The following interview was conducted via email in November 2005.

Mehdi Kia is a political activist and co-editor of Iran Bulletin-Middle East Forum (www.iran-bulletin.org). The journal is a political quarterly in defence of democracy and socialism in the Middle East. It was first published in 1993 under the name of Iran Bulletin and has since been expanded with a new editorial board.

Q: Islam as a religion holds within it a potent political force. Its message extends to the legal, economic and social organization of the Muslim community. Does this make it incompatible with secularism? Is secularism a deviation from the basic principles of Islam? Is it merely an idea imported from the West to which Islam can never relate? Or is there a place for a secular political order in Islamic countries?

A: Your question contains several assumptions that may not be entirely accurate. You talk of Islam as if it was one religion. Yet, like all religions, Islam is infinitely adaptable. It could be said that there are as many Islams as there are Muslims. Like all religions, Islam is modifiable. Even the interpretation of direct reference in the Quran can be, and has been, modified through the centuries. Can you find any respectable Islamic scholar that defends slavery? Yet slavery appears throughout the Quran as normal – with the enjoinder that the good Muslim will treat their slaves well. For a larger exposure of the flexibility of Islam see Mohammad Reza Shalguni’s series of articles on Islam and modernity (www.iran-bulletin.org).

The second assumption in your question relates to the political force of Islam. Undoubtedly Islam has been used as a banner throughout its entire history for various political movements. What must be made clear is that the various movements that have surfaced as “political Islam” (under such names as fundamentalist Islam, radical Islam, Islamism etc) are entirely new movements in response to the changes imposed by global capital over the last 30-40 years. It is the ravages of the neo-liberal globalisation agenda that have provoked the backlash. In the current ideological vacuum, in the absence of strong working class organisations (and with a feeble indigenous bourgeoisie), this vacuum has been filled by reactionary Islamist movements. There was nothing either preordained or inevitable in this. These movements – which have to be seen as predominantly social movements – have used various interpretations of Islam to galvanise their social base – which was predominantly those layers of society which felt the first blows of globalised capital: the unemployed and semi-employed urban poor, the traditional (“bazaar”) bourgeoisie and the traditional intellectuals. This issue is expounded in a series of articles by Ardeshir Mehrdad (Political Islam parts I-IV), which can be seen in the above site and are updated in Critique (Political Islam’s relation to capital and class. Critique Vol. 36-37 July 2005).

Therefore there is no reason to suppose that Islam is uniquely incompatible, or for that matter uniquely compatible, with secularism. Like all religions it is infinitely adaptable. The issue is who is using religion, and for what purpose?

Q: Islam preserved much of the patriarchal nature of pre-Islamic society. In marriage, divorce, inheritance and other social relations the Qur’an appears to legitimize the unequal treatment of women. Is it possible to separate Islam and patriarchy? Can Islam ever promote gender equality? Is it open to gender reforms? Is the West using an ethnocentric perspective when it directs criticism at the status of women in Islam?

A: The same arguments would hold for the issue of patriarchism. There is no doubt that Islamic societies are particularly blighted by partiarchism. However, it is worth noting that taking the case of family relations as an example, Muslims resemble the local cultural norms more than they resemble each other across different countries. Muslims in North India have more in common with their Hindu neighbours than fellow Muslims in South India (see Eric Hobsbawm, London review of Books 4 August 2005 Volume 27 No. 15) Then again you need to look at the various contradictions appearing in the Quran itself – so that different people may take different parts to make their case for a more or less male or female-friendly interpretation (see again Mohammad Reza Shalguni’s articles for examples).

The case may become more difficult in such issues as inheritance and jurisprudence – where more specific anti-women directives appear in the Quran. But even here scholars have used various ruses (such as expediency, secondary commandments etc) to frankly overturn the explicit words of the Quran. This has already been started in Iran by some very senior scholars. Even Khomeini explicitly stated that if it required Muslims to stop prayer (and other essential rites) to preserve Islamic government – it was permissible under secondary commandments (ahkame sanavieh).

Deep gender inequality does exist in Islamic societies, and there is no inherent reason to prevent us combating this. The essential element, however, is to separate religion and state. What so-called Islamic feminists are trying to do is to maintain a religious government and try to pretend that they can change religion to make it compatible with gender equality. They fall into the same fallacy as I expounded above. That is to confuse Islam as a religion with Islam as a political force. The former is theoretically reformable. The latter is an ultra-reactionary movement that is not so adaptable. Indeed female subjugation is a central tenet of the Islamist movement in all its different guises. It is a total mirage to put ones hopes on a reformist Islamism. You need to look no further than its current utter collapse in Iran. From a point of overwhelming influence it has fallen to utter dejection. The reason for this debacle is not hard to discern. The reformists were working within the framework of an Islamic government – which proved untenable.

Q: Islamic feminism advocates a re-reading of the Quran and the hadiths to find confirmation of gender equality. By confronting the traditional male interpretations of Islamic texts, it intends to demonstrate that patriarchal attitudes have distorted the principle of equality in Islam. But can feminist discourse be articulated within an Islamic framework? Is Islamic feminism in conflict with secular feminism? Is it more effective than secular feminism in the fight for the emancipation of women in Islamic countries?

A: I have partially answered this question above. Specifically, rather than viewing Islamic feminism as a religious reform movement we should regard it as a political movement that attempts to impose a female-friendly version of Islamism on political Islam. Thus it should be assessed in political terms not religious ones. By packaging essentially a political agenda in Islamic guise it obfuscates the issues faced by people living under an imposed neo-liberal globalisation project. Neo-liberal globalisation, with its inherent imposition of global destitution and global disenfranchisement, can only be countered by a world-wide movement for democracy and people’s sovereignty. The Islamist movement – and equally its feminist offshoot - by making religious allegiance central to its policies, splits this force along ideological, rather than class or democratic lines. Thus by splitting women into Islamic and non-Islamic it splits the feminist movement. This is how it also splits working class and other organisations along Muslim and non-Muslim lines. In Iran we had Muslim teachers’ trade unions set up against secular teachers’ trade unions etc. The consequences were devastating, allowing the Islamic government to split the democratic movement and destroy its secular section.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, the Islamists successfully launched “Muslim” women against their secular sisters and destroyed their organisations. Once this task was completed the Islamist women were completely absorbed into the state – where they remain to this date. There is no officially accepted independent women’s organisation in Iran today – Islamic or secular.

Thus in the global struggle against capital – the Islamic feminists, just like their “Islamic” counterparts in other participatory organisations, have split the anti-globalisation and democratic movements as well as class-based anti-capitalist movements. Indeed their wrath is more often than not directed against “secular” organisations rather than the imperialist enemy.

I will reiterate: Islamic feminism is a political movement whose aim (whether individuals within it recognise it or not) is to extend the life of political Islam. As such its project is exclusivist, and hence reactionary.

Q: In Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations?" we find the modern world defined by cultural conflicts, not ideological or economic ones. Seven or eight major civilizations are identified, but the confrontation between Islam and the West is placed centre stage. How can we interpret this culturalist approach to world politics? Is it an important thesis which describes a "new phase" in international relations? Or is it merely part of the attempt to find a new "Other" to justify US foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War?

A: I don’t know if you have actually read it. The intellectual content of this book, written by a Harvard professor, is truly pathetic. The book is no more than a slogan that is encapsulated in the title. The entire “argument” expounded in the book fails to add anything more. It is a wonderful mirror into the intellectual barrenness of the neo-conservative’s ideology. Huntington’s earlier anti-democratic book, The Third Wave, was also a bible for the neo-cons.

The fact that Huntington’s latest book has been taken up by the neo-cons as their ideological tome exposes the totally brazenly imperialistic nature of the neo-liberal globalisation project. This is a project based on neo-liberal imperialist policies backed up by naked force where necessary. The tragedy is to see so many former “leftists” acting as apologists for this shameless exercise in global greed and aggression. The “war against terrorism” has an equally totally facile intellectual base – a mere excuse to use force in the service of corporate capital.

Q: The intellectual history of political Islam is infused with the traditions of the Salafist or Wahhabi School and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the ideas of thinkers such as Abul A'la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb. But it is also framed by the political ideologies that inspired modern national liberation movements in the Third World, particularly Marxism-Leninism. Could it be that the political project is far more important than the religious one in defining the identity of Islamist groups? Is the religious message reduced to an instrument to articulate concerns over modern imperialism? Is this why Islamist groups receive considerable ideological support from left-wing thinkers in the West?

A: As I mentioned above political Islam is neither a continuation of previous Islamist movements, nor even a religious movement. It was a reactionary response to the neo-liberal globalisation project as it related to Islamic societies. Political Islam could not have succeeded in becoming a mass movement in the absence of two major preconditions. First: a class vacuum created by the fact that in these countries the native bourgeoisie was feeble and without roots while the working class was young and unorganised. Neither class could impose its class hegemony on the other. Second: the ideological vacuum. The native bourgeoisie was too feeble to provide a hegemonic ideology. This was best seen in the defeat of the various nationalistic ideologies that were so dominant in the 50s and 60s. Meanwhile the weakness and failure of the left locally and its demise at a global level meant that an alternative ideology could not take its place. It was into this vacuum that political Islam stepped.

The political project it proposes, however, is a backward looking and an intensely reactionary anti-imperialism. In contradiction to the widely held belief, the reason the Islamists got to power, or are poised to take power, is not because of too much modernisation, but conversely because of too little modernisation. It was the uprooting of vast numbers of peasants into cities, without being absorbed into production and the economy. It was the cancerous growth of shanty towns. It was the lack of housing and the most elementary facilities. What these societies needed, and still need, is a project of real modernisation that has the basic interests and needs of the vast majority in sight; modernisation for the majority by the majority. Despite some arguments to the contrary the Islamist movements are incapable of doing this, not least because they destroy the democratic and creative potentials of society (see Ardeshir Mehrdad and Yasamine Mather’s article in Critique Vol. 36-36).

You are right that some of these movements did also adopt Marxist and Leninist concepts. To the extent that they did so, or to put it another way, to the extent that they did not oppose communist and other working class organisations they remain progressive. The Iranian People’s Mujahedin in their early history is a good example. But their tragic metamorphosis to a leader-centred quasi-fascist organisation is a salutary warning of the trajectory such organisations can take, and so often do take. They are allies to progressive forces in so far as, and only while, they orient themselves in the direction of left movements.

Why the European and other left have been mesmerised by political Islam relates, more than anything, to the weakness of their own ideology. This is the same weakness that made them such an easy prey to Islamists when the latter got to power in Iran. A crude populism that equates any “anti-imperialist” posturing as progress is totally unable to come up with the strategy and tactics necessary to confront the neo-liberal globalisation project. This populism is unable to see that faced with an overwhelming majority of our world living on the edge of existence – either already in abject poverty or on the brink of pauperisation – only a global, democratic and inclusive mobilisation and organisation of the working class (which is more than just factory workers) can be truly anti-imperialist.

The Islamists are not anti-imperialists. Indeed they actively impede this process by splitting the working class, and every other social grouping, along ideological lines. This is what makes them reactionary. It is not surprising that most Islamist movements received financial and logistic help from imperialist powers until recently – and some still do. The left that cannot see this is unworthy of the name.

Q: Al-Qaeda strives to mobilise the entire Muslim community against what its members call the Crusader-Zionist alliance. Osama bin Laden urges Muslims to "ignore the minor differences among themselves" and fight the "greater enemy" occupying the Muslim land. Ayman al-Zawahiri calls on Muslims to unite against "a single enemy" and to "lead the Muslim nation toward jihad to liberate Palestine". To what extent has this strategy been successful?

A: By their very nature Islamist movements are inherently fragmentary. They are leader centred and are organised in a strict hierarchical structure. Moreover, their intense ideological makeup is an invitation to schisms. The fact that in opposition they may appear to work together should not hide this essential characteristic. They fragment the very moment they seem to have conquered power and overcome all opposition. You only have to see the myriad of splits among their compatriots in Iran – which happened even during the lifetime of a truly charismatic and powerful leader such as Khomeini.

The underlying reason for this fragility is multifold. Being leader centred, their organisation is top-down. Being rooted in ideology, the moment these organisations come to a decision point on any key issue they tend to split. We saw how at every major turning point the Islamic regime in Iran had to face, a number of policies led to an equal number of splits and purges. We saw it even with the Taliban when they faced policy-decision time.

I believe that in so far as the Islamists echo those slogans that are in the hearts of the people of the Middle East - the Palestinian issue, the colonial occupation of Iraq, US and other imperialist designs on west Asia and North Africa etc - they attract support among the “wretched of the Earth” (Fannon’s phrase). What is in question is the ability of political Islam to come up with a successful strategy to confront these. It seems to me that recourse to terrorism against civilians, to take one example, is a sign of failure not a recipe for success. Such a tactic is both immoral, and futile, and should be condemned unreservedly. It is also a dead end.

Q: On 7th July 2005, Europe realised that there are "home-grown radicals" within its boundaries. Racism, unemployment and lack of opportunities have created a new generation of angry, frustrated and alienated Muslims in this continent. Young Muslims have been further radicalised by the bloody war in Iraq, the result of which is that there is now a growing pool of Islamist militants in cities all over Europe. How is Europe to resolve this problem? Can there be such a thing as a European Muslim? Or a European Islam? Is Europe prepared to co-exist with Islam? Or is Islam a threat to the cultural identity of Europe?

A: At the expense of repeating myself some key points should be made. As you rightly point out the radicalism of immigrant youth (and they do not all have to be Muslim as we have seen over the last few days in France) comes from the utter hopelessness of their condition. Over the last 25 years we have seen the growth of “third world” conditions within the heart of the “first world”, another gift of neo-liberal globalisation. In these islands of deprivation, ethnic and religious minorities are often over represented. However, we should note that alienation in not unique to Muslim youth. While disasters usually bring people together (as we saw in the recent Tsunami) after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans we witnessed widespread looting and rape in poorer neighbourhoods. What better snapshot of social alienation!

For Muslims, there is also a long list of issues such as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, support for corrupt regimes, etc which affects them more directly. And since 9/11 Muslim youths have been specifically targeted by police and security forces. The issue of the ban on headscarves, though superficially part of the secularisation agenda, has to be viewed in this light. In today’s France this is another way of intimidating ethnic minorities. When we add to this mixture the failure of secular progressive forces to provide an alternative (organisational and ideological), the success of radical Islamist ideology becomes obvious.

One other factor tends to be ignored. The growth of superstition and rejection of rationalism are not confined to Muslims. Witness the growth of fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. Witness the growth of those who believe the creation theory as it appears in the bible (word for word) and reject Darwinism. Visit Boston where you can see the most prestigious scientific institution of the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cheek by jowl with an equally imposing Christian Science building. And witness a US president that speaks directly to “god”.

Advanced capitalism is quite comfortable with ignorance and superstition – nay it encourages it to divert attention from the ravages it is imposing on our planet. The entire public education system, even in advanced capitalist countries, has been diluted and downgraded in order to provide workers who do not ask questions. The radical youth of Europe, previously a sure recruit to the left and now drawn to the Islamists, are a product of this. Europe will only rid itself of its “Muslim issue” once we can create a participatory and truly emancipatory continent and world. Europe is in need of modernisation like everywhere else.

It is only through a radical reorganisation of power and ownership that social groups can maintain their identity and differences while remaining together. Only then will Islam, like any religion (or no religion) become a personal issue and not a political one. Otherwise the disenfranchised will lash out in anger – as they are doing in France at the time I am writing. This solution might sound utopian but I am afraid there are no short cuts – whatever our reformists might try to persuade us.