https://www.dawn.com/news/787645/islamic-socialism-a-history-from-left-to-right
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Between the 1950s and early 1970s, a powerful ideology in the Muslim world galvanised itself from the minds and fringes of modern Islamic intellectualism and made its way into the mainstream political arena.
But this ideology did not have a single originator. Its roots can be found amongst the works of Muslim thinkers and ideologues in South and East Asia, Africa and in various Middle Eastern (Arab) countries.
Also, once it began being adopted by mainstream leaders and political outfits, it was expressed through multiple names. But today, each one of these names and terms are slotted under a single definitional umbrella: Islamic Socialism.
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Roots and Trees
Though one can struggle to pinpoint the exact starting point (or points) from where the many ideas that became associated with Islamic Socialism emerged, historians and intellectuals, Sami A. Hanna and Hanif Ramay – who specialised in critiquing and compiling a dialectic history of Islamic Socialism – are of the view that one of the very first expressions of Islamic Socialism appeared in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century.
A movement of Muslim farmers, peasants and petty-bourgeoisie in the Russian state of Tatartan opposed the Russian monarchy but was brutally crushed.
In the early 2oth century, the movement went underground and began working with communist, socialist and social democratic forces operating in Russia to overthrow the monarchy.
The leaders of the Muslim movement, that became to be known as the Waisi began explaining themselves as Islamic Socialists when a leftist revolution broke out against the Russian monarchy in 1906.
During the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that finally toppled and eliminated the Russian monarchy and imposed communist rule in the country, the Waisi fell in with the Bolsheviks and supported Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin’s widespread socialist program and policies.
However, after Lenin’s death in 1924, the Waisi began to assert that the Muslim community and its socialism in Tatartan were a separate entity from the Bolshevik communism.
The movement that had formed its own communes became a victim of Stalin’s radical purges of the 1930s and was wiped out.
One is not quite sure how the Waisi defined their socialism in a country where (after 1917) atheism had become the state-enforced creed. It was left to a group of influential thinkers and ideologues in South Asia and the Middle East to finally get down to giving a more coherent and doctrinal shape to Islamic Socialism.
Islamic scholar, Ubaidullah Sindhi, who was born into a Sikh family (in Sialkot but converted to Islam), was also an agitator against the British in India.
Chased by the authorities during the First World War, Sindhi escaped to Kabul, and from Kabul he traveled to Russia where he witnessed the unfolding of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
He stayed in Russia till 1923 and spent most of his time discussing politics and ideology with communist revolutionaries and studying socialism.
Impressed by the chants of economic equality and justice during the violent revolution, Sindhi, who remained being a Deobandi Sunni Muslim, dismissed communism/Marxism’s emphasis on atheism.
From Russia Sindhi traveled to Turkey and it was from Istanbul that he began to give shape to his ideas of Islamic Socialism through a series of writings especially aimed at the Muslims of India.
He urged Muslims ‘to evolve for themselves a religious basis to arrive at the economic justice at which communism aims but which it cannot fully achieve.’
The reason he gave for this was that though he saw both Islamic and Communist economic philosophies similar regarding their emphasis on the fair distribution of wealth, socialism if imposed with the help of a more theistic and spiritual dimension would be more beneficial to the peasant and the working classes than atheistic communism.
During the same period (1920s-30s), another (though lesser known) Islamic scholar in undivided India got smitten by the 1917 Russian revolution and Marxism.
Hafiz Rahman Sihwarwl saw Islam and Marxism sharing five elements in common: (1) prohibition of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the privileged classes (2) organisation of the economic structure of the state to ensure social welfare (3) equality of opportunity for all human beings (4) priority of collective social interest over individual privilege and (5) prevention of the permanentising of class structure through social revolution.
The motivations for many of these themes he drew from the Qur’an, which he understood as seeking to create an economic order in which the rich pay excessive, though voluntary taxes (Zakat) to minimise differences in living standards.
In the areas that Sihwarwl saw Islam and communism diverge were Islam’s sanction of private ownership within certain limits, and in its refusal to recognise an absolutely classless basis of society.
He suggested that Islam, with its prohibition of the accumulation of wealth, is able to control the class structure through equality of opportunity.
Basically, both Sindhi and Sihwarwl had stumbled upon an Islamic concept of the social democratic welfare state.
Building upon the initial thoughts of Sindhi and Sihwarwl were perhaps South Asia’s two most ardent and articulate supporters and theoreticians of Islamic Socilaism: Ghulam Ahmed Parvez and Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim.
Parvez was a prominent ‘Quranist’, or an Islamic scholar who insisted that for the Muslims to make progress in the modern world, Islamic thought and laws should be entirely based on the modern interpretations of the Qu’ran and on the complete rejection of the hadith (sayings of the Prophet and his companions based on hearsay and compiled over a 100 years after the Prophet’s demise).
After studying traditional Muslim texts, as well as Sufism, Parvez claimed that almost all hadiths were fabrications by those who wanted Islam to seem like an intolerant faith and by ancient Muslim kings who used these hadiths to give divine legitimacy to their tyrannical rules.
Parvez also insisted that Muslims should spend more time studying the modern sciences instead of wasting their energies on fighting out ancient sectarian conflicts or ignoring the true egalitarian and enlightening spirit of the Qu’ran by indulging in multiple rituals handed down to them by ancient ulema, clerics and compilers of the hadith.
Understandably, Parvez was right away attacked by conservative Islamic scholars and political outfits.
But this didn’t stop famous Muslim philosopher and poet, Muhammad Iqbal, to befriend the young scholar and then introduce him to the future founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Jinnah appointed Parvez to edit a magazine, Talu-e-Islam. It was set-up to propagate the creation of a separate Muslim country and to also answer the attacks that Jinnah’s All India Muslim League had begun to face from conservative Islamic parties and ulema who accused the League of being a pseudo-Muslim organisation and Jinnah for being too westernised and ‘lacking correct Islamic behavior.’
Apart from continuing to author books and commentaries on the Qu’ran, Parvez wrote a series of articles in Talu-e-Islam that propagated a more socialistic view of the holy book.
In a series of essays for the magazine he used verses from the Qu’ran, incidents from the faith’s history and insights from the writings of Muhammad Iqbal to claim:
The clergy and conservative ulema have hijacked Islam.
They are agents of the rich people and promoters of uncontrolled Capitalism.
Socialism best enforces Qur’anic dictums on property, justice and distribution of wealth.
Islam’s main mission was the eradication of all injustices and cruelties from society. It was a socio-economic movement, and the Prophet was a leader seeking to put an end to the capitalist exploitation of the Quraysh merchants and the corrupt bureaucracy of Byzantium and Persia.
According to the Qur’an, Muslims have three main responsibilities: seeing, hearing and sensing through the agency of the mind. Consequently, real knowledge is based on empirically verifiable observation, or through the role of science.
Poverty is the punishment of God and deserved by those who ignore science.
In Muslim/Islamic societies, science, as well as agrarian reform should play leading roles in developing an industrialised economy.
A socialist path is a correction of the medieval distortion of Islam through Shari’a.
Parvez joined the government after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, but after Jinnah’s death in 1948, he was sidelined until he resigned from his post in 1956.
An issue of Talu-e-Islam featuring Muhammad Iqbal on the cover. Many essays written by Ghulam Ahmed Parvez for the magazine included arguments for the propagation of Islamic Socialism and fiery polemics against conservative ulema.
Another scholar at the time who was using Iqbal’s writings on Islam and the Qu’ran to formulate Islamic Socialism in South Asia was Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim.
A philosopher, author and a huge admirer of Muhammad Iqbal, Khalifa ventured into the ideological territory of Islamic Socialism later than Ghulam Parvez.
A keen student of Islam (especially Sufism), Khalifa, after getting his PhD from the Heidelberg University in Germany, authored a number of books on Iqbal’s philosophy, Islamic thought, Jallaluddin Rumi (Sufi poet and writer), and also translated the Hindu holy book, the Bhagwat Gita, into Urdu.
It was after the creation of Pakistan that Khalifa began to seriously study Marxism and what it meant to a young ‘third world’ country like Pakistan.
In his 1951 books, ‘Islam and Communism’ and ‘Iqbal Aur Mullah’, Khalifa saw Islamic Socialism as harnessing the freedom of thought, action and enterprise characteristic of Western democracies by creating opportunities for all.
Like most Islamic Socialists of his era, Khalifa too was basically explaining Islamic Socialism to be a kind of spiritual and theistic concept of the social democratic welfare state enacted in various Western countries.
In ‘Islam and Communism’, Khalifa sees land as being the principle source of economic wealth and thus the moral basis for agrarian reforms in Pakistan.
Apart from Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, most other Islamic Socialist thinkers discussed above, though thoroughly critiquing Marxism/Socialism on the basis of Qu’ranic teachings and listing similarities and differences between the two, say little about exactly how much a role should a government and state play in matters of faith in societies run on the ideology and economic system prescribed by Islamic Socialism.
Parvez quite clearly suggests that an Islamic Socialist society run on the laws and economics derived from rational interpretations of the Qu’ran and modern scientific thought would inherently become responsible, law-abiding, egalitarian and enlightened and would not require the state to play the role of a moral guide.
In other words, Islamic Socialist policies guarantee a progressive and non-theocratic (if not entirely secular) Muslim majority state where the citizens are enlightened enough to make their own moral choices, and where the state sticks to looking after the citizens’ economic interests and needs and delivering justice.
It is within these two main areas where the state can evoke rational and modernistic interpretations of the Qu’ran, especially those verses dealing with property rights, Zakat, justice and the rights of women.
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PART II
Islamic Socialism: A history from left to right
In the Middle East, Islamic Socialism evolved into becoming a more nationalistic and revolutionary idea, mainly due to the creation of Israel (in 1948) and the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from the area.
A Christian Syrian philosopher and Arab nationalist, Michel Aflaq, is remembered to be the originator of the Middle Eastern strain of Islamic Socialism that expressed itself as Arab Socialism and Ba’ath Socialism.
Born into an Arab Christian family, Aflaq became a communist at college and university, but broke away from the communists to formulate a radical and new Arab nationalist philosophy with another young Syrian, Salah ad-Din al-Bitar.
After studying the steady economic and political decline of the Arab peoples around the world, Aflaq and Bitar advocated the creation of a united Arab state.
For this they recasted Arab nationalism by infusing into it a heavy dose of socialist economic ideas, progressive cultural and social outlook, and by reworking the idea of Islam inherent in it by evoking ‘Qu’ran’s revolutionary spirit’ to counter injustice and inequality but separating Islam (as an organised faith) from the matters of the state.
Aflaq and Bitar claimed that this would lead to a renaissance in the Arab world, turning it into an economic and political power.
Their emphasis on the word renaissance (which in Arabic is ‘Al-Ba’ath’), gave birth to the term ‘Ba’ath Socialism,’ and soon both Aflaq and Bitar set out to define exactly how this form of socialism works.
Ba’ath Socialism appealed to the unity of all Arab nations on the basis of language/culture (Arab) and on the faith most Arabs followed (Islam).
It suggested that the Arab nations were being undermined by five forces: European colonialism (driven by capitalism); Soviet Communism; ‘decadent monarchies’ in Arab countries; Islamic conservatism within Arab societies; and the clergy and the ulema who were keeping these societies in the clutches of backwardness.
Ba’ath Socialism offered a path between Western capitalism and Soviet communism by suggesting that all Arab nations come together as one state under a single ‘vanguard party’ of Arab nationalists who would impose socialist economic policies, modernise society through education, science and culture, separate religion from the state but continue being inspired by the egalitarian concepts of Islam that would remain to be the faith of a majority of citizens in the united Arab state.
In spite of being staunchly secular, Ba’ath Socialism celebrated Islam as proof of ‘Arab genius’, and a testament of Arab culture, values and thought.
Song and Dance
The Middle East and Africa
Ba’ath Socialism seemed to have arrived at a ripe moment in modern Arab history because from 1940s onwards a number of anti-colonial movements in Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Syria were all being lead by outfits declaring themselves to be adherents of Arab Socialism.
In 1948, a young military Colonel in Egypt, Gammal Abdel Nasser, formed the clandestine ‘Free Officers Movement’.
The group consisted of Egyptian army officers driven by the ideas of Arab Socialism/Ba’ath Socialism.
In 1952 the movement overthrew Egypt’s pro-British monarchy in a coup and declared Egypt to be an independent Arab Socialist Republic.
Interestingly, the Free Officers Movement and coup were initially supported by the anti-colonial right-wing religious group, the Muslim Brotherhood.
But once Nasser began unfolding his policies ‘to modernise the Egyptian economy and society,’ and claimed that Islam was best served when practiced in private, the Muslim Brotherhood turned against his regime.
In 1954 it tried to assassinate Nasser who responded by unleashing a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and the conservative clergy.
Inspired by Nasser, a group of young officers in Iraq successfully overthrew the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. Though the new regime at once declared Iraq to be a republic, it did not form an Arab Socialist Party like Nasser.
That changed when in a counter coup (in 1963) another group of officers took over and formed the Iraq Ba’ath Socialist Party. But the situation remained fluent and by 1966 the Ba’ath Socialists were ousted in a coup only to return and stabilise their power in 1968.
Ba’ath Socialism became Iraq’s central ideology and the Ba’ath Socialist Party the country’s ruling outfit. This party and ideology in Iraq would last till 2003 until the fall of its last main man Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Ever since its independence in 1949, Syria had been in turmoil and witnessed a number of coups most of which were backed and planned by the Syrian Ba’ath Socialist Party.
In 1956, Syria also became one of the first Arab countries to enter the ‘Soviet camp’ as opposed to the ‘American camp.’ Nasser’s Egypt soon followed Syria’s lead and signed various defense, economic and cultural pacts with the Soviet Union.
To fully realise Arab/Ba’ath Socialism’s main doctrinal thrust of enacting a united Arab nation, in 1958 Syria and Egypt merged to become the United Arab Republic (UAR).
The experiment was a disaster as the Syrian side thought Nasser was undermining Syrian interests. The union was dissolved when the Ba’ath Socialist Party in Syria engineered another coup in 1961.
Till 1970, Syrian politics was caught in a tense tussle between the radical and moderate factions of the Ba’ath Socialist Party until the party and government were taken over by Hafizul Asad, an Army General.
Asad, an Alawite Muslim – a breakaway Shia Muslim sect – would go on to stabilize Syria and rule as dictator till his death in 2000.
Under him the Ba’ath Socialist Party and regime became the most stable, as well as radical in any Arab country.
In Algeria during that country’s nationalist struggle against French colonialism that began to peak in the 1950s, the movement’s main outfit the Organisation Spéciale (Special Organisation) began to be drawn towards the ‘liberation philosophy’ of Arab/Ba’ath Socialism.
In 1954 The Special Organisation merged with various small left-wing nationalist groups and guerilla organisations to form the National Liberation Front (or the FLN – Front de Libération Nationale) that became the largest nationalist outfit during the Algerian liberation movement against French colonialists.
Thousands of Algerians and French died between 1954 and 1962 in the war. When the French finally agreed to leave Algeria in 1962, the FLN became the first ruling party of independent Algeria.
Right away tensions emerged between FLN’s radical leader, Ahmed Ben Bella and the more moderate, Houari Boumedienne. In 1965 Boumedienne, with the help of the newly formed Algerian army, toppled Ben Bella in a coup and became Algeria’s second head of state.
He outlawed all other political parties, made FLN the sole ruling party of Algeria, initiated a number of socialist economic polices, and cracked down on Islamist and conservative religious groups.
But unlike Arab Socialists in Iraq, Syria and Egypt, Boumedienne did not aggressively push his country into the Soviet sphere of influence. He was, however, equally vocal in his criticism of pro-US Arab monarchies, Israel, Islamists and capitalism.
During the height of a civil war (between Egypt-backed nationalists and Saudi-supported monarchists) and anti-colonial movement (against the British forces) in the northern part of Yemen, the two main outfits leading the nationalist movement were the Yemeni National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY).
Both the political and guerilla groups were steeped in Arab Socialism and were being led by Marxists.
When the fighting spilled into the South of the country it intensified, so much so that the NLF and FLOSY began to attack each another in spite of the fact that both were inspired by Nasser’s Arab Socialism and were being operated by Marxists.
In 1967, NLF and FLOSY defeated the monarchists and drove out the British from the south. NLF then went on to crush the FLOSY and declared the south as an independent republic.
In 1970, NLF named South Yemen as the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen and formed the country’s sole ruling party, the Yemeni Socialist Party.
The party right away signed defense, cultural and economic pacts with communist regimes in Soviet Union, China and Cuba.
North Yemen fell into the hands of forces being backed and funded by Saudi Arabia and the US.
In Libya another admirer of Arab Socialism and Nasser, Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, replicated Egypt’s Free Officers Movement and overthrew the Libyan monarchy in a coup in 1969.
In 1971, he formed the Arab Socialist Union (to be Libya’s sole ruling party), unleashed various radical socialist policies, and signed defense and economic pacts with the Soviet Union.
Though vehemently opposed to pro-US Arab monarchies (especially Saudi Arabia), and a close ally of the Soviet Union, Qadhafi’s Libya, unlike other Arab Socialist regimes of the time, began tempering Libya’s version of Islamic Socialism by paralleling an anti-Islamist policy with certain puritanical initiatives that saw the outlawing of the sale and consumption of alcohol, closure of nightclubs and a crackdown on Marxists in universities and colleges.
In 1976 he published a book (called the ‘Green Book’) in which he described his understanding of Islamic Socialism. The book became a compulsory read for school and college students.
Two opponents of the Qaddafi regime hanged in public in 1977.
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