Barry Rubin: The Arab Political Left and the Islamist Drive for Power

The Arab Political Left and the Islamist Drive for Power

By Barry Rubin

In the “good old days” of Stalinist Communism, the Left would have called the Islamists, “clerical fascists.” These forces, the party line would have surely explained, were attempts by the bourgeoisie to fool the masses, using religion to distract them from their “true interests” of having socialism.

Thus, there would have been no doubt that the Left would have opposed the Islamists, indeed might have been the most ferocious of their enemies. After all they have totally different views on social issues and they are also competing for state power.

True, there would have been some temptation to “use’ these forces. As a German Communist slogan once put it, “After Hitler, Us.” I was going to say that this idea didn’t work out so well for them, though Nazi rule in Germany was half-followed by the German Democratic Republic.

In today’s world, however, the Left has no such ambiguous stance as it would have in the days when Marxism-Leninism was the hegemonic doctrine and the USSR or China the idols they worshipped. This phenomenon of Western leftist enabling for Islamism has often been noticed in the West but has not been examined so much in the Middle East. One reason, of course, is that the Left is a far less significant force there.

Just as the “Arab Spring” has brought out Islamist and liberal forces, however, it has also revived the Arab Left.

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

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