%^$ islam and communism in the 20th century an historical survey by stephen suleyman schwartz *&^

8/6/2019 %^$ ISLAM AND COMMUNISM IN THE 20th CENTURY An Historical Survey by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz *&^

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ISLAM and COMMUNISMby Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

2009

C I PCentre for Islamic Pluralism

2009

www.islamicpluralism.eu

Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers


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1718 M Street NW #260

Washington, DC 20036 USAand

BM 2394, London,WC1N 3XX, UK

ISLAM AND COMMUNISM

IN THE 20th

CENTURYAn Historical Surveyby Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

Center for Islamic Pluralism

Washington * London * Kln * Sarajevo

www.islamicpluralism.org


www.islamicpluralism.de


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Islam and Communism in the 20th CenturyAn Historical Survey

by Stephen Suleyman Schwartz

Published in the USA in 2009

by the Center for Islamic Pluralism

1718 M Street NW #260

Washington, DC 20036 USA

and

BM 2394, London, WC1N 3XX

First English edition June 2009

An abbreviated version of this paper was originally published in German as

Kommunismus und Islam im 20. Jahrhundert:

Ein Historischer berblick,

in Jahrbuch fr Historische Kommunismus-Forschung 2009, Aufbau, Berlin

Design: Asim Mesihi

www.islamicpluralism.org


www.islamicpluramism.de

ISBN 978-0-9558779-3-3

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is pending with the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Center for Islamic PluralismAll rights reserved

The authors rights have been asserted

This document may be reproduced and reposted by any userwith acknowledgement of authorship and original publication. Bound

offprints on paper will be supplied on request.

Cover photograph:Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers


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The present study is mainly concerned with

relations between international Communism

and the Islamic umma, or global community,

rather than Moscows policies toward Soviet

Muslims. The former topic has been neglected

by historians and experts, while the latter has

been treated in considerable detail.

As in Christianity and Judaism, communistic,millenarian, radical-political, and revolutionarysocialist movements have a notable presence in thehistory of Islam. Typical examples of each

phenomenon may be cited. The legacy of pre-Islamic Iranian religious communism themovement known as Mazdakism, a variant ofManichism which briefly flourished in the 6th

century C.E. is reflected in aspects of IranianShiism. Mazdakism adopted social collectivismand principles of public welfare.

Radical Sufi or Islamic spiritual movementswith tendencies toward millennialist, utopian,antinomian, and other forms of anti-authoritariandissidence included Turkish Alevism, the Kizilbashvariant of Shiism, and Hamzeviyya in the Balkans.Their doctrines stirred peasants, and occasionally,city dwellers, to rebellion against the Muslim

authorities, and memory of their traditions ofprotest is often easily found in the Islamic world.1

In addition, a body of scholarship on Sufism ingeneral, produced by Christian, Jewish, andMuslim scholars, has perceived in it a social protestmovement, from its beginnings in Islam.

For example, the outstanding Sufi Husayn bin Mansur Hallaj (858-922 was executed inBaghdad allegedly for heresy; he has traditionally

been portrayed as having faced persecution for

declaring, Ana ul-haqq, or, I am truth as amanifestation of God. But the definitive Western

scholarly examination of Hallaj, by the Frenchscholar Louis Massignon,2 identifies the Sufi withthe threat of an Islamic social revolution. InMassignons account, which may be skewed by theFrench scholars own anti-Jewish prejudice, theintoxicated metaphysics involved in Hallajs

purported heresy fades into the background in aMuslim Baghdad in which public corruption wasubiquitous and supposedly complicated by the roleof Jewish bankers. Some Sufis claim Hallaj waskilled for disclosing state secrets to the people.One of the disciples of Hallaj, Ahmad Al-Amuli,told the court official Hamid bin Abbas that thealleged transgressions in religion of Hallaj werenothing compared with the acts of theft and crueltycommitted by the rulers; Al-Amuli was then

tortured, but, like his mentor, refused to submit.The present-day critic of radical IslamKhalid Durn viewed Hallaj as a saint of the poor,and one Sufi source describes him as the patron ofoutlaws.3 Some have taken him as a model ofsubversive and libertarian4 conduct. Hallaj was,however, also a topic of verses by no less thanAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who wrote, I forgetmy own existence and proclaim, I am the truth,And like Mansur Hallaj I volunteer myself forhanging. Khomeinisidentification with Hallajembodies therevolutionary aspect ofthe dour Iranian clerics

personality, but also mightindicate Khomeinis viewof himself as a martyr tooppression.5

CIP

CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC PLURALISM (CIP) www.islamicpluralism.eu 1

Islam and Communism in the 20th Century

An Historical Summary

AyatollahRuhollahKhomein


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Islam and Communism in the 20th Century An Historical SummaryCIP

Islamic Modernism and RevolutionLater prominent expressions of radical-politicalreformism in Islam include the activities of 19th

century Salafis such as Jamalaldin Al-Afghani(1838-97), a Muslim ideological adventurercomparable in many respects to Mikhail Bakunin(although Bakunin is a problematical figure in thiscontext, for his Pan-Slavism and inspiration of ananti-Muslim spirit in the Balkans in the 1870s).6 Amore developed example of Islamic reformism wasfound in the Committee of Union and Progress(CUP orItihaclar), the leading force in the internal

political transformation that occurred at the end ofthe Ottoman imperial state in the early 20thcentury.7 The CUP included members of TurkishFreemason lodges whose organization was

promoted by the Western powers, a historicaldevelopment which left an unfortunate legacy ofanti-Masonic conspiracy theory in Turkish andwider, global Islamic consciousness. In theaftermath of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia,Leon Trotsky and others argued that the 1906constitutionalist movement in Persia and the 1908Young Turk revolution led by the CUP both

reflected the impact of the Russian upheaval on thetsarist empires eastern neighbors.

The Bolsheviks had become involved in thePersian constitutional revolution, with theGeorgian-born activist Grigory SergoOrdzhonikidze (1886-1937) crossing the Russo-Persian border to assist Iranian revolutionaries inorganizing armed detachments.8 KhrastyuRakovski (1873-1941), the Bulgarian-bornrevolutionary socialist active in several countries,

and a long-time associate of Trotsky, wrote on theoccasion of the Young Turk Revolution:

After Russia and Persia, Turkey nowenters the revolutionary movement9. The trope ofa chain of revolutions beginning in Russia in 1905,continuing in Persia and Turkey, and resulting inthe Chinese upheaval of 1911 was also the subjectof theoretical meditations by Vladimir I. Lenin,outlining the opening of the anti-imperialistmovement in the colonial nations as an adjunct to

the socialist labor movement in the developedcountries. Lenin wrote in 1908, in a quite casual

manner according to the 1930s Trotskyist authorC.L.R. James:

The revolutionary movement in the states ofEurope and Asia has manifested itself so

formidably of late that we can discern quiteclearly the outlines of a new and incomparablehigher stage in the international struggle of the proletariat The class-conscious workers ofEurope now have Asiatic comrades and theirnumber will grow by leaps and bounds.10

Lenin summed up his view on this issue in 1917,when he wrote, on Bolshevik foreign policy:

The Russian revolution, which as early as

1905 led to revolutions in Turkey, Persia andChina, would have placed the German andBritish imperialists in a very difficult position ifit had begun to establish a truly revolutionaryalliance of the workers and peasants of thecolonies and semi-colonies against the despots,against the khans, for expulsion of the Germansfrom Turkey, the British from Turkey, Persia,India, Egypt, etc.11

The Turkish convulsion brought trade union

organizations to the Ottoman territory, mostremarkably under the leadership of SephardicJewish workers, as in the major European Ottoman

port of Selanik, which had a large Jewish majority.A separate and special instance of Sufi

libertarianism, uniquely combined with dawa ormissionization of non-Muslims, support for theOttoman state, Islamic heterodoxy, and progressive

political attitudes is offered by the history of theBektashi Sufi order. Bektashis formed the chaplain

corps of the Ottoman military units known asYenieri (Janissaries) or new men, originally

CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC PLURALISM (CIP) www.islamicpluralism.eu2

VladimirIlyichLenin


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made up of Christian converts to Islam. TheBektashi order has been centered in Albania since

the suppression of Sufism by Mustafa Kemal,founder of the Turkish Republic, in 1925; itcomprises the only indigenous Shia Muslimcommunity in Europe. Bektashism has played amajor role in the Albanian national movement, aswell as advocating womens equality and populareducation. Its followers account for as much as aquarter of all Albanians, or two million people, andalthough shunned by some, but not all Sunnis fortheir nonconformism, the Bektashis are among the

best-organized and most influential Sufi orders.12

The first majorexample of Islamicsocialism appearedduring the second decadeof the 20th century,

parallel with the firstworld war, in the DutchEast Indies, which later

became Indonesia. TheIndies Social Democratic

Association (IndischeSociaal-DemocratischeVereenigingor ISDV) was created by Dutch radicalsocialists living in the colonial territories, the mostnotable being Hendrik Sneevliet, alias Maring(1883-1942). Sneevliet became a leader of theThird (Communist) International (CI), representingthe CI in China, and then emerged as a left-oppositionist aligned with but independent of theTrotskyist movement in the 1930s. He is

considered a national hero in the Netherlands forhis involvement with the February 1941 strike

against the German occupiers of the country, inprotest against anti-Jewish measures; a street andmetro station in Amsterdam are now named forhim. The strike, which took place during the Hitler-Stalin pact, was the first important solidarity actionwith the persecuted Jews to take place in WesternEurope. It put forward the slogan, Against

National Socialism and National Bolshevism International Class Struggle! In April 1942Sneevliet and other leaders of a small andindependent anti-Stalinist entity called De DeerdeFront (The Third Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front)were arrested and executed by the Germanoccupation authorities in Holland.13

The Indonesian aspect of the revolutionarymovement in the Dutch colony is best related byTan Malaka (1894-1949), who followed Sneevlietinto the Comintern. Indonesians were the earliestsubstantial group of Muslims outside Soviet-controlled territory (i.e. the Caucasus and CentralAsia), and neighboring Turkey and Iran, toassociate themselves with Moscow. Tan Malakahad cooperated with a Muslim nationalistmovement counting millions of members, Sarekat

Islam (SI or Islamic Union). A revolutionaryfaction, Red Sarekat Islam, was born from theranks of SI in the Javanese city of Semarang. In amemoir, Tan Malaka eloquently recalled his viewof the intersection of Islam and Communism, andthe necessity of an alliance between Pan-Islamistsand Communists: When I stand before God, thenI am a Muslim, but when I stand before men, thenI am no Muslim, for God has said there are manySatans among men.14 Thus, Islam could resolve

spiritual issues but could not assure justice in theface of exploitation and other evils in humansociety. Examination of the Indonesian example

puts in question the general typology of Muslimradical religiosity as Islamist. The nationalmovement in what would become Indonesia wasIslamic but did not favor religious purification oran Islamic state.

Marxist Attitudes Toward Muslims

The CI was the first of the revolutionaryinternationals to make a serious approach to the

Islamic Modernism and Revolution CIP


Yenieriler(Janissaries): The term in Turkish, yenieri means new troops,indicating what they were originally, an alternative to the regular army.

HendrikSneevliet,aliasMaring


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Muslim umma; both the International WorkingMens Association of Marx and the SocialistInternational that succeeded it were either whiteracist, in present-day terminology, or Western-imperialist in their main attitudes their support forIrish revolutionary claims being the only notableexception. Historians of Bolshevism typically datethe new strategy to the Soviet-sponsored 1920Congress of Peoples of the East, held in Baku, butascribe it to Russian ambitions in the East. In aspeech at the 1920 Congress, Karl Radek, theformer comrade of Rosa Luxemburg in the SocialDemocracy of the Kingdom of Poland andLithuania (SDKPiL) and confidant of Lenin,

charged that the British capitalists resolved tobreak [Ottoman] Turkey into pieces as soon as possible British capital condemned Turkey todeath, Radek declared, with the aim of betteruniting the British colonial possessions in Africaand India.15

Marxist sympathy for the Ottomans andtheir successors against the British did not,however, begin with the CI. Karl Marx himselfcollaborated with the British politician David

Urquhart (1805-77), defender of the Ottoman orderin the Balkans (after participating in the Greekindependence movement) and scourge of pro-Russian interests in Britain. Marx and Urquhartwere united in accusing Lord Palmerston of sellingout to Moscow.16

In terms of extensive practical encounters, prior to 1917 the main experience of therevolutionary Marxist movement with Muslims

came about in the Balkans, a theatre of warbetween Austria-Hungary and Russia. Luxemburgand the Austrian Marxists condemned Slavicdemands for the breakup of the existing empiresinto small, ethnically-defined states, arguinginstead for conversion of the multiethnic andmultireligious Habsburg and Ottoman domainsinto socialist federations. Criticism of tsaristcomplicity in assaulting the Ottoman dominionsand murdering local Muslims en masse

particularly theTurks and Albanians slaughtered bythe Serbs in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, whichresulted in the Serb conquest of Kosova and othercomponents of a disintegrating Turkey in Europe

was also forthcoming from proto-Bolshevikssuch as Trotsky, who served as a war correspondentin the Balkan conflict.17

Similar condemnation of Slav atrocitiesagainst the Balkan Muslims and Albanians (thelatter community including a significant Christian

population) was put forward by the Serbian SocialDemocratic Party (SSDP), most of whose memberswould be absorbed into the Communist Party ofYugoslavia (KPJ) when it was founded in 1919.

One of the first public figures to sound the alarmabout the brutality of the Serb invasion of Kosovain 1912-13 was a leader of the SSDP, DimitrijeTucovi (1881-1914).18

Trotsky wrote on Serb atrocities in Kosovafor the liberal Russian dailies Kievskaya Mysl(Kiev Thought), Dyen(The Day), and Luch (Ray).It is probable that Tucovi, who was his friend andcomrade, was the source of one of Trotskys most


Above: the partition of European Turkey 1908-13 Karl Radek, Bolshevik functionary (1885-1939) Historical Prizren, center of Ottoman Kosova


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shocking dispatches. In Behind the CurtainsEdge, published by Kievskaya Mysl, Trotsky

placed in quotes a first-hand account of Serbianmilitary atrocities:

The horrors actually began as soon as wecrossed the old frontier... The sun had set, it wasstarting to get dark. But the darker the sky became, the more brightly the fearfulillumination of the fires stood out against it.Burning was going on all around us. EntireAlbanian villages had been turned into pillars offire far and near, right up to the railway line...Dwellings, possessions accumulated by fathers,grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, weregoing up in flames. In all its monotony this picture was repeated the whole way toSkopje.

The remainder of this long account consisted of anextraordinary series of murders, tortures,massacres, and thefts committed by Serbiansoldiers and officers. Balkan Muslims andAlbanians were not the only victims; Bulgariansand Sephardic Jews were also despoiled by theSerb forces. The authoritative historian of the once-

distinguished Sephardic community of Manastir(Bitola) in Macedonia, Mark Cohen, describesSerbian atrocities as an incentive for earlyimmigration of the Manastir Sephardim to theU.S.19

Tsarist Russian encouragement to Serbianaggression was a preoccupation of manycommentators, and radical criticism of the Russianrole was extremely sharp. Trotsky lashed atexamples of ethnic cleansing a term that had

just then been coined by the Serbs20 and thecomplicity in it of Russian tsarist and democraticnationalist politicians including the liberal PavelMilyukov, in two extraordinary texts, published in

Dyen in January 1913: An ExtraparliamentaryQuestion to Mr. P. Milyukov, and Results of theQuestion About the Balkans .

In the former, Trotsky wrote:Mr. Deputy! ...You have frequently, both in thecolumns of the press and at the tribune of the

Duma, assured the Balkan allies... of theunaltered sympathies of so-called Russian

society for their campaign of liberation.Recently, during the period of the armistice, youmade a political journey to the Balkans... Didyou not hear during your travels... about the

monstrous acts of brutality that were committedby the triumphant soldiery of the allies all alongtheir line of march, not only on unarmedTurkish soldiers, wounded or taken prisoner,but also on the peaceful Muslim inhabitants, onold men and women, on defenseless children?...Did not the facts, undeniable and irrefutable,force you to come to the conclusion that theBulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia[Kosova], in their national endeavor to correctdata in the ethnographical statistics that are not

quite favorable to them, are engaged quitesimply in systematic extermination of theMuslim population? ...Is it not clear to you thatthe silent connivance of the leading Russianparties and their press... makes it much easierfor the (Bulgarians and Serbs) to engage in theirCains work of further massacres of the peopleof the Crescent in the interests of the culture ofthe Cross?21

In the succeeding text, Results of the Question

About the Balkans, Trotskys polemic reached anintensity rare even for him. Addressing himself

Marxist attitudes toward Muslims CIP


Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Russian revolutionary, was a warcorrespondent for the Kiev newspaperKievskaya Mysl in the Balkansand reported on the atrocities committed against the Albanians andTurks of Macedonia and Kosova during the Serb invasion of 1912


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again to Milyukov, he wrote:Since the leading newspapers of Russia...either hushed up or denied the exposures published in the democratic press, a certain

number of murdered Albanian babies must be put down, Mr. Deputy, to your Slavophileaccount. Get your senior doorman to look forthem in your editorial office, Mr. Milyukov!

He continued:Indignant protest against unbridled behaviorby men armed with machine guns, rifles, andbayonets was required for our own moral self-defense. An individual, a group, a party, or aclass that is capable of objectively picking itsnose while it watches men drunk with blood,

and incited from above, massacring defenseless people is condemned by history to rot andbecome worm-eaten while it is still alive.22

The SSDP leader DimitrijeTucovi had volunteered forservice in the Serbian army, andhad marched in its ranks intoKosova, on the belief thatsocialists needed to be with

their people wherever theywere. He had been won tosocialism as a middle-school student, acharacteristic East European phenomenon of thetime, and his internationalist beliefs were sincereand profound. Almost immediately, he beganwriting about the horrific character of the Serbianconquest of Kosova in the Belgrade socialistnewspaper Radnike Novine (Workers Journal).His statements were extraordinary for their candorand their authors authentic solidarity with theAlbanians.

When Prishtina, the capital of Kosova, wasoccupied by the Serbs,Radnike Novineprinted thefollowing as a letter from a soldier:

My dear friend, I have no time to write to youat length, but I can tell you that appalling thingsare going on here. I am terrified by them, andconstantly ask myself how men can be so barbarous as to commit such cruelties. It ishorrible. I dare not (even if I had time, which Ihave not) tell you more, but I may say thatLuma [an Albanian region along the river of the

same name], no longer exists. There is nothingbut corpses, dust, ashes. There are villages of100, 150, 200 houses, where there is no longera single man, literally not one. We collect them

in bodies of forty to fifty, and then we piercethem with our bayonets to the last man. Pillageis going on everywhere. The officers told thesoldiers to go to Prizren and sell the things theyhad stolen. The Radnike Novine editor added,Our friend tells us of things even moreappalling than this, but they are so horrible andso heartrending that we prefer not to publishthem.

In later articles published by Radnike Novine,

summarizing the Balkan Wars, the acquisition ofKosova, and particularly the suppression of theAlbanians, Tucovi wrote among other things:

It is at the very least now necessary to looktruth in the face and, setting aside all prejudices,recognize that the struggle that the Albanian people are today conducting is a natural,inevitable historical struggle for a different political life from the one they had underTurkey, and different from the one imposed on

them by their ruthless neighbors, Serbia,Greece, and Montenegro. [Emphasis inoriginal.] A free Serbian people must value andrespect that struggle as much for the freedomsof the Albanians as for their own, and denyevery government a means to carry out a policyof aggression.23

We have carried out the attempted premeditated murder of an entire nation. Wewere caught in that criminal act and have beenobstructed. Now we have to suffer the

punishment... In the Balkan Wars, Serbia notonly doubled its territory but also its externalenemies...

Our lordly people dreamed of foreignlands and foreign freedoms, but we who hadbeen heralds of national liberation brought withus, instead, the banner of nationalenslavement... The basis for all of themisfortunes we now suffer and which we willcontinue to suffer in the future lies in the factthat we invaded a foreign land.

Voltaire said the poor always like tospeak of their past... This is clearly true of the


DimitrijeTucovi(1881-1914)


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tiny Balkan states, which wanted to create theirfuture on the basis of the past. Some recall therule of Tsar Duan, they dream of a GreaterSerbian state... The memory of that illustrious

past is inseparably linked to territorialexpansion by the ruling classes...

Serbian overlords are trying to turn anational minority [Kosova Serbs] into amajority by means of a police state, and they arepreparing their subjects not to be free citizens but submissive subjects. The regime ofextraordinary police measures... is inspired bythe reactionary desire to advance one nation andsubdue another... On the other hand, it gives riseto new urges... provoking intolerance and hatred

between peoples.The Serbian bourgeoisie desires

freedom for its own nation at the price offreedom for other nations... We want freedomfor our nation without denying the freedom ofothers. This goal can be achieved in the Balkansonly by the formation of a political entity inwhich all nations would be completely equal...without regard to who ruled what regioncenturies ago.

Tucovi was an extraordinary figure. A capablesoldier, although he was a firm antimilitarist, heremained a reserve officer in the Serbian army, andwas killed in action in the first months of WorldWar I. He was not only an enemy of Serbianimperialism, he was also a real friend of theAlbanian people. He believed, in effect, and withconsiderable reason, that the Serb, Montenegrin,andAlbanian inhabitants of northAlbania formed asingle, interrelated regional community, embracing

two nations, Serbo-Montenegrin and Albanian, andthree religions, Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim.But he saw this in a way completely

different from certain Serb chauvinists, whodeclared the population of Kosova to be no morethan Albanized Serbs. In reality, Tucovi argued,it was the other way around: Karaore, leader ofthe Serb national uprising of 1804 and progenitorof a Serb monarchical house, the Karaorevies,was, Tucovi said, of Albanian origin. Above all,

Tucovi defended Albanias right to independence,and the Albanian-majority character of Kosova.

Tucovi insisted:Relations with foreign nations, and thereforewith the Albanians, must be built on ademocratic, civil, and humane foundation of

tolerance, cooperative existence, and labor.

Alone in its uncompromising rejection of GreaterSerbia, the SSDP which Tucovi led was a tiny

political formation, founded in 1903. Other notableinternationalists in the party included Kosta

Novakovi, who also served as a combat soldier inthe Serbian army, Duan Popovi, DragiaLapevi, and Tria Kaclerovi. Novakovi,Lapevi and Kaclerovi were all elected to the

Serbian parliament. Their party had links with theRussian Bolsheviks prior to the 1917 revolutionand the formation of the CI, and with the similarBulgarian left socialist tendency known asTesnyaki or Narrows, as well as with Trotsky,then affiliated to no party, and other independentRussian Marxists. Tucovi and Lapevi wereSerbian delegates to the 1910 congress of theTesnyaki, a major regional political event of thetime.

Popovi, editor of Radnike Novine, wroteof the 1912 Albanian campaign:The details concerning the operations of theSerb armies are frightful. They plunder, laywaste, burn, plow up, massacre, and destroyeverything, down to the roots... It is no wonderthat our peasant masses have such barbaricinstincts since this state never saw to it that theywere educated and civilized; nor should we beshocked at the narrow and meagre political andspiritual horizons of our military commanders

who are trained to regard the brutal and cold- blooded murder of tens and hundreds ofAlbanians, their wives and children, as heroic...The slogans in which such ideas and views areexpressed come from the highest social andpolitical strata in Serbia. It is not merely aquestion of a protest by Serbian workers againstthe Albanian policy of the Serbian bourgeoisie;we must rescue the image of the Serbian peoplein the eyes of cultured and democraticEuropeans. We must show that there are people

in Serbia, many people, who oppose this, andthat at the head of this opinion stands the

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working class and Social Democracy.

Lapevi wrote at the same time, with greatprescience:

Through the politics of our governmentconditions have been created so that for a greatmany years (perhaps even decades!), there willbe repeated clashes and suffering between twounfortunate nations... Serbia has ordered itsarmies to subdue and enslave... Our soldiershave marched with guns and cannons but havenot only created dishonor for their land, whichonce had a tradition of revolution and liberation,but they have also created conditions for eternaldiscord. We shall constantly have conflict and

misfortune if Serbia does not change itspolicies.

Nearly 20 years later Kosta Novakovi recalled:The invasion of Albania by the Serbian armywas a Serbian imperialist attempt to capture theports of Shkodra, Durrs and Shen-Gjin TheSerbian imperialist government left nothingundone against Albanians during its occupation.It issued orders for scaffolds to be erected in adozen parts. It massacred, killed and plundered

the impoverished Albanian population. And itpersecuted only the poor

When they invaded Kosova, theSerbian imperialists proclaimed that they weregoing to regain the historical rights they had in1389. Basing themselves on these historicalrights, Italy or France, Greece or Turkey, coulddemand half of Europe, because they had heldthose parts at one time. Indeed, France coulddemand a piece of Russia, because once in 1812Napoleon went as far as Moscow.

Kosova is a purely Albanian territory;it has only 10-15 per cent Serbs. The Serbianimperialists employed the tactics and methodsof medieval warriors or colonial invaders: theannihilation of the population under the pretextof military operations, the disarming of people,and the suppression of the armed resistance.Thus 120,000 Albanians men, women, boys, old folk and children, were wiped out;hundreds of villages, more in Kosova and fewerin Macedonia, were bombarded and most of

them completely destroyed. It should be pointedout that the representative of the tsarist Russian

imperialist policy, Hartwig, the minister ofRussia to Belgrade, blessed Belgrades policy ofannihilation. The Orthodox Russian tsar urgedhis Orthodox Serbian brothers, King Petar and

his son Aleksandar, to kill a whole people and tospread the Orthodox faith in the Balkans. Atleast 50,000 Albanians were forced to becomerefugees and flee to Turkey and Albania to savetheir lives. This annihilation thinned out theAlbanian nation in Kosova, but in no waychanged the Albanian character there. Theobjective of these massacres of Albanians inKosova was to replace them with Serbs and tocolonize and Serbianize it. However, until theend of 1912, as long as there was resistance on

the part of the Albanians, the colonization progressed rather slowly. Only a few Serbssettled in the Kosova region at the start.

Novakovi wrote these lines in Liria Kombtare(National Liberation)24 an Albanian-language

periodical printed in Geneva, which, supported bythe CI, backed Kosovar Albanian rebels againstSerbian domination in the late 1920s.

A CI-directed front, the Balkan Federation,came to include the leading Kosovar revolutionary

groups. It should be noted that the social-revolutionary Internal Macedonian RevolutionaryOrganization (IMRO/VMRO), which like SerbianSocial Democracy contributed many cadres to theCI, was also, originally, an internationalistformation. VMRO projected a future Macedonia inwhich Slav Muslims, Albanians, and local Turkswould have equal rights with ChristianMacedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Gypsies,and Sephardic Jews. The official language of

independent Macedonia, to foster unity betweenthese disparate peoples, was to be Esperanto.Decades later, during and after the period of TitoiteCommunism, the VMRO became almostexclusively Slavist in outlook. But at the beginningof the history of the KPJ, in the 1920 elections inmonarchist Yugoslavia, then known as theKingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (KSHS),the KPJ received a major share of votes inMacedonia, and in the same year the Macedonian

metropolis of Skopje experienced a general strikeor commune.25 Throughout this period,



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Macedonia no less than Kosova was inconsiderable insurrectionary upheaval, with wholedistricts liberated from the control of monarchistand Great-Serbian Belgrade.

Political activists from Muslim-majorityBosnia-Hercegovina played a significant role in theearly history of the KPJ. Josip Cizinski, alias MilanGorki (1904-39), a member of the Czech minoritycommunity born in Bosnia, was a dominant figurein KPJ activities, although not Muslim.26 AMuslim-born former head of the KPJ inHercegovina, Mustafa Dedi, became one of sixmembers of an executive committee of YugoslavTrotskyists living in Russia, formed in 1929.27

The Baku Congress of 1920 and Its

AftermathWith much of Eastern Europe aflame with revolt, atthe Baku Congress of 1920 the CI revealed that itsinterest in an alliance with Turkish and othergeographically near elements in the Muslim

world exceeded the expressions of anti-imperialistsolidarity with the Ottoman Muslims previouslyenunciated by Marx, the Serbian Social Democrats,and Trotsky. A Turkish Communist Party was

briefly prominent in the countrys political life, butwas curbed by Mustafa Kemal. Franz Borkenaudescribed the fate of the Turkish Communists inthis period as a catastrophe, writing TheComintern had to choose between Kemal and theTurkish Communists. For the first time the interestsof Russian foreign policy actually involved theexistence of a communist party. The Russians choseKemal in preference to Turkish communism inthe later congresses and meetings of the Comintern

no Turkish delegates took part The decisionabout Turkey was taken while Lenin was formallyand actually at the head of the Soviet state.28

Soviet approaches to Muslim communitieshad predictably begun within the borders of theformer tsarist empire, now Soviet territory. In someregions, mainly in the Caucasus, where tsarist

The Baku Congress and its Aftermath CIP


Azeri communists painting slogans for the conference.

South Caucasus 1917 Republic of Azerbaijan, 1919-1920

Congress of the Peoples of the East. Baku, September 1920


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aggression had been cruel and caused continuousresistance, Communism was welcomed andadopted an Islamic vocabulary (e.g. shura orIslamic consultative body for soviet orcouncil) during the Leninist period. The Leninistadministration also granted religious privileges topreviously-suppressed Caucasian Sufi shaykhs.

During the Baku Congress, of animpressive total of 1,891 attendees, 1,275 had filledout personal questionnaires. Given the new Soviet policy in the Caucasus, it is unsurprising thatChechens, who had been active combatants indefense of Islam through much of the 19th century,were the sixth largest delegation, with 82 present(plus 13 Ingushes, a national group related to andtypically associated with Chechens), numericallyfollowing 235 Turks, 192 Persians, 157 Armenians,104 Russians, and 100 Georgians. The Daghestanirevolutionary Jalaladdin Korkmasov declared tothe Congress, heroic struggle has dyedDaghestan in the color of its own blood, shed forthe glorious Red Flag what is at stake is theworld revolution. What faces us is a great worldwar even before the [Baku] Congress before

the call issued by our leaders, we began ghazawat,29 a holy war. 30

In the Central Asian regions where tsarismhad been much more successful as a military powerbut had left much of local Muslim governance in place, Communism was perceived, withconsiderable justification, as an ethnic Russianand antireligious phenomenon, and was resisted by

Muslim combatants with moral help from elementselsewhere in the umma. Muslim dissidence was fedby the legacy of jadidism, an Islamic reformisteffort among the Turkic communities of theRussian empire, as well as the Turkestan rebellionof 1916 against tsarist orders for militaryconscription. The 1916 insurrection is commonlyknown as the Basmachi movement, and isunfortunately neglected by Western historians.Having begun as opponents of tsarist imperialism,the Turkestani rebels maintained their resistance toSlavic domination after the establishment of Sovietrule. Soviet political agents treated the Basmachi inCentral Asia and another movement, the Musavatin Azerbaijan, as equal, Pan-Turkic enemies of thenew regime.

It is noteworthy that the questionnaires forthe Baku Congress listed only three Arabs,surpassed by 12 Jamshidis and 11 Hazaras (bothMuslim ethnic groups living mainly in Afghanistanand Iran), and eight Kurds. The final Manifesto ofthe Congress listed Arabia, Syria, and Palestine ascountries represented by delegates. As in theaftermath of 1905, outside Moscows annexed

territories, Russian political developmentsexercised a greater influence over the Muslim statesbordering on the former empire than in the broaderumma. Until the late 1940s, Soviet policy towardMuslims manifested a reversal of the commonattitude of the Western powers, which treated Islamas the Arab religion, and therefore as mainly afactor in dealing with the colonized Arab peoples,


In the summer of 1918, Mensheviks and right Social-Revolutionaries stageda counter-Revolutionary coup and seized power in Baku. They invitedBritish forces into the city and arrested 26 leading members of the lawfulSoviet of Peoples' Commissars, mainly Bolsheviks and a few left Social-

Revolutionaries. Then, on 20 September 1918, on orders from the British,the Commissars were taken out to a remote location in the desert wherethey were shot and beheaded. Painting by Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky Soviet Desert Police commandant cross-examines an Uzbek Caravan leader


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The Baku Congress and its Aftermath CIP


Training Azerbaijani soldiers for the Red Army (under General Frunze)

Red Army troops advancing into the Pamirs

Central Asia and the Caucasus: focal point of The Great Game

Bukhara, Uzbekistan: Left, the Mir Arab Madrasah; right, the KalanMasjid; between them the Tower of Death

Dance of a bacha (dancing boy), Samarkand, ca 1905 - 1915Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

*


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and secondarily with the Indian Muslims. For theRussians, relations with the Turks and Iranians weremore important, at the beginning, than with theArabs.

Nevertheless, elements of confrontation between Soviet politics and the movement for

Jewish colonization in Palestine, in which Arabswould be subject to considerable Russian blandishments over time, are visible early in CIhistory. The Baku Manifesto included thefollowing: What has Britain done for Palestine?There, at first, acting for the benefit of Anglo-Jewish capitalists, it drove Arabs from the land inorder to give the latter to Jewish settlers; then,trying to appease the discontent of the Arabs, itincited them against these same Jewish settlers.31

Only three years later, in 1923, the ex-anarchist andfuture Left Oppositionist Victor Serge, functioningas a CI journalist in Germany, expressed thecommon hostility of both the German Communists(KPD) and the rising National Socialist movementto the Jewish petty-bourgeoisie. In that period, CIrepresentatives like Ruth Fischer and Karl Radek(in the notorious Leo Schlageter case) expressedtheir solidarity with ultra-nationalist extremists inGermany. Much commentary on this example ofCommunist flirtation with fascist Jew-baiting has

treated it as a temporary aberration, but Sergeswriting shows others beside Fischer and Radekconforming to the posture of the CI. Serge reportedthat in Breslau, then in Germany, and todayWroclaw in Poland, young fascists had incited thelooting of Jewish shops; according to Serge, themob had given a good lesson to some viciousgrocers.32 Serge further praised Radek andHermann Remmele, a German Communist leader,for their speechifying and debates with fascists,

writing, You are fighting Jewish finance, saidRemmele to the fascists. Good, but also fight the

other finance, that of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes!He thus got those fascists to applaud the classstruggle. This idiom was identical to the better-known rhetoric of Ruth Fischer.33

Meanwhile, the lure of the Orient had become a powerful motif in Soviet literature. The SovietMuslim communities produced numerous works invernacular languages exalting the regime, but littleis of enduring worth. By contrast, the legendarywoman Bolshevik Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) joined her then-lover Fyodor F. Ilyin, known asRaskolnikov (1892-1939), in a diplomaticadventure in Afghanistan in 1920, when the

Leninist regime tried to assist the anti-British policyof Amanullah Khan (1892-1960), the Afghanmonarch from 1919 to 1929. Reisner composed akind of prose-poetry about Central Asia, resemblingthe Sufi classics, in which she observed, Betweena flat earth and a flat sky, smoke drifts intonothing Smothered silence for hundreds ofmiles All fades on the steppe, where stones aremade of moonlight and clouds petrified inemptiness. She also described Tashkent blazing

like a dark emerald a simile few would findappropriate today, given the shabbiness anddemoralization of the capital of independentUzbekistan.34 She further discerned a silencewhich makes the birds dumb and the trees stopgrowing High in the pale sky a snowstorm offighting white eagles But in the long, hopelessclay wall, raised from the earth and splashed by thebreath of tired laden donkeys and camels who candeny that here, in that exhausting, pitiless wall there

is a green window, from which one may see agarden hidden from view like a jewel inside aring.35 She later wrote brilliantly on the failedGerman Communist revolution of 1923.36 Reisneralso became the lover of the ill-fated Radek, whoalong with Ilyin-Raskolnikov was a victim of theStalinist purges, and it is not unlikely that had shelived she would have become involved with theLeft Opposition (LO). The first wife of Josip Broz-Tito, Pelagea Denisova-Belusova, was a member of

the Trotskyist group and remained one until she waspurged by the Stalinist apparatus.37

Hermann Remmele



Ruth Fischer Larisa ReisnerVictor Serge


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Another Soviet writer with a heterodoxreputation, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), wrote inhis novella Dzhan with considerable insight on the

difficult situation facing the Soviet Central Asianpeoples; a Turkmen is its tragic hero. 38

The Soviet authorities sought to transformSoviet Central Asia into a display window formodernization of the Muslim East, a policy thatachieved some minor victories, perhaps bestsymbolized by the construction of a mass metrotransit system in Tashkent. In addition, from 1933 to1943, de facto Soviet control was extended toEastern Turkestan (called Xinjiang by the Chinese),

which has a Muslim majority. Eastern Turkestanisviewed this as a progressive development, sayingtoday that when they were under Sovietadministration they turned to (and even consideredthemselves part of) Europe, but with thereestablishment of Chinese authority during the

second world war they were forced to look towardBeijing and to accept wide-scale Han Chinesecolonization. Although tsarist and Soviet Russians

alike colonized the Soviet Muslim republics, theymade no such attempt in Eastern Turkestan.According to one authority on Soviet nationality policy, pro-Soviet Turkestanis, especially Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, took upon themselvesthe tasks usually reserved for Russian andUkrainian settlers.39

In 1924-25, the CI encountered its firstimportant ally from theArab world in the person ofAbd el-Krim (c. 1882-1963), the Berber leader of

resistance in the Moroccan Rif to Spanish andFrench imperialism. In 1927, the Soviet Union wasthe first government in the world to recognize thetotalitarian Wahhabi supporter Abd Al-Aziz IbnSaud as ruler of Hejaz.40 CI support for the Arabsin the Palestinian anti-Jewish riots of 1929 has been

Soviet Communism and Muslim Liberation Movements CIP


Uighurs of Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang)Left: a Bukharan Uzbek; right, an Afghan

Turkmen villagers Andre Platanov, author of Dzhan (1930)


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a subject of considerable historiological comment.CI commentary on the riots was, however,contradictory, with the Berlin Communist daily

Rote Fahnepraising theArabs and branding Jewishdefenders as fascists, while the CI weekly International Press Correspondence detailed thesuffering of the Jewish victims.41

The latter outcome was predictable in thatJewish settlers then comprised the overwhelmingmajority of Palestinian Communists. With the turnof the CI toward the Peoples Front strategy,heralded by a Russo-French military pact, after1935, the position of the Soviet Union became evenmore convoluted and self-contradictory. Theelection of the Front Populaire to power in Francein 1936, in which the French Communists (PCF)were represented, led the PCF to oppose Arabnationalism in the French North African

possessions. The first substantial modern Algerianrevolutionary group, ltoile Nord-Africaine (The

North African Star, hereinafter ltoile) was led byAhmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898-1974), whocooperated with the CI and PCF in the 1920s.

Messali Hadj and his movement became associatedwith the French Trotskyists after the PCF failed to

protest the suppression of theAlgerian organizationin 1937; the Trotskyist Fourth International was

proud to continue the line of the CI in mobilizingthe colonial masses.42 Ltoile was later known asthe Parti du Peuple Algrien (Party of the AlgerianPeople, or PPA), the Mouvement pour le Triomphedes Liberts Democratiques (Movement for theTriumph of Democratic Liberties, or MTLD), andthe Mouvement National Algrien (Algerian

National Movement, or MNA.)

Arabs in the Spanish Civil WarIndependently of CI action, and at the same time asthe PCF had turned against colonial protest, theEuropean and American left adopted an anti-Muslim viewpoint based on the involvement ofMoroccan troops in the Spanish counter-revolutionary movement led by Gen. FranciscoFranco in 1934-39. Franco had been a commanderof Moroccans in the Spanish Foreign Legionduring the 1920s, and led Moroccans into the


Muhammad Ibn 'Abd El-Krim El-Khattabi, leader of the Rif Berbers Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj, founder of the Mouvement National Algrien


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Asturias region of Spain to suppress the 1934proletarian commune briefly established there. Theintroduction of colonial forces into Asturias was

profoundly shocking to the Spanish left, in thatAsturias was the only Spanish region that had never

been conquered by Muslims. While the Spanishright claimed to defend the countrys traditionalChristian religiosity and culture, it did not hesitateto allow Moroccans to invade Asturias inliquidating a revolutionary uprising.

Employment of the contemptuous termmoros or Moors to refer to the Moroccansserving with the Spanish Nationalists became, andtoday remains, a staple of Western leftist discourse,as well as the Francoist narrative, on the Spanishconflict, which became an open war in 1936.Moroccan Islamic clerics (ulema) declared theSpanish struggle to be a jihad against atheistCommunism, in which martyrs would beguaranteed entry into Paradise. African volunteersfrom then-Spanish Guinea (now EquatorialGuinea), as well as Senegal and Mali in then-

French Soudan, also served in the Franco forces.But as many as 1,000 Arabs, Berbers,

Africans, and non-Soviet Asians, presumablyMuslim if only by birth, also fought in the Soviet-controlled International Brigades (IB) as well as inthe party and trade-union militias on theRepublican side in the Spanish war.43 The PCF,notwithstanding its bad record on Algeriandecolonization, opened recruiting offices for Spainin Oran, as well as in the French-controlledMoroccan cities of Casablanca and Agadir, and inTangier, then under international jurisdiction. ThePCF even pondered the organization of an ArabLegion to fight in Spain. But while some AlgerianArabs, along with Franco-Algerian Communists,

joined the IB, the attempt to create a substantialunit failed because of the superior appeal of ltoile

Nord-Africaine, members of which had attemptedunsuccessfully to get to Spain for enlistment in theRepublican army. Ltoile, through its periodical

Al-Umma, decided to emphasize propagandaagainst the Francoists, especially targeting the

Arabs in the Spanish Civil War CIP


Francos Moroccan troops enter the city of Oviedo, October 1934

First meeting of the Committee of (Anti-Fascist) Militias in Barcelona on

July 21, 1936. Of its members, the leading elements were six anarchists, plusthe Catalan Left and other republicans with five, the POUM with threerepresentatives, and Catalan peasants with one. In addition, four were socialist trade unionists and the Stalinist Communists had one officialdelegate


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Berbers of the Rif, rather than direct recruitment to

the Spanish Republican forces. Ltoileparticipated in a 1935 European Islamic conferencein Geneva, alongside the Syrian Druze emir,Islamic modernist, and occasional contributor toCommunist periodicals in French, Shakib Arslan(1869-1946)44, grandfather of the present-dayLebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt (b. 1949).

Arslan, who knew Spanish Muslim historywell, wrote, The fire of civil war in Spain has beenlit between the two big parties: the conservatives,

and, joined with them, priests, bishops, the greater part of army officers (sic)45, monarchists, andmoderate republicans (sic)46; and [against them],the workers, Communists, the poor, the peasantswho demand land, the extremist Republicans, thosein rebellion against the past.47 While hisknowledge of contemporary Spanish politics wasimperfect, Arslans Islamic modernism seems tohave naturally merged with the radicalism of theSpanish non-Muslim masses.

Egyptian Arabs were included in the BritishBattalion of the IB. Some hundreds of PalestinianArabs and Armenians (the latter, and perhaps someof the former, of Christian origin) joined thePalestinian Jewish majority in the Naftali BotwinCompany of the IB. Palestinian Arabs also servedin other sections of the IB, along with smallnumbers from other Arab lands. An Iraqi-American, N. Anwar, who had been a leadingfunctionary of the Syrian and Lebanese CP, fought

in the IB and joined the Spanish CP, later returningto the U.S. where he pursued his professional

career in engineering.48 In Spain, Communist andanarchist propagandists appealed to Moroccans, inthe Franco army as well as in the colony of SpanishMorocco, by describing the Islamic umma as ananti-imperialist force, much as CI supporters hadintimated at Baku in 1920.

The Palestinian Arab Communist NayatiSidki (1905-?), in Moscow when the Spanish war

began, was sent by the CI to Spain to conduct

propaganda directed at the Moroccans, andpreached, with visible success as reported by theSoviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, that thoseserving Franco were enemies of Islam. Sidki was,however, treated badly by the Spanish Communistleaders, who preferred to see all Muslims as

brethren of Francos Moroccan cohorts. Sidki leftSpain after realizing that only the Spanishanarchists who, even more than the CI, viewedthe umma as a universal area of rebellion against

oppression the anti-Stalinist Partit ObrerdUnificaci Marxista (POUM), in the militias ofwhich Orwell served, and the Catalan nationalistleft supported liberation of Spanish Morocco fromimperialist control. Sidki published a volume onthe Spanish war inArabic in Damascus in 1938, butwas excluded from the Syrian Communistmovement by its Stalinist leader, Khaled Bagdash(1912-95), who aggravated the humiliation byappropriating Sidkis book on Spain as if it were hisown work. Sidki was the first Arabic author tocomment significantly on the wartime murder of


International Brigaders arriving in Albacete Hashim al-Atasi, President of the National Bloc on a short visit to Genevaon April 8, 1936, to meet with the Syrian-Palestinian Congress. Front row(from left to right): Ihsan al-Jabiri, unknown, Hashim al-Atasi, Shakib

Arslan, Saadallaah al-Jabiri. Back row (from left to right): Dr. Abd alKader al-Jabiri, Urfan al-Jabiri and Awnallah al-Jabiri.


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Arabs in the Spanish Civil War CIP


Moroccan volunteers with the International Brigades

Juan Garcia Oliver, CNT militant Joaquin Maurin, Gen Sec., POUM

Andreu Nin, later co-founder of thePOUM, while in RussiaBuenaventura Durruti, CNT militant

1934, Puerto de Santa Maria prison: Generalitat government ministers: LlusCompanys, Joan Lluh Vallesc, Joan Comorera (later Soviet agent), MartBarrera, and Ventura Gassol, arrested after the insurrections of that year

Left, POUM leaders: Julin Gorkn (editor of the daily La Batalla, secondfrom left) and Andreu Nin (political secretary of the POUM, second from

right)


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the Andalusian poet Federico Garca Lorca, whosework bears a strong Islamic stamp. Sidki composednew memoirs in Arabic between 1958 and 1975.

Some 50 to 100 Albanian IB members,representing the only Muslim-majority nation inEurope, refused assignment to the South Slavicdetachments of the IB, which were commanded bySerbian officers, and the Albanians were includedin the Italian Garibaldi Battalion. Unfortunately,the Albanians were involved in the suppression ofthe 1937 anti-Stalinist demonstrations in Barcelonaknown as the May events,49 recorded by Orwell.In allowing themselves to be so used, the Albaniansmay have directed fire not only at Orwell but also

at an Algerian anarchist, Michenet Essaid BenAmar. Bosnian, Macedonian, and other Muslimsfrom Yugoslavia, including a handful of KosovarAlbanians, for their part, had no objection toserving in the South Slav ranks of the IB. SomeTurkish citizens, who may have been eitherMuslims, Sephardic Jews, or Greek or ArmenianChristians, also enlisted in the IB.50

Soviet Communism and Muslim Liberation

MovementsThe aforementioned Shakib Arslan later becameassociated with the notorious Haj Amin Al-Husseini, installed by the British, in usurpation ofthe rights of the local ulema, as mufti (chiefIslamic jurist) of Jerusalem, and eventuallyemployed as an agent of Hitlers Germany. Likeother prominent 20th century ethnic liberationmovements, Arab nationalism had two wings

between which it vacillated: one leaning toward

socialist anti-imperialism, the other toward the rivalimperialism of the Germans and otherrevisionist51 powers. For anticolonialistmovements in Latin America, the Middle East, andthe Far East the latter two areas including manyMuslims German and Japanese ambitions oftenappeared to represent, rather than fascism andimperialism, a major counterweight to Britain,France, and the Netherlands. The CI, whenengaging with such movements, at first seldom

intervened to support the dominance of the leftistfactions rather, Moscow preferred the

establishment of Communist Parties that woulddraw members from or cooperate with thenationalist milieux, in the belief that, givenhistorical development, the appeal of Communismwould replace that of narrow nationalism.

Thus, the CI did not actively seek to dividethe Irish, Macedonian, Catalan, Chinese, orIndochinese national movements (except, in thelatter cases, ordering their opposition toTrotskyists). Through much of the 1930s, while onone side of the globe the Chinese Communistssought an alliance with the Guomindang, on theother the KPJ cooperated with the Croatian rightist-nationalist Ustaa. By contrast, the Zionist,

Ukrainian, and other national movements withconstituencies inside the Soviet Union were targetsof extreme ideological enmity by the Sovietregime. A similar pattern is visible in the Muslimumma: Central Asian and, under Stalin, CaucasianMuslim resistance trends were subjected torepression, while the CI and the Soviet Communistleadership dealt benignly with the competing formsof Arab nationalism perhaps also because ofSoviet anti-Jewish ideology, disguised as an

aggravated anti-Zionism. The Soviet Unionsupported the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali,established by a military coup in Iraq, early in 1941

i.e. during the Hitler-Stalin pact.With the German invasion of Russia and

Soviet alliance with Britain, and then the U.S.,however, the Soviets began an accelerated programfor establishment and expansion of CommunistParties in the Arab world, with the immediate goalof countering Axis influence. In furtherance of

Soviet war aims, the French Resistance movementincluded many Arabs living in the metropole. Butsome of the new Arab Communist Parties werelargely made up of Sephardic or Italian Jews (thelatter living around the eastern Mediterranean)rather than Muslims. In Egypt, where a CommunistParty operated briefly in the 1920s, several furtherefforts to organize a CP were fostered by the CI inthe 1930s, yet the Soviet-controlled movement wasonly effectively created during and after the second

world war. Egypt also produced a significantTrotskyist movement.



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An Egyptian Trotskyist and surrealistgroup, Art et Libert (Art and Liberty), establishedin 1939, founded the first Arabic-language socialistnewspaper in Egypt, At-Tatawwur (Evolution).The leading personality in the group was a Copt,Georges Henein (1914-73), who remained an anti-Stalinist.52 Heneins Cairene radical milieuoriginally included the enigmatic Henri Curiel(1914-78), a Sephardic-Italian Jew who became a

prominent Egyptian Communist. Curiel was aclose relative and recruiter of the Soviet spy GeorgeBlake (b. 1922), who escaped from prison inBritain and reportedly still lives in Russia. Curieleventually served as the operational chief of Soviet

clandestine operations in Europe, residing in Paris,with special connections to the Arab countries andAfrica; he was prominent in supporting theAlgerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and theAfrican National Congress (ANC) in their periodsof illegality. After his cover was blown in theFrench conservative weekly Le Point in 1976,Curiel was assassinated in Paris. The case has never

been solved.53

Perhaps because of his Coptic, i.e. Christian

Orthodox, background, Henein, remarkablyenough, perceived that a Soviet-backed revival ofPan-Slavism in 1945 had reestablished anexpansionist nationalism supported by Orthodoxyand redolent of tsarism. A direct line may be drawn

between that 1945 development and the Sovietinvasion of Afghanistan in 1978, followed byatrocities against Balkan and Caucasian Muslims.This last phase began with the expulsion ofBulgarian Turks and compulsory Slavization of

indigenous Bulgarian Muslims in the 1980s, theincitement of the Armenians against Azerbaijanduring the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horrorssuffered by the Chechens, and the wars ofaggression against the Bosnian Muslims andMuslim-majority Kosova. In the latter cases,Russian antipathy to Balkan Muslims is visible asthis paper is completed, in the position of VladimirPutins regime supporting Serbia against MuslimBosnians and Kosovar independence.

Soviet activity in the Islamic umma duringand after the second world war was riven with

contradictions typical of an openly imperialist,rather than a social-revolutionary strategy. Thesedissonant elements included reinforcement of thevisible distinction between aggressive imperialismin the border nations, such as Iran,Afghanistan, andthe Muslim regions of the Caucasus and Balkans,and more cordial alliances with radical Arab statesand movements. From the Islamic viewpoint, theRussian borderlands, which suffered most fromSoviet interference, were countries in which Islamhad long overcome Christian power, and whichwere considered hereditary rivals or enemies ofSlavic Orthodox expansionism. By contrast,Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Arab

societies included large and often prosperousOrthodox Christian minorities, giving them acertain status as allies for Russian ambitions. Thismay be one of several paradoxical explanations, inaddition to that of a greater appeal offundamentalist Islam among Arab Muslims, for therelative success of Communism per se in the non-Arab components of the umma and its generalfailure among Arabs.

The proclamation of independence by

Israel in 1948 followed the decolonization of Syriaand (imperfectly) Lebanon, both former Frenchcolonies, and was succeeded by the Free Officerscoup of Gamal Abd Al-Nasr and his comrades inEgypt. The Soviet government and the CommunistParties had temporarily supported Israel as anopponent of British influence in the Middle East,

but the Soviets quickly decided that aid to theArabs was a more promising option. In addition,Zionist sentiment among Soviet Jews was

considered deeply threatening to Stalins regime.Blatantly anti-Jewish show trials were held afterthe second world war in Budapest (against LszlRajk [1909-49] et al)54 and Prague (vs. RudolfSlnsk [1901-52] et al). Venomous Judeophobiaon the pretext of anti-Zionism characterized SovietCommunist policy until the end of really existingsocialism, and post-Soviet Communist partiessuch as the CP of the Russian Federation (KPRF),headed by Gennady Zyuganov, have perpetuated

anti-Jewish rhetoric.Arab components of several Communist

Soviet Communism and Muslin Lineration Movements CIP



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factions in Israel gained a significant niche as political representatives of the Arab sector inIsraeli institutions. But in Israeli Jewish life,Communism also long persisted as a powerful

force. Communist Parties led by and recruitinglarge numbers of born Muslims burgeoned, duringthe second world war, in Iran (the Party of theMasses or Tudeh, founded in 1941, while thecountry was partitioned between the Soviet Unionand Britain) and Iraq (the Iraqi Communist Partywas originally established in 1934).

The Tudeh was a major factor in the socialagitation preceding the overthrow of MohammadMusadeq in Iran in 1953. It was banned by the

government of the Islamic Republic created by the1979 Revolution, and appears extremely weak,now mainly working outside the country. BecauseIran borders on Russia, and given the partition andimplantation of various pro-Soviet statelets onIranian territory (including Iranian Azerbaijan in1920-21 and 1941-46), as well as the role of thesecular and Islamic left in the KhomeiniRevolution, the history of Iranian Communism isextremely complex. At the commencement of the

Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Soviets wereviewed outside Iran as sympathetic to it. Comical

aspects of this emerged in Western leftist andrightist opinion; the former at first ascribed theleadership of the popular movement to the Tudeh,while the latter feared that the revolution wouldlead to Soviet control of Iranian and even Arabianenergy resources. Both proved wrong.

The Iraqi CP was a key supporter of theregime of Abd al-Qerim Qassem in Iraq from 1958to 1963. It was ferociously repressed by theBaathist governments that followed Qassemsoverthrow, and, in yet another Middle Eastern

paradox, the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam in2003 has led to its large-scale rebirth.

Elsewhere in the Muslim umma, the

Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), originatingwith the ISDV of Sneevliet, became the worldslargest CP out of power between the achievementof Indonesian independence in 1949 and the bloodyliquidation of the party, with hundreds of thousandsof its supporters killed, in 1965. Tan Malaka, itsmost remarkable figure, was murdered in 1949.The PKI has never been restored to legality and its

present or potential strength cannot be adequatelyassessed. It also now works mainly abroad.

A Communist Party of the Sudan wasfounded in 1946 and was a leading element in thecountrys military government under Jaafar Al-

Nimeiry, until the CP briefly overthrew the latter in1971; Al-Nimeiry was restored to rule, and the CPwas suppressed. Its current level of mass support,in the complicated environment of a country underthe failed shariah regime of Hassan al-Turabi,with considerable north-south and other regionalconflicts, is difficult to gauge.

In the 1950s, the three major figures in thenonaligned bloc of anti-colonialist statesrepresented two countries with overwhelmingMuslim majorities and one with a significantMuslim minority: Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasr ofEgypt, and Tito of Yugoslavia. Politicaldevelopment in the core Arab countries fell to

Nasr-style elites incapable of effecting significantsocial progress. Communist Parties continued their

activity in Syria and Lebanon, with varying prospects, and do so today. But fear of Nasrs


Left to right: Hassan el-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood,assassinated ib 1949; Henri Curiel, founder of the Egyptian CommunistParty, assassinated in 1978


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influence, especially after Egyptian aid proveddecisive in the liberation of Algeria, led to thecreation by Saudi Arabia of the Muslim World

League (MWL) in 1962, as a buffer against Nasristexpansion. The MWL united Saudi Wahhabism,the Ikhwan ul-Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood,and Pakistani jihadists, and much later wasimportant in the organization and financing of theanti-Russian Afghan mujahidin as well as theirsuccessors in Al-Qaida.

The Indonesian bloodbath of 1965temporarily ended the period of euphoria in theIslamic wing of the anti-colonialist movement,

coming, in the same year, between the overthrow ofAhmed Ben Bella, elected president of therevolutionary Algerian government, and thekidnapping and disappearance in France of MehdiBen Barka, a popular Moroccan leftist supported

by the Soviets.

Soviet Manipulation of Post-Colonial

RegimesNevertheless, the decline of Muslim revolutionary

enthusiasm was quickly followed by another phaseof Soviet manipulation, based on the expansion oftwo well-established tactics: support for Nasr andincitement against Israel. During the Khrushchevand early Brezhnev periods, the Soviet camp andthe countries friendly with or receiving substantialaid from the Soviet Union fell into three groups:

Peoples democracies (e.g. Bulgaria)were ruled by Communist cadres; National democracies on the road to

socialism (e.g. Egypt, where Sovieteconomic and military aid and advisers

were of major importance until Nasrsdeath), were governed by national

bourgeois forces; In countries struggling for nationalliberation from imperialism (including

Algeria, Guinea, and Mali, which areMuslim in their majority), a nationalbourgeoisie had yet to emerge.

In a clear understanding of thiscategorization, only two criteria were applied to allsuch countries: subordination to or pronouncedsympathy with Soviet international strategy, andthe erection of single-party states.

The former South Yemen had thedistinction of being the only Arab country to

become a fully-defined Soviet satellite, between

1970 and 1990, until the state was integrated withthe Yemen Arab Republic. The Yemeni SocialistParty was recognized by Moscow as a Marxist-Leninist cadre organization. South Yemen troopswere sent to Cuba for military training, and someutilized their experience in later joining jihadistcombat elsewhere. One of the most strikingnarratives about the lives of Arab mujahidin inAfghanistan and their introduction into the 1992-95Bosnian war is that of Al-Battaar Al-Yemeni, an

example promoted in the propaganda of thePalestinian-born Abdullah Azzam (1941-89),mentor of Osama bin Laden:

Al-Battaar was in the Communist army ofYemen and they sent him to Cuba to train intanks. He learnt the ins-and-outs of tanks untilhe knew nearly every thing about them. Whenhe returned to Yemen, he became a goodpracticing Muslim and, instead of returning tothe Communist Army, he went to Afghanistanand fought there for some time. After that he

returned to Yemen.

Soviet Communism and Muslin Lineration Movements CIP


11 May 1958, Khosrow Roozbeh,the leader of theintelligence branchof the MilitaryOrganization of the

Tudeh Party, wasexecuted by a firing

squad of the Shah of Iran, who hadestablished dictatorship through the1953 CIA-SIS-backed 28 Mordadcoup d'tat against the Musadeqgovernment. Refusing to beblindfolded, Roozbeh shouted to thefiring squad: "Long Live the TudehParty of Iran! Long LiveCommunism! Fire!"

Josip Broz Tito Gamal Abd Al-Nasr Sukarno


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When he heard about the Jihad inBosnia, he traveled there. He had theopportunity to go and he took it. In Bosnia, heset about training all the brothers about tanks.

He taught the brothers how to lie under amoving tank, in order to build their confidencewhilst dealing with the Serb tanks on foot. Hisultimate dream was to take a tank in the fightingas booty (ghaneema) and use it against theenemy. He wanted to be the first one to capturea tank for the Mujahidin the brothers caughta tank and they called him on the radio. He wasinjured in his hand at the start of the operationbut, with his hand bandaged... he did not goaway, nor did he rest but he went with his injury

back to the front line. While helping to removean injured brother from an enemy bunker, Allahtook him as shaheed[martyr for Islam] when amortar bomb exploded next to him.

One brother said, O al-Battaar! Wedo not deserve martyrdom. We are not goodenough to be shuhadaa [plural for martyrs].

While it is often claimed that Western support forthe Afghans fighting against Russian interventionafter 1979 enabled blowback with the emergence

of al-Qaida, this episode illustrates how Soviet penetration of the Muslim world had already produced a more direct effect.55 Anterior to theemergence of the Afghan mujahidin, Westernerswere wrong in believing that the Soviets would useIran to seize control of the Persian Gulf region;rather, sudden fear in Moscow at the radical-Islamist victory in Tehran contributed to the seriesof decisions in furtherance of a SovietizedAfghanistan, which resulted in the disintegration of

the Soviet Union.After the 1967 Israeli-Arab war the Soviet

Union reinforced its anti-Israel profile and becamea major sustainer of rejectionist Arab states andarmed movements such as the Palestine LiberationOrganization, Popular Front for the Liberation ofPalestine, etc. The Soviet government had alreadyextended support to the PLO at its organization in1964. All of the original Palestinian radical groupswere secularist or Marxist, with many led by

Christians rather than Muslims (e.g. GeorgesHabash [1926-2008, dead as this text was written],

Wadi Haddad [1927-78], and Nayef Hawatmeh [b.in the late 1930s], all from Orthodox Christianfamily backgrounds. Hamas, the IslamicResistance Movement derived from the Palestine

branch of the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), didnot emerge as a rival to the PLO and the para-statePalestinian Authority until the 1980s.

The global radicalization of the 1960sproduced a revival of the Turkish left as well asvarious Kurdish radical groups, but in neither casedid Soviet-controlled Communists assume a

prominent role, although Turkey fell into a periodof significant violence between its left and socialisttrends and the religious and nationalist right. A

competent historiography of this phenomenon isabsent in English. Turkish secularism continues toexercise a considerable influence in the countrys

political life, not least among Alevis, who both inTurkey itself and in the Turkish diaspora in Europeare markedly oriented toward the radical left.56 Inthe same region, Greek governments after 1974

participated in the Orthodox alliance with theSoviets by opposing U.S. influence in the easternMediterranean, but also assisted the Palestinians as

well as Kurdish radicals. Ex-Yugoslavia providedguerrilla training of Palestinians, while the formerCommunist regime in Romania did the same forthe Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

The narrative of Al-Battaar Al-Yemeniindicates the single most important fact about thelink between Communism and Islam in the 20thcentury: the complete collapse of Soviet policy,and even of the Soviet social system, following theadventure initiated in Kabul by Leonid Brezhnev.

This penultimate chapter in Soviet history began ata moment when, late in the day as it was for theLeninist system, Communism seemed solidlyestablished as a permanent element of the global

political landscape. If anything, the Russiansappeared to have tipped the worldwide balance offorces decisively to their advantage when theirVietnamese clients harried the U.S. and its alliesout of Southeast Asia. Yet at the same time theinternal crisis of the Soviet system advanced,

largely misunderstood in the West, through the1970s. The Russian Communists would soon be



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compelled to find an internal enemy that could be

manipulated to unify their people and an externaltarget against whom to mobilize their Slav subjects.The new foe was the same both within andwithout: Islam.

No sooner had they gained an impressiveapparent victory over the West in Indochina thanthe Communist ship ran aground on the shoals ofhistory. The year 1978 included three decisiveindicators of the future: the seizure of power inKabul by Nur Muhammad Taraki (1913-79), aliterary figure and leader of the Peoples

Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in April,the commencement of the final agony of theIranian monarchist regime with bloody repressionof student demonstrations in September, and theelection of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, to the Roman

papacy, in October. Each of the three countries inwhich these dramatic events were focussed

bordered the Soviet Union, and each had played aspecial role in Communist international politics.Further, each of these states saw events in 1978 that

were, or appeared, shockingly novel to the world.Afghanistan had long been considered a

zone in which Soviet and Western power competedfor influence, but was the first country to undergoan open Communist coup since the immediateaftermath of the second world war. Unlike Cubaand South Yemen, as well as the later Soviet andCuban satellites in Ethiopia, Guin-Bissau, Angola,Moambique, Grenada, and Nicaragua,Afghanistan under the PDPA attempted to leap

ahead of the usual progression of widening Sovietinfluence. Taraki sought to move from the typical

Soviet-defined position for a country like

Afghanistan, as struggling for national liberationfrom imperialism to a full-fledged peoplesdemocracy. This radical attitude would undermineMuscovite confidence in the rule of Taraki and hisclose comrade Hafizullah Amin (1929-79). Aminwrote incoherently but insightfully:

If we had waited to follow the same classpattern of working-class revolution through anational democratic bourgeoisie, then we wouldhave followed such a long and thorny road thatit would have required not only years but

centuries.57

As the same time, it is believed by some that theSoviets had found national liberation leadersimitating Nasr unreliable and had decided to returnto a policy of activist intervention by Leninist

parties.The Iranian exploits of the Tudeh in 1953

were then still well-remembered, but the IslamicRevolution completely transformed the global

political sensibility of the Muslim umma. Thereassertion of nationalism in Poland in 1956 hadinaugurated the long transition or de-Stalinization in the East European peoplesrepublics, delayed in the aftermath of the Tito splitin 1948 and suppression of the East Berlin laboruprising in 1953. And Wojtyla was the first non-Italian to be elected Pope since the 16th century.Moscow was therefore beset on its frontiers byunpredictable phenomena: the Marxist radicalism

of Taraki, who removed his Soviet-subsidized butneutral predecessor, Muhammad Daud Khan; the

Soviet Manipulation of Post-Colonial Regimes CIP


Mujahideen, Kunar province. 1985 PKK women guerrilla fighters, Kurdistan


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appearance of an incomprehensibly new ideologyin Iran, and the rebirth of a Poland that, a traditionalfoe of Russian power, was inspirited by theunexpected global importance granted it byWojtylas ascension to the throne of Peter.

The PDPA, which was less than 15 yearsold in 1978, was split between ethnic and classfactions: the Khalq or Masses tendency led byTaraki and HafizullahAmin, made up of rural, poorPashtuns, and the Parcham or Banner groupingunder Babrak Karmal (1929-96), associated withurbanized, elite speakers of Dari, a dialect of Farsi.Hafizullah Amin has been widely described as thereal power behind Taraki. Khalqi-Parchami rivalry

was so extreme that it often veered toward, andlater was expressed in, outright intraparty violence.The Khalqis, as illustrated by the previous citationfrom Hafizullah Amin, were notable in their zealfor social reorganization, and their immediatemeasures included adoption of the titleDemocratic Republic of Afghanistan, with astartling Communist-style red national flag,hostility to Islamic religiosity and customary habitsin one of the least-developed and most tribal

societies in the world, and recourse to brutalrepression, including executions. It is less

paradoxical than illustrative that the Stalinist PDPAof Taraki was more radical in its approach toAfghanistan in the late 1970s than the BolsheviksIlyin-Raskolnikov and Reisner had been insupportingAmanullah Khan during the great age ofLeninism. (Ilyin-Raskolnikov himself had becomea near-Trotskyist by 1937 and was probablyassassinated by NKVD agents in 1939 after his

dismissal from a post as Soviet ambassador toBulgaria.) The Taraki regime proved brief induration; in September 1979 Taraki wasoverthrown and killed by his fellow-Khalqi,Hafizullah Amin. But the Afghan peasants werealready deeply disaffected with the new regime,and the mujahidin had begun combat against theSoviet-style modernization of the country.

At the end of 1979, Hafizullah Amin waskilled in turn, as Russian troops marched into

Kabul and installed theParchami Karmal in power.Moscow appeared to have become especially

alarmed by events in Iran, where Khomeini hadbeen carried into the summits of authority after theflight of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Parchamis weresaid to be more moderate in their attitude towardIslam than their Khalqi victims, but the arrival ofKarmal was insufficient to calm the mujahidin,whose ranks had swelled as Afghan refugees

poured into Pakistan, where they were organizedand armed, soon with the generous support of theU.S. and Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was, in acertain sense, a parallel to Poland, in its capacity toresist Russian subjugation, although Afghan culturewas Islamic and, by comparison with that of thePoles, unworldly. Both the Poles and Afghans

were, nevertheless, imbued with sentiments ofineluctably intense religious duty in defying Soviet

power.For that reason alone, Afghanistan could

not be stabilized as a Soviet possession. Karmalhanded over power to Muhammad Najibullah(1947-96), a Parchami Pashtun, in 1986, but theSoviet order in Afghanistan was doomed. ThePDPA changed its name to the Party of the Nation(Hizb-i Watan) and Najibullah went even further

than Karmal in seeking to appease Islamicresistance to the Soviet-backed government. By1987, however, Mikhail Gorbachov had decided onthe withdrawal of Russian troops fromAfghanistan. Yet Russian military and financialassistance to Najibullah continued until 1990,fighting the Khalqis as well as the divided (andtherefore often weak) mujahidin. Najibullahsgovernment outlasted that of Gorbachov; the latteroversaw the Soviet state until its definitive

breakdown in autumn 1991, while Najibullah heldon to power for a half-year more, resigning in April1992. The revolutionary regime in Afghanistan,with its bloody, gangster-style quarrels andeventual replacement by the fundamentalistTaliban, represents the most ignominious andsqualid chapter in the history of Sovietexpansionism, and expresses the utter decadence ofthe Leninist system.

It is seldom noted that blowback from the

Soviet incursion into Afghanistan producedsomething new in Soviet history. It provoked



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Muslim opposition to Moscow in Soviet Muslimrepublics such as Uzbekistan, from which armyconscripts were sent toAfghanistan to fight, as wellas leading to interference with the Chechens andother oppressed Muslim nationalities of theCaucasus by Arab Afghans i.e., jihadistvolunteers from Arab countries that had joined theAfghan resistance. The Afghan war wrecked anycredibility the Soviets had gained in the umma,devastated the Soviet system, and convinced the

jihadists that, having destroyed the worlds secondleading political power, the combat capacity of theIslamic awakening could not be restricted.

Concluding ObservationsConcluding considerations have more to do withthe character of radical Islam than of Communism.With the collapse of Soviet Communism, many

academics, intellectuals, and political or mediafigures worldwide have alleged that the U.S.needs jihadism as a necessary enemy, fillingthe role formerly occupied by the Communistmovement. The argument is much more accuratewhen applied to Russian, post-Communist politics.

Similarly, some analysts interpret jihadism as aform of social protest, based in the economic

problems of the Muslim countries. Much Westerndiscussion of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhoodtypifies this attitude. In my view it is moreappropriate to describe the present-day convulsionsin the Muslim world as products of inevitablemodernization and development, and jihadistmovements as reactionary phenomena comparableto the Black Hundreds in tsarist Russia. I have

written at some length on Islamofascism as thebest construct for understanding jihadism.58

One movement that has embraced atheoretical and currently non-violent jihad, theHizb-ut-Tahrir (HuT) or Islamic Liberation Party,was founded by the Palestinian Taqiuddin Al-

Nabhani (1909-77), and is banned in somecountries, but has focused a serious effort in ex-Soviet Uzbekistan and its neighbors. HuT calls forestablishment of a global Islamic khilafah or

caliphate, in a manner that seems to promise ex-Soviet Muslims a new social system that would

restore or improve public benefits, including permanent employment, state-subsidizededucation, and free health care as provided underthe Soviet regime. Above all, a new khilafah wouldallegedly save the Muslims from the post-Sovietinsecurity of globalization. HuT employs arevolutionary vocabulary, organizes according tothe traditional conspiratorial cell system, and hasapparently attracted to its ranks some Westernleftists who became Muslim. It is perhaps the only

phenomenon to have effectively merged Islam andthe legacy of Communism, notwithstanding itsferocious denunciation of the former atheist regimein Russia.

In a parallel

%^$ islam and communism in the 20th century an historical survey by stephen suleyman schwartz *&^

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