THE TRANSFORMATION OF MARXISM INTO ISLAMISM
MESOP : BRITISH NEW LEFT APPLAUDS THE CALIPHATE / AFTER the criminal Stalinism NOW the clinically ill version
Left Unity is the new party of the left in Britain (3000 members) / Final motions and amendments for Left Unity conference
Criticisms of the call for the Caliphate must be countered by knowledge and understanding. Painting it as inseparable from violence or empire building is a false association that lacks historical, political and intellectual credibility. The Caliphate represents an alternative political vision that is gathering support amongst Muslims across the Muslim world because, for its adherents, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, it stands for replacing the brutal regimes in which they live with a political system based on Islam that sets up an accountable executive, an organised judiciary, representative consultation, the rule of law and citizenship; such a state could only be a stabilising force for the region and the European Left has to acknowledge and accept the widespread call for a Caliphate among Muslims as valid and an authentic expression of their emancipatory, anti-imperialist aspirations.
The call for the Caliphate, however vague and malleable the concept is, reflects a strong internationalism among Muslims, reinforced and reproduced
for hundreds of millions each year by the Haj (Pilgrimage to Mecca), which breaks down and demotes any attachments to nation states of origin.
At bottom the caliphate means one government for all Muslims, in which non-Muslims who accept its authority are also welcome. The idea of the caliphate has evolved throughout history but its political content has remained vague. There is no ‘correct’ interpretation of the Caliphate; the lowest common denominator among its Muslim adherents is that a representative and deliberative body – the Shura – should appoint the Caliph, or political executive, and, in so doing, be mindful of the need to represent the peoples’ interests.
However, although the Islamic State’s announcement is the first serious attempt at re- establishing the caliphate since the institution was abolished in 1924 by the Turkish republic, it has divided rather than united Islamist groups and
the broader Muslim community and escalated the conflict and mistrust between Sunnis and Shiites. IS’ call for a Caliphate is partly tactical; a means to win Muslims all over the world to supporting, but IS’ jihad is also aimed at overturning the existing imperialist order and enabling the expansion of the boundaries of the caliphate to encompass all territory where Muslims live.
It has, however, backfired, dividing political Islamists, many of whom have made it clear that a Caliphate cannot be accomplished, as IS are purporting to, through blood, charges of apostasy and explosions’.
We see this as the latest tragic chapter in the complex and divided resistance of the peoples of the Middle East against the imperialist intervention of the western capitalist powers. Despite the atrocities it has carried out and its attack on
the Kurds, IS nevertheless represents an attempt
to break fundamentally with the structure of religiously and ethnically divided nation states imposed on the region by Britain and France at the end of the First World War. It now controls a swath of land from western Syria to western Iraq, running religious schools, bakeries and power plants, exporting oil, levying taxes and organising parades of tanks, and is fighting a war on several fronts. Its call for a Caliphate holds out to Middle Eastern Muslims the promise of a return to something more like the Ottoman Caliphate that preceded western domination and held sway over a vast, complex and diverse empire, home to many ethnicities and faiths. Unlike a continuation of the framework of western-imposed nation states, it therefore, theoretically, has progressive potential, although this is hard to see in the heat of a violent struggle and IS’s terror tactics against other strands within Islam. Even so, this, together with the west’s failure to confront Shi’a dominance in both Iraq and Syria, accounts for the mass support IS has gathered from among Sunnis in the region.
Final motions and amendments for Left Unity conference | Left Unity