communist Party under another name) joined the coalition cabinet of Ahmad Ghavam, with no programme at all except to prevent the suppression of the separatist regime of the Azerbaijani Democratic Party which ruled the West of the country under the protection of Soviet bayonets. This episode did not last long, and came to an end in October 1946 with the removal of the party from office and the arrest of a number of trade union and party members.72 In India the communists had pursued a rather independent line during the war. They had favoured the division of India into 16 separate regions, on the basis of the principle of national self-determination. Muslims were to have ‘the right to form autonomous states and even to separate if they so wished, in places where they were in the overwhelming majority’.73 After 1945, however, they were brought back into alliance with the Congress. The veteran British communist Palme Dutt, himself of Indian origin, travelled to India in 1946 and was able to persuade the Indian communists to abandon what he called ‘the myth of communist support for Pakistan’.74

The Cold War and Renewed Communist Isolation

The end of the Second World War was followed, after an interval, by the collapse of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers and the coming of the Cold War. For the communist parties this involved a turn to the left. In Europe direct instructions to this effect were issued by the Soviet Union's hardliner Andrei Zhdanov in his speech to the first meeting of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in September 1947. Communist parties, he said, should ‘lead national resistance to plans of imperialist expansion and aggression’.75

A new situation was created for Muslims in Eastern Europe in the years after 1945 by the establishment of communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. In the short term, the Stalinist model of the suppression of independent religious organizations and co-optation of those that survived was followed. Religious courts and religious schools were abolished; the awqaf were taken over by the state; the Sufi orders were prohibited; the veil was outlawed. In the long run considerable differences emerged. In Yugoslavia after 1948, following expulsion from the Cominform, the building of mosques was allowed again; all restrictions on performing the haj pilgrimage to Mecca were removed; children again received religious instruction; new madrasas were opened for training the Muslim clergy; Sufism was quietly permitted to revive; and in general the position of Yugoslavia within the ‘non-aligned’ movement was a good reason for Tito to use the favourable position of Muslims as an advertisement.76 In Albania the opposite process took place. For the first two decades the Stalin model of co-optation and control was followed, with the appointment of official heads of both the Sunni community and the Bektashi Sufis, who had the job of pretending to the outside world that Muslims were both well treated and entirely supportive of the communist government. Then in 1967 Albania was declared an atheist state, all places of worship were closed and all religious communities were dissolved.77 Bulgaria stood somewhere between its Balkan neighbours: there, the measures of the 1940s remained in force, but about 1,000 mosques survived, there were five madrasas and possibly 500 imams.78

Outside Europe, trends already existed within the communist parties towards breaking the alliance with the national bourgeoisie, so Stalin and his associates simply needed to provide encouragement. The new policy was more subtle than that of 1928–34, because the communist parties of the Muslim world were not instructed to engage in anti-religious propaganda. Awkward questions about the status of women and family law were not raised. Stress was laid more on the need for immediate insurrection to overthrow both colonialist regimes and independent bourgeois nationalist states, such as India and Pakistan, which under Zhdanov's ‘two camps’ theory fell into the enemy camp in so far as they were not allied with the Soviet Union. The Madiun rising of 1948 in Indonesia was one of the first fruits of the new policy. In this case, a leading communist, Musso, returned from exile in the Soviet Union in August 1948 with the intention of carrying out what he himself called the ‘Gottwald plan’ to seize power in the way that the communists had just done in Czechoslovakia. Existing non-communist organizations such as the Socialist Party were induced to merge with the PKI and criticize themselves for their ‘basic error in compromising with the imperialists’ by the Renville Agreement.79 The fusion process had barely started when local PKI leaders jumped the gun by mounting the Madiun coup. Musso was not responsible for this decision, but, in line with the practice of communist solidarity, associated the PKI with it after the event. He hoped to secure Muslim support by giving an Islamic slant to his action: ‘If we really want to save Islam from being destroyed by the unbelievers, the time has now come for a Holy War. They say we want to destroy religion, but we want to destroy the Dutch, not religion.’80 Sukiman, the leader of Masjumi,81 the party founded in 1945 to unite all Muslims who wanted to establish Indonesia on an Islamic basis, was not convinced, and he called upon his followers to oppose the PKI, ‘because in a communist Indonesia Islam would have no chance of survival’.82 The result was a brutal conflict both with Masjumi and with the Nationalist Party (PNI), and eventual defeat at the hands of the army, followed by severe repression.83

In India there was at first considerable hesitation, because of factional divisions within the party. The Soviet Eastern specialist E. Zhukov wrote in July 1947 that Nehru was a ‘rich reactionary’ and the Congress leadership were bourgeois who had capitulated to imperialism.84 But the Indian Communist Party, led by P.C. Joshi, continued to support Nehru until December 1947, when the party declared that Nehru's policy was one of ‘subservience to the Ango-American imperialist camp’.85 Finally in February 1948 at the Second (Calcutta) Congress of the party, Joshi was replaced as General Secretary by B.T. Ranadive, and the ‘Ranadive line’ of violent revolution to achieve a ‘people's democratic state’ was adopted. This phase of communist policy lasted until 1951. The Communist Party of Pakistan, which was founded at the 1948 Calcutta Congress, organized a number of strikes and peasant revolts in the next three years.86 In Iraq the communists in 1948 led the unsuccessful popular uprising known as al-Wathbah which was directed (in their eyes) as much against the ‘national bourgeoisie’ as it was against the feudalist regime of Nuri al-Sa‘id.87 In Egypt the revolutionary government of the Free Officers in Egypt, under Muhammad Nagib and Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, which had snatched power in 1952 from the monarchy after a revolt, led by the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood, was denounced repeatedly by the Soviet press in the next few years. Zhukov put the official position succinctly in 1949: ‘The reactionary and nationalist bourgeoisie in its various forms – Kemalism, Gandhiism, Zionism or Pan-Arabism – has passed over definitively into the camp of imperialist reaction.’88

National Liberation and its Dilemmas

With the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War in 1953 the conflict between East and West began to take a different and milder form. Khrushchev launched the slogan of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in foreign policy. For the Muslim world this meant that the attempt would be made to spread Soviet influence by peaceful, non-violent means. In April 1955 the Soviet government stated that it would ‘develop peaceful co-operation with all states in the Middle East interested in strengthening their national independence’.89 Khrushchev now criticized Stalin for having failed to recognize that the newly independent countries of the Middle East were likely to clash with the West. This opened the way to closer relations at state level and renewed alliance policies for local communist parties. Alliances could be achieved both with anti-imperialist Muslim movements striving to achieve power and with successful nationalist revolutionaries, such as, in the Arab world, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, and in Indonesia, Sukarno. The ‘national bourgeoisie’ was no longer criticized, but rather praised as ‘a new historical type, progressive in a world where capitalism is approaching its death agony’. ‘The national bourgeoisie has learned by experience’, said Khalid (Fuad Mursi), the secretary-general of the (reunited) Egyptian Communist Party in 1957, ‘that it cannot advance without the support of the socialist camp from outside and the popular masses from within’.90 As always, there were difficulties, since the nationalists, although happy to accept Soviet aid, regarded communists within their countries as a threat to be neutralized, co-opted or suppressed, while the communists naturally had the ultimate objective of gaining power for themselves. Khrushchev put the Soviet position on this very frankly in 1959, in connection with Nasir's campaign of repression against the Communist Party of Syria: ‘The USSR has no intention of intervening in the internal affairs of Arab countries, and in spite of what has happened the USSR will continue its policy of aid and assistance to the United Arab Republic.’ The present situation in the Arab countries, he calmly added, ‘does not favour the establishment of a communist system’.91 The Communist Party of Iraq, which was in a very strong position after its participation in the July Revolution of 1958, and in fact regarded itself as ‘the basic political force in the country’,92 was compelled to engage in self-criticism in August 1959 of its ‘leftist error’ in attempting to secure a share in the new government, and it never repeated the attempt.93

At the easternmost end of the Muslim world, in Indonesia, the policy of the Communist Party (PKI) was not essentially different. Here there was a government of the national bourgeoisie, headed by a nationalist president, Sukarno, supported by an Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) with a coalition of Muslims (Masjumi) and Social Democrats (PSI) in opposition. The PKI had already anticipated the abandonment of Stalin's hardline policy towards the national bourgeoisie before his death: in 1951 it retrospectively repudiated the Madiun uprising. This was an independent decision arrived at by the strong team of four – Aidit, Lukman, Njoto and Sudisman – that had just taken over the leadership.94 In 1952 the party leader, D.N. Aidit, proposed a ‘united national front’ which would include the ‘national bourgeoisie’ (Sukarno and the PNI) but exclude the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ (Masjumi). Then in 1954 the fifth congress decided to support the PNI cabinet of Ali Sastroamidjojo even though the party ‘did not regard it as a truly progressive government’.95 This was because Sastroamidjojo was pursuing the nationalist objectives – which the communists shared – of removing Dutch influence and acquiring West New Guinea (West Irian) for Indonesia. They also eventually (in 1960) decided to adopt Sukarno's ‘Five Principles’, or pancasila, the first of which was ‘belief in one God’, a central tenet of Islam. On this basis it was hoped it would be possible to appeal to Muslims, or at least to avoid rejection out of hand as a party of atheists.96

The period between 1953 and the late 1960s is therefore marked by a double process in the Muslim world, namely, first, the rise and victory of secular nationalists (Nasir, the Ba‘th in Syria and Iraq, Sukarno, Nehru), whose regimes were regarded by the USSR after 1955 as ‘essentially progressive, moving towards socialism’; and, second, the growth of a strong communist movement, in alliance with the nationalists, but hoping to move beyond nationalism to socialism. The growing strength of the movement was recognized indirectly by US President Eisenhower in January 1957 when he named ‘international communism’ as the ‘greatest threat’ facing the Middle East.97 In many non-communist countries, ‘Islamic socialism’ became quite popular in the 1960s, attempting to balance religious principles with socialism, which in essence was secular. In Pakistan, the idea of ‘Islamic socialism’ was exemplified by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). He was president of Pakistan after Bangladesh's war of secession from Pakistan until 1973, and then prime minister until 1977. After years of military dictatorship and a civil war, Bhutto's Islamic socialism was popular among many strands of society.98

After the 1960s a number of factors worked together to weaken communism in Muslim countries. First, some communist parties were undermined by Soviet policies. In the mid-1960s the Soviet viewpoint on national democratic states altered: one-party states, it was decided, were now acceptable partners if they pursued progressive policies. It followed that communist parties were not needed in those states. They could be dissolved, and communists could then join the ruling party and work from within to secure their objectives. Communist parties did not always obey these instructions. The Egyptian party was asked to disband and did so in 1965; but the Algerian party continued to operate illegally, giving rise to an embarrassing incident at the twenty-third congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when a delegation from the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) walked out rather than see Algerian Communist Party members seated as delegates.99 The Sudanese party also refused to disband, and managed to remain in existence until 1971 when it allegedly mounted a short-lived coup against General Numeiri: after three days he returned to power with Egyptian help and suppressed the party with much bloodshed.100 This catastrophe led to a certain reorientation of policy on the part of the Soviet Union. Instead of calling upon communist parties to dissolve and enter one-party regimes as individuals, Soviet commentators advised them to retain their separate existence. But they still had to recognize their inevitable subordination to nationalist governments: ‘The alliance of communists with national democrats is not a passing development but a long-range perspective. In a number of countries national democratic parties are ruling parties playing the leading role in the national liberation movement and non-capitalist development’. Communists had to accept this as a fact and not get upset about it: ‘Proletarian parties do not yield to emotion, but proceed from objective class analysis.’101 Second, communist parties everywhere were devastated by repression. The list of parties that suffered in this way is long, but the explanation is always roughly the same. They were too successful. With mass support and allies within the military they looked likely to seize power. Their former nationalist allies stepped in to prevent this, sometimes encouraged by United States government agencies, sometimes assisted by traditionally-inclined forces within the nation itself.

In Indonesia the PKI staked everything on its alliance with Sukarno in the ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ and gained the lasting enmity of wealthy santri Muslims by its campaign of 1963–65 to enforce the dispossession of the big landowners of Java.102 The PKI's 1964 campaign for land reform also tended to alienate all Muslims on religious grounds, because under the waqf system the ulama were in the position of landowners. Robert Hefner has written of a ‘linkage between wealth and religion’ in this context.103 Even before the massacres of 1965 there were clashes between Muslims and communists near Kediri in late 1964 and January 1965.104 In September 1965 Sukarno declared that Indonesia was about to enter the second stage of the revolution, namely socialism; there followed what appeared to be an attempted coup by pro-communist elements in the army.105 After suppressing the coup, the top army leaders, Suharto and Nasution, declared that the PKI was responsible for it, despite its denials, and the main Muslim organizations called for the ‘annihilation of the PKI’. The Muhammadiyah issued a fatwa declaring that ‘the extermination of communists is an obligatory religious act of holy war’ (7 October 1965).106 Estimates of the resulting slaughter vary, but 500,000 is the usual figure put forward.107 Indonesia was unusual in that ordinary Muslims took part in the repression. Elsewhere, it was generally military rulers who suppressed the party and executed its leaders, if they could catch them. This happened in Syria in 1959; in Iraq in 1963, when the communist leader Husain al-Radi was killed; in Algeria in 1965 when Colonel Boumedienne expelled the communists from government and the FLN; in Sudan in 1971 when General Numeiri executed the secretary-general of the Communist Party Abdul Khalid Mahgoub. Apart from suffering severe repression, most of the communist parties of the Muslim world also split into rival factions under the strain of continuing Soviet support for the regimes that were repressing them.108 The persuasive arguments of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong also played a part in encouraging this process of fragmentation. In many cases pro-Chinese communist parties emerged as rivals to those which followed the Moscow line.

The third change of the 1960s was that nationalist regimes in the Arab world and beyond suffered a certain amount of discredit after 1967 by defeat in the Six Day War, which seemed to show that they were unable to achieve the most popular aim of Arab nationalism, and perhaps of Muslims in general, which was the liberation of the Palestinians from Israeli rule. The fourth and final reason for change was socio-economic: the increasing oil wealth of some urban elite elements of Muslim societies brought greater integration into both the worldwide economy and, despite the efforts of some traditionalist rulers, the culture of the West. In reaction to all these trends, a powerful and ruthless Islamic resistance grew up, directed not only against Western and communist influence but also against existing secular nationalist rulers, sometimes using extreme methods of struggle. This new development was seen in the Soviet Union as highly disturbing, both internally (because of its possible impact on the Muslims of Central Asia) and externally (because it threatened the stability of secular nationalist allies). Political Islam was a new phenomenon in most of the region. The period between 1924, when Mustafa Kemal abolished the caliphate, and the 1960s was a time during which Islamic political activity was, as L. Carl Brown has put it, ‘muted’.109 For many years the communists had had to adopt a position on matters related to the culture and traditions of Islam, certainly, but they were not confronted with a serious rival in the shape of political Islam.110 The four major political factors they had had to consider were the secular nationalists, the colonial or post-colonial power, the Soviet Union and the popular masses. Now for the first time Islam starts to enter the picture as a political force.

The Rise of Political Islam and the Decline of the Soviet Union

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution and the achievement of sole power by Saddam Hussein in Iraq make the year 1979 a turning point. But it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, more than anything else, that suddenly ended the comfortable harmony of the Brezhnev era between the Soviet government and the Muslims of the Soviet lands. A period of isolation then began for the communist parties. Islamic groups were now of greater political significance than ever before (the revolution in Iran inspired movements in both Lebanon and Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood rose in revolt in Syria in February 1982). But alliances with these parties were practically ruled out by communist support for Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union made desperate attempts to stay on good terms with its Muslim allies, despite the Afghanistan issue. Articles in Soviet journals stressed the progressive nature of Islam. Thus, Leonid Medvenko wrote in 1980: ‘The national liberation movement, which often raises the banner of Islam, is spearheaded not only against imperialism, but gradually turns against the very foundations of capitalism.’111 The new Iranian government was not convinced. Ayatollah Khomeini fulminated against both West and East. He denounced the invasion of Afghanistan. ‘I strongly condemn’, he said, ‘the dastardly occupation of Afghanistan by the plunderers and occupiers of the aggressive East.’ He repudiated the idea of a connection between Marxism and Islam: ‘Some people have mixed Islamic ideas with Marxist ideas and created a concoction which is in no way in accordance with the progressive teachings of Islam.’112

Soviet–Iranian relations became very frosty, and it was increasingly difficult for communists to operate within the country. The Tudeh Party's offices in Teheran were sacked in July 1980 by Islamic militants. The Soviet government did not react, except to criticize those who ‘incite religious fanatics to act against democratic and other leftist forces, particularly the Tudeh Party, which backs Ayatollah Khomeini's anti-imperialist line’.113 But things went from bad to worse for the party, until finally in 1983 it was dissolved and 45 communists were executed for alleged espionage.114 Moreover, alliances with secular nationalist partners were also made more difficult at this time by the increased repression carried out by Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria and Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt. The Soviet reply to this development was to urge the Arab communists to ‘bide their time and realize that the evolution of the revolutionary democratic regimes to socialism is a very long process’.115 Many Arab communists, however, doubted whether this evolution would ever come to pass, and some of them drew the conclusion that the official Moscow-line parties had reached a dead end. Hence the fragmentation of communism that had already started in the 1960s in Iraq, Syria and Iran continued and worsened now all the parties were in exile.

Communists Afloat on Uncharted Waters

The era of perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the official communist parties of the guide they had looked to for many decades, but these events also opened the way to new situations and new thinking. In Lebanon, the Communist Party's deputy leader, Karim Mroué, suggested in 1986 that the party should examine its relationship with religion and, as he put it, to ‘the Arab heritage’, and this began a two-year debate which culminated in a change in the party programme. This new programme stressed solidarity with the Palestinian factions, dialogue with religious movements, alliance with all social forces in the Arab nation, and the struggle for the liberation of the occupied territories, including southern Lebanon.116 The ground was thus laid for the Lebanese Communist Party's alliance with Hezbollah 15 years later.117

In the post-Cold War era, Muslims and various left-wing and Marxist groups have come together again, because they face the same enemies – imperialism, colonialism, militarism, racism and Zionism. The global anti-war movements naturally forged alliances between leftists and Islamists. In December 2002, before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a meeting was convened in Egypt that brought international leftists and Islamists to the same platform. The meeting resulted in the first Cairo declaration ‘Against US Hegemony and War on Iraq and In Solidarity with Palestine’. In December 2003, a second Cairo declaration was announced, whose aims included the ‘continued pursuance of the struggle to support the unified international front against imperialism and capitalist globalization’.118

In Lebanon the Communist Party had already made the necessary ideological preparation to allow it to form an alliance with Hezbollah, the ‘Party of God’, as translated into English. In 2007 the two groups joined together to set up a national resistance front. They also formed militias, which opposed the entry of Israeli commandos into several villages. When Israel's invasion started, Hezbollah led the national resistance. The Lebanese CP declared a full mobilization of its party to assist Hezbollah in the political movement, in the defence of the south and in internal operations to aid the million refugees who fled Israeli bombing. At a Damascus rally, protesters carried pictures of the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. At present, Hezbollah and the Lebanese Communist Party are jointly discussing the need to develop ‘a counter-project to the neo-liberal model’, the free-market policies backed by Washington.119

The Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in a statement issued in 2007 while meeting with Iranian Health Minister Mohammad Farhadi, praised the vision of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and said the Koranic model of government should be considered as a substitute for Western-style systems. Fidel added: ‘We also have a common enemy that always threatens us – an enemy that has invaded all the countries of the world’.120

Conclusion

The political history of Marxists and Muslims showed that co-operation between these two forces of opposition had occurred many times during the twentieth century. Essentially it was a common enemy that fomented provisional collusion between the two.

The relationship between communism and Islam was not entirely unproblematic, however. While there was much, in both ideology and situation, that brought Muslims and communists closer together, there were also many points of disagreement that divided them. The communist world-view was opposed to religion of any kind, including Islam. This fundamental ideological division did not inevitably find expression in practical politics, and there were often tactical reasons for downplaying it. Yet it remained there, beneath the surface. There were other points of friction too, particularly in the case of traditional Islam, which was tied to a local status quo, which the communists wanted to overturn, however much both sides might agree to oppose Western imperialism. Where communists advocated land reform, for instance, this could well involve an attack on charitable religious foundations (as in Indonesia in 1964, for example). Campaigns for the emancipation of women would include agitation against the veil, and this was bound to bring fierce resistance from traditionally-minded Muslims (as in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s). In this context, the hostility of Islamism to Marxist movements, and the use of Islamic groups to fight Soviet communism and the wider left during the Cold War, deserves serious analysis.

So there were at least two tendencies: towards co-operation and towards hostility. Which one prevailed depended on the epoch and also the social and political conditions of the region. In this collection of essays contributors will examine the varied responses of communists to Islam. Moreover, since it takes two to make an alliance, they will also examine the evolving attitudes of political Islam towards communism.

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.

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.