The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?
I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
[Long post ahead]
Frankly, I was a bit confused at first at the responses to Hakim’s supposed misdeed. I saw practically nothing wrong with his post.
This is speaking as someone who considers themself “ex-muslim” and rarely practices any of the daily rituals of being muslim.
I have read through both the Hexbear thread and this one here on Lemmygrad. Firstly, I would like to say I agree with Aru’s comment on the other parallel thread running right now.
I’d like to address some of the contentions people have about the post. Hakim starts his post with this statement:
Not because they ARE muslims, as in, Islam was the only way in which they were able to carry out anti-colonial struggle, but rather they carry out the anti-colonial struggle through BEING muslim. Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.
It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education. It is the masjid that organizes the local community. It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.
To say that if Palestine was fully christian or any other “religion”, they would still reject colonization, misses the point. It doesn’t matter about some hypotheticals that you concoct in your head. That’s as useful as saying that if China was 100% Christian they would still be communist - what is the point in engaging in idealist hypotheticals? To simply compare it to Christianity, is idealism. Because you are not comparing the reality in which these cultural traditions, epistemologies, and beliefs operate. You are comparing one idea to another, utterly deaf to the material context behind it. The material reality of the ummah, the material reality of Palestine, means that Islam is the force in which anti-imperialist and anti-colonialism is carried out.
So yes, perhaps for many muslims, the Quran, the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) becomes the starting point of their political conciousness, and to somehow call it immature, backward, or a type of “false consciousness”, is to fall into the orientalist idealist tropes of the days of direct colonization.
Throughout the entire Islamic world we have seen numerous secular and communist organizations that directly collaborated with the colonizer, that never gained support from the muslim masses and that also had to face a visceral reactionary force funded by the West. To say that secular movements only failed in the Islamic world because they were being pitted against reactionary Western-funded movements ignores the fact that if these secular movements truly had the mandate of the people - truly did listen to the working masses, they would have succeeded in maintaining power in the first place.
To act like this analysis is somehow “idealism”, when it is actually idealism to ignore history and material conditions in favour of a dogmatic secular understanding of class warfare.
Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR? Why doesn’t anyone ever mention about the beacon of liberal modernity and secularism - France - in which if you ask anyone in the ummah what they think about it, they would vehemently reject associating with that Islamophobic “secular” state. Why is it immediately assumed that when someones says they want an Islamic country, it is immediately assumed they want a monoreligious populace with forced conversions on heretics and heathens? Why is it assumed when we say something is Islamic, it means that it cannot involve people of other faiths (or lack thereof)?
In my eyes, the answer is simple. It is because the Western left still carries the mental burden of colonization, of cultural genocide, and they project it onto the global south - onto the ummah.
Are we suppose to ignore the Islamic influence of for example Southeast Asian foreign policy, Arab nationalism, or North African decolonization? How about the Islamic Axis of Resistance pushing back against the Zionist Entity and other US imperial projects in West Asia? Islamic socialism and Islam has been, and continues to be, materially closer to anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and communism than Western Marxism could ever even dream about (that is - if they even recognize imperialism). Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.
Is it the “muh slems” that are idealistic, or is it the Western’s left misunderstanding of the “unity of opposites”? If you can only percieve reality in absolutes, in black-and-white, then “religion” is always “immaterial”; that means you will be unable to identify your friends from your enemies and it also means you will never understand Islam and the ummah.
Thank you
The first time I read this comment, I started to write a reply but then realized that I’m not totally sure what you mean in some places, and I figured it would be better to ask than just assume.
What do you have in mind with the notion of ‘entrenchment’ here?
How does this distinguish the masjid from superstructural institutions generally, like schools or mass media?
What does this mean? That the masjid is an employer? That it’s a marketplace? Or just that it carries out the functions of the state in Islamic societies?
To be clear here, ‘the’ ummah extends to everywhere Islam is believed or practiced? Or does it mean instead something more like ‘Muslim countries’?
To make sure I understand what you mean here, Is this a fair (equivalent) restatement or does it miss some things?
Yeh their post is so confused and unclear its difficult to even beging to parse and deconstruct it.