Muslim and Arab-American Voters Show Black People How to Exercise Political Power

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Black voters feel trapped in the duopoly but other groups are giving a master class in political courage. The Abandon Biden campaign shows the way.

Face the Nation Host Margaret Brennan: Thasin, you did change your mind on the president. Why?
Thasin: I was a champion for Joe Biden until October 7. I feel he disowned us, disenfranchised us, with his stance on Gaza.
Brennan: What do you mean by that?
Thasin: He’s not listening to us. We’re asking for a cease fire at this time. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Too many lives have been lost at this time. I was never a single issue voter and in fact I used to argue with people not to be single issue voters but for me this is a deal breaker. Way too many lives have been lost. 
Brennan: When you say “us” you’re Muslim, is that what you mean? You think the Muslim community here feels as you do?
Thasin: Yes. I think the vast majority of Muslims, Arab-Americans, progressives, I identify myself as a progressive, and many people I talk to in my circles are not going to be voting for Joe Biden.

- Michigan Voter Focus Group on CBS news program, Face the Nation

Historically, Black people in this country have allowed themselves to feel trapped by the racialized political duopoly. A feature of U.S. politics is to allow only two parties to play a decisive role in elections and for one of them to be designated as the white people’s party and the other as the Black party. 

Beginning after the civil war and until the 1960s, the democrats were the party of the segregated south, and thus the party for white people generally. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, became the de facto preference for Black people despite their willingness to shove Black interests under the bus when they felt the need to placate white voters. 

In 1872 Frederick Douglass spoke at the National Convention of the Colored People and famously spoke these words. “For colored men the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.” Douglass and other Black people counseled continued support for the republicans, even when they made deals to withdraw federal troops from the south, or refused to codify the Civil Rights Act of 1875 into law after the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional. 

Democrats were the party of the confederacy and thus could not be countenanced under any circumstance, even republican betrayals.

This dynamic played out for the next 100 years when the two teams made a switch which lasts until today. The last time a majority of white people supported a democrat in a presidential election was 1964. Ever since that time they have given a majority of their votes to republicans and Black people have done likewise with the democrats. 

Unfortunately the role that Black political action played in forcing democrat Lyndon Johnson to advocate for and sign the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Right Act of 1964 into law have been forgotten. Black people won legislative victory through their own efforts in creating a mass movement and a political crisis that brought about change. This era has been fetishized, without any understanding of its real importance and meaning. The truth has been turned on its head, and we are taught that Black people owe loyalty to democrats, when that party should reward loyalty with policies that Black people want to see enacted.

But every group in the country has not been cowed. Voters who identify as Muslims or who have Middle Eastern ancestry have put Joe Biden on notice that his aiding and abetting of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza will cost him politically. Michigan has the largest Arab-American community of any state and plays a pivotal role in presidential elections. Democrats take great care to mobilize voters in this key “swing” state. Hillary Clinton’s failure to do so in 2016 resulted in Donald Trump’s victory there by a small margin of 13,000 votes and he prevailed in the Electoral College when Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also neglected by the democrats and flipped to the republican column. 

Joe Biden won in Michigan in 2020 by a 154,000 vote margin in a state where 200,000 registered voters identify as Muslim and 300,000 claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa. Michigan is not the only state Biden won by a small margin thanks to Arab and Muslim voters. In Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin he also owed his victory in part to members of this community.

A group of Muslim leaders in swing states are rightly using their electoral power with the #AbandonBiden campaign. They are not so frightened of a Trump presidency that they have allowed themselves to vote for the man who through his proxy Israel has killed some 24,000 people in Gaza and despite phony claims of “working behind the scenes” shows no inclination to change policy and save lives.

It is true that these communities do not share Black people’s history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation. As such they have a greater willingness to show independence but there are lessons here for Black people in how to exercise their power.

Joe Biden and every democrat elected in the last 60 years owes his presidency to Black voters. The same is true of politicians in city halls, state legislatures, and in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Black people have political muscle but through a combination of misleadership chicanery and ignorance of the right lessons of history, act as supplicants instead of as political players.  

Arab-Americans have not forgotten Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, when citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen were barred from entering the country. Yet they do not act fearfully despite the fact that Trump is again a candidate for the office he once held and pledges to bring back the ban and even to deport people who protest U.S. policy towards Palestine.

Fortunately the #AbandonBiden campaign has shown no signs of letting up because its leadership knows how to get results and because they refuse to disrespect themselves and their people by rewarding a genocidaire with another term in the white house. How much could Black people achieve with similar determination?

In 2024 and beyond, the words “but Trump” should lose their power. How much has Biden done for Black people in the last three years? The covid era programs of small stimulus payments and the Child Tax Credit are over. Millions of people eligible for Medicaid and SNAP food benefits have been kicked off the rolls in many states with no intervention from the federal government. The pardon for federal marijuana convictions freed no one from jail. Police continue their killing spree with more than 1,300 victims in 2023. Mass incarceration continues as 1 million Black people are locked up, more than anywhere else in the world with the help of the most draconian sentences in the world. Of course Senator Joe Biden bragged about his role in the Clinton era Crime Bill which put so many Black people behind bars. There was good reason not to vote for him in 2020.

As it seems Black people have forgotten how to demonstrate political power, perhaps lessons from other groups are a means of regaining what has been lost. Black people can abandon Biden too, along with all of the democrats who owe their elected office to a group of people they routinely ignore or use for “dog whistle” politics appealing to white voters. 

Donald Trump is not the biggest enemy, he is just the loudest and the least refined. Abandoning Biden and his minions can be a reality which may produce some worthy result. Feeling trapped by the duopoly has been and continues to be a losing proposition.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents . You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter , Bluesky , and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley@blackagendareport.com

Afghanistan, Western Imperialism, and the Great Game of Smashing Countries

By John Pilger

Republished from Mint Press News.

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal  reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:

We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré  and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,

We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,

upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

On Afghanistan, he added this:

We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

Malcolm X: The Black Messiah

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Republished from the author’s blog.

“I now introduce to you, a man that would give his life for his people,” Benjamin 2X told the crowd in the Audubon Ballroom. That would be the last time 2X would have the honor to make such an introduction. Because on that day, February 21, 1965, in front of close to 500 people, including his pregnant wife and children, Malcolm X was shot 15 times.

On Saturday morning, February 27, 1965, in Harlem, New York, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was laid to rest. The public viewing of his body was attended by up to 30,000 mourners. Another 3,000 people made the pilgrimage to pay their respects at the Faith Temple Church of God to their “shining Black prince.”

J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to “neutralize,” a “true Black revolution” in the United States. By any means necessary, they were hellishly bent on preventing “the rise of a” Black “messiah.” Hoover and the FBI identified Malcolm X as the one who, “might have been such a ‘messiah.’”

James Baldwin said, when Malcolm talked, he articulated the long-denied pain and suffering for all of the Black people in the United States. That Malcolm corroborated the reality of Black folks, and by doing so, he affirmed that, “they really exist.”

Malcolm spoke directly to their soul.

The primary role of the Messiah, from an Old Testament perspective, was supposed to be one of a liberator, by militant means. He was to, “strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,” and, “with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked” (Isaiah 11:4). According to Sigmund Mowinckel, author of He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism, The Messiah always had, “political significance,” and, the Messiah’s mission is to restore his people, “and free them from their enemies.”

Malcolm and his message were messianic.

That made Malcolm X dangerous.

That made Malcolm X a revolutionary worthy of being neutralized in the eyes of Hoover and the FBI.

Malcolm saw the “Black Revolution,” as “controlled by God.”

Two days before his assassination, Malcolm said, “It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.” Hoover wanted to, prevent Malcolm the messianic from rising. Hoover felt the only thing that could save this country was the elimination of people like Malcolm. He feared Malcolm’s ability to, “unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” Hoover correctly labeled Malcolm as a “martyr of the movement,” but it seems that Hoover viewed martyrs as people who sacrificed life for the sake of principle.

Hoover viewed Malcolm X as dead.

As past tense.

Malcolm is a Muslim. When he was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom, he was gunned down fighting for the liberation of the oppressed. 15 bullets entered his body, but he did not die. Allah says in the Quran, “And say not of those slain in the way of Allah: ‘They are dead.’ Nay, they are living, though ye perceive it not.”

Malcolm X is alive.

He lived in the Black Panther Party (BPP).

Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the BPP said:

“The fact that Malcolm X had been murdered…drove Huey and I to a point to say that we were going to have to create an organization, reflective of what he was talking about. The fact that Malcolm said that by legal constitutional right, the 2nd Amendment, that every Black man, woman, and person in this country had a right to have a shotgun in their home to defend themselves from unjust attacks by racism was one point that influenced us very much. But what influenced us, even more, was Malcolm’s emphasis that we must have a political organization that felt most immediately with the housing, and the clothing, the shoes, and the food for the people.”

Dr. Huey P. Newton adds that “Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with…We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm…the Party is a living testament to his life and work.”

Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael went as far as to emphasize that, “we who have an ideology today use Malcolm X as our framework. Our basic framework. Our point of reference.”

Malcolm was there, but he saw him not.

Olympic medalist and human rights activist John Carlos was born and raised in Harlem. He would follow Malcolm X around the streets, picking his brain as a teen. Reflecting on the first time that he sat and listened to Malcolm speak, Carlos notes:

“I’m sitting this close to him to listen to him. And I can just feel the blood just run through my body, man. I couldn’t sit still. I was — just with excitement for me to be there and see somebody live that I could touch that was talking like that. Because the way he was talking is the way I was feeling because I’m seeing what’s happening in my community.”

Somberly, Carlos continues.

He thinks back to February 21, 1965.

He feels guilt.

Carlos, in some ways, blamed himself for Malcolm being shot 15 times at the Audubon. He believed that if he were there, he could have saved Malcolm from a fate that he had already foreseen. Carlos says:

“I was supposed to be there that Sunday. And we decided, me and some of the guys I was with, Machine and Metal Trades and the track team, that I was going to go try and get my driver’s license that Monday. And we took a road trip and drove up to Buffalo, New York — not Buffalo, but Bear Mountain. And we passed by West Point, and just as we passed by West Point, it came on the news that Malcolm X was shot. Man, we turned around. We shot back to the hospital. By the time we got back to the hospital, he was gone, and everybody was milling around.

And I can tell you, man, probably the better part of 40 years, not 40 years, but 20 years of my life, I felt real bad, felt like if I was in the Audubon Ballroom that day, I could have did something to prevent him from dying.”

Malcolm was alive and standing next to John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics as he raised his clenched Black fist in the air.

Malcolm X is alive in the hearts and minds of every one, whose evolution in life involved the reading of his autobiography. He is alive in every lashing out for liberation by Black folks uncompromisingly fighting tooth and nail against the interlocking systems of white supremacism and anti-Blackness.

He is alive because Allah says so.

He is alive because we won’t let Malcolm rot away.

Yes, on this day, in 1965, the physical shell of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was adorned in white linen, and placed into the ground, but from that day forward he lives everywhere.

Trump's Muslim Ban is a Declaration of Perpetual War

By Amir Khafagy

After months of anticipation, the Supreme Court has finally made their decision on Trump v. Hawaii, better known as the Muslim ban. In a close 5-4 ruling the court has ruled to uphold Trump's ban. The decision has outraged many, yet the decision was expected given the court's conservative majority. Plastered all over my Facebook feed I'm bombarded with invites to protests and rallies that will achieve nothing but satisfy the collective catharsis. Say No to Trump's Muslim Ban, the invites enthusiastically read. Thousands have already taken to the streets in nationwide days of action to show solidarity with Muslims and in defiance of the court's decision. During a rally in Foley Square in Manhattan, Democratic politicians and nonprofit leaders took to the stage to lambast Trump. New York City Council Member, Carlos Manchaca, addressed a crowd which seemed to be comprised of mostly white non-Muslims by stating to roaring applause that Trump "doesn't represent New York and American values."

As a Muslim and an Arab American, one would think I would be the first to jump on the bandwagon of resistance to such an abhorrent policy. You would also think that I would be grateful to see so many non-Muslim liberals pledging to stand up for me and other Muslims. However, I can't seem to stomach any of it. Maybe because those who are in opposition of the ban are opposed to it for the wrong reasons. Politicians like Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren pledge to defend Muslims in America, yet their support for military budgets that bomb, main, and kill Muslims abroad go unchallenged. Everyone is quick to react, but few are critically thinking. Trump's travel ban isn't a Muslim ban at all; it's a hit list. If it was truly a Muslim ban, meaning every majority-Muslim country was on the list, I would feel quite differently. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What is the case is the fact that every country on Trump's list is a country that the United States is currently at war with.

Let me first briefly explain what the travel ban is. On January 27, 2017, Trump signed the first travel ban, Executive Order 13769. In addition of blocking Syrian refugee's entry into the United States indefinitely and suspending U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, it also barred nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the country. Immediately after the executive order was announced, liberal activists around the country sprang into actions. Rallies were held at JFK airport to support the travelers who were being turned away at customs. Upwards of over 700 travelers were detained, and nearly 60,000 visas were revoked. After numerous legal challenges and the public outcry, the Trump admiration grudgingly revoked the order, replacing with a modified and rebranded Executive Order 13780. The new travel ban was a much more diversified list that restricts travel from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Trump called the new travel ban the "watered-down, politically-correct version." Again, activists protested the plan and again the administration modified the list, this time only removing Chad. Soon after the third version of the travel ban went into effect, the state of Hawaii sued the administration, arguing that the ban was racially and religiously discriminatory because it specifically targets Muslims.

Hawaii's argument isn't wrong, per se. As far as that's concerned, I do agree to an extent that the ban is a bigotry policy that is intended to pander to Trump's Islamophobic and racist base. What I don't agree with is the simplistic view of the travel ban that ignores the relationship between it and America's imperial foreign policy. For instance, none of America's middle eastern allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, made the list, even though all the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of those two countries. Those two oppressive and dictatorial regimes are firmly nestled in America's pocket by being the recipients of massive amounts of military aid. It's not just happenstance that the travel ban aligns with American overt or covert regime-change operations abroad. Are we quick to forget that America has been conducting drone strikes in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen? Or the fact that American boots are on the ground in those countries? Additionally, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran are subjected to crippling economic sanctions and their governments are being constantly undermined by American intelligence services. If anything, those countries should have a travel ban in place against us.

What really makes the so-called "Muslim ban" dangerous is that it taps into the fear of Muslims, an irrational fear that is so pervasive in our culture, to further legitimize American imperialism. It's worth noting that retired four-star general, Wesley Clark, has remarked that the State Department and Pentagon have planned since 2001 to "take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." With the exception of Lebanon and the removal of Sudan and Iraq, Trump's travel ban list is identical to the Pentagon's "kill list." So, it should be safe to assume that the travel ban has more to do with justifying war than it does with banning Muslims. Thus, the ban serves as a de facto declaration of perpetual war, sanctioned by the highest court of the land. After all, if we aren't afraid of Muslims, how can we be persuaded to fight them indefinitely?

Most of the criticism of the ban from Democrats is mute when it comes to attacking America's foreign policy. It focuses on the politics of identity rather than the politics of the reality. The Democrats want us to focus our outrage on Trump and the racist Republicans instead of understanding that the Democrats are just as complicit in their bipartisan support for the military industrial complex. Just last year, Trump signed into law a whopping $700-billion military budget with overwhelming, bipartisan support. Interestingly enough, the budget stipulated increased military spending for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The Democrats have no problem bombing Muslims, they only take issue with banning them.

Which reminds me, this whole paternal obsession with refugees is also misguided. During one of the protests I attended, I noticed a woman holding up a sign that read, "We Love Refugees." During the rally, another politician stood at the podium and declared, "We welcome the refugees fleeing their war-torn countries." Maybe it's just me, but I found this whole love affair with refugees to be quite morbid. I couldn't help but think if we weren't busy bombing and destabilizing their countries, there wouldn't be a refugee crisis in the first place. But, of course, no one made mention of that. As always, liberals in attendance were quick to diagnose the symptom but failed to acknowledge the disease. In this case, the disease is, as Martin Luther King, Hr. put it so eloquently so many years ago, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."

Who's Afraid of Mazdak? Prophetic Egalitarianism, Islamism, and Socialism

By Derek Ide

The year was 1974. Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) had liberated their country from the French occupying forces and the pieds noirs (French settlers) only twelve years prior. Under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-5) and then Houari Boumédiène (1965-78), Algeria underwent a series of state-building initiatives immediately following independence. The Algerian leadership operated within the parameters of a loosely defined "socialism" that became the organizing ethos under which they constructed the newly independent state.

Algeria was still in the midst of its "socialist" transformation when, a year earlier in 1973, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat (1970-81), embarked upon his neoliberal Infitah ("Opening") program. This nascent economic program significantly augmented Western capitalist institutions control over Egypt and would eventually overhaul the "Arab Socialism" that had been arduously built from the top-down by his predecessor, the pan-Arab nationalist hero Gamal abd Al-Nasser (1954-70). To deal with the remnants of the Nasserist and Communist left in Egypt, Sadat slowly released many members of the Ikhwaan (Muslim Brothers) from prison. While they had been locked up under Nasser, Sadat viewed the Islamists, including al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), as a counterweight to the still active Egyptian left, especially on university campuses. Violence against the left was often encouraged, and the Islamists eventually came to dominate many university settings.[1]

While the Islamists engaged in violence against the left in Egypt on behalf of the state, the Islamists of the Maghrib launched a new ideological war against the "socialist" states in North Africa. In 1974 Abdellatif al-Soltani published what historian Benjamin Stora called the "first manifesto of the Islamist movement in Algeria." This "virulent critique" of the "Socialism of the Algerian leaders" invoked the name of none other than the 6th century Zoroastrian prophet and Iranian reformer Mazdak. Al-Soltani's polemic was titled "Mazdakism is the Origin of Socialism" [2] and it denounced the moral decay of the "destructive principles imported from abroad." All political action must emanate from "within the framework of the party of God, as opposed to the party of Satan," it proclaimed, implicating that the "socialist" policies of the Algerian state as deriving from the latter. Al-Soltani continued that there must be a "single state with a single leader, founded on Muslim principles."[3] For the Islamists like al-Soltani, socialism was something foreign, a contaminant that could not be reconciled with the all-encompassing totality that was Islam.

Yet, the Algerian state during its "socialist" stage was far from secular in any sense of the word. Even at the peak of these state-building and industrialization exercises, the Islamic lexicon was dominant and the state was heavily adorned in religious garb: Islam was the official state religion, no future law could ever "target the state religion," jumaa became the official day of rest, gambling and alcohol sales to Muslims were illegal, Muslims couldn't raise pigs, the president had to be a Muslim, the amount of masajid more than doubled (2,200 to 5,829) from 1966 to 1980, and government sponsored seminars on Islamic thought took place annually.[4] Thus, critiques of the Algerian state on the basis of any perceived secularism were relatively desiccated. Instead, the primary enemy for the Islamists was the socialist model of development; their issue was with "socialism" in any form or degree, not with the professed religiosity of the state. Not only was Marxism an "imported" ideology foreign to Islam, socialism was also an ideological descendent of Mazdakism, a dangerous heresy against God that any good Islamist ought to struggle against.

But who was Mazdak, and why was this pre-Islamic Iranian prophet's name being pejoratively drug into Islamist political discourse in 20th century Algeria? Mazdak was a Zoroastrian prophet who lived and preached during early 6th century. Although details of his life are tenuous at best, a few tenants of his ideology and religious teachings have been established. Mazdak claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda, the monotheistic god of Zoroastrianism. However, Mazdak's Zoroastrianism was an egalitarian rejection of the mainstream clerical establishment and most of his teachings were considered heresy by the Zoroastrian clergy. A significant element of Mazdak's religious thought focused on economic egalitarianism, including an emphasis on developing communal property and community work where all people benefited. Although Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian Mobad (priest), his teachings were radically anti-clerical in the fact that they accused the mainstream Zoroastrian clergy of oppressing the Persian population and causing poverty through excessive accumulation.

Mazdak's socially conservative critics accused him of extending "communal property" to the point of "sharing wives" and "free love." Despite these allegations, Mazdak's real crime was his economic message. It was his radical egalitarianism that caused him to become a target of the state. Zoroastrian scholar M.N. Dhalla articulated the core teachings of Mazdakism:

"The account of Mazdak's system is very meagre; but it is known that he accounted Jealousy, Wrath, and Greed as the three main causes of all evil in the world. Everyone, according to Mazdak's teachings, should be given equal opportunity and equal share of the enjoyment of the earthly possessions of God. So it was originally ordained by God, but that natural order has been upset by the aggressive strong for their own self-aggran­dizement. Society should therefore return to that original ideal state. These revolutionary teachings thrilled for a time Iran, and exercised a powerful fascination on the masses. The crisis was brought to a head when, far from taking any initiative to stamp out the heresy, the king encouraged it, and finally embraced it. His son, Prince Noshirvan, summoned the Dasturs and Mobads to consider the situation. It was certain that the cult would spread and the young prince adopted severe measures to suppress it, lest it should menace the public peace. The clergy who viewed the new heresy with great alarm, advised rigorous measures to extirpate the threatening creed. Mazdak did not live long to preach his doctrine, for the prince arranged a banquet for him and his followers and put them all to the sword in A.D. 528."[5]

Thus Mazdak and his followers were executed by the state and the religious establishment for the "excitement" they encouraged amongst the Iranian masses. A variety of accounts of Mazdak's death show the gruesome hatred ruling elites harbored for Mazdak. One narration suggests that Mazdak was presented with the spectacle of a "human garden" by his executors when three thousand of his followers were buried alive with their feet sticking from the ground. According to this account Mazdak himself was then hanged upside down and shot with arrows. Other stories of his execution employ equally morbid methods of torture.

Overtime Mazdak and "Mazdakism" became a common pejorative utilized by religious scholars, both Zoroastrian and Islamic, to denigrate any radically egalitarian religious philosophies within their respective traditions. While medieval Muslim historiography often condemned the "socialist" aspects of Mazdakism, this critique was carried over effectively into the 20th century, and not just by way of al-Soltani and the Algerian Islamists. As early as 1919 the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Mohammed Bakheet, was vehemently condemning Mazdakism as a predecessor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bakheet wrote that the communists in Russia represented an "ancient 'way' and it is the creed of a Persian hypocrite named Zoroaster." [6] But this "ancient way" was only spread to the masses by a "man from Mazria called Mazdaq" who "taught communism of property and of persons, and put it in their mind that this, although it might not be from religion, was at least honorable in the doing." Mazdak's "heresy" furthermore articulated the idea that "God furnished the means of living to be divided equally among the people… [so] they decided to take from the rich and give to the poor… [and] the masses seized this opportunity wholeheartedly with Mazdaq and their followers aiding them in all their views." After condoning the slaughter of Mazdak and his followers, the Grand Mufti goes on to explain that "Islam was introduced and swept this false way aside." Furthermore, Bakheet proclaimed, God himself had "undertook the distribution of the means of living among His creatures by saying 'We divided up their livelihood among them' and 'God gives the livelihood to whom He wishes from among His servants,' and so on." Thus God had ordained prodigious inequality, and it was no place for mere humans to challenge God's will in this regard. Bakheet furthers his critique of the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that their "way" is:

"…one which destroys all Divine laws… it legalizes blood-shedding, allows trespass upon the property of others, treachery, lies, and rape… demolishes human society, destroyed the order of the world, leads to apostasy from religion, threatens the whole world with horrible distress and bitter troubles, and instigates the lower classes against all systems founded upon reason, morals, and virtue.

Accordingly, every true Moslem ought to avoid such people and their misguided views and false doctrines and deeds, because they are undoubtedly apostates." [7]

Indeed, it is this historical memory that al-Soltani and other Islamists drew upon in 1974 to validate their "Socialism as Mazdakism" critique of the Algerian state.

It is no wonder then that the United States and other imperialist powers often viewed the Islamists as appropriate vehicles through which they could combat pan-Arab nationalism and left-wing movements in the Middle East. At nearly every turn the Islamists presented themselves as enemies of left-wing and progressive movements and as such could be readily absorbed into the larger imperialist framework. When the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) finally took power in Algeria in the 1990s, they hastened the privatization of the state sector and the dismantling of any remnants of the socialist project. But examples of the Islamist movement serving the interests of imperialism go far beyond Algeria. Islamists of the Maghrib undermined the legitimacy of anti-imperialist states like Libya and Syria. Egyptian leaders used the Ikhwaan to undermine the pan-Arab and nationalist left. While the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its second largest party the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), engaged in militant guerrilla war against Israel, Palestinian segments attached to the Egyptian Muslim brothers (those that would eventually become Hamas) refused to fight for decades. Instead they opted to try to "Islamicize" Palestinian society before engaging in the struggle and focused on developing enough cadre to position themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian national liberation movement. During the events of "Black September," the Jordanian Muslim Brothers sided with the Hashemite monarchy, originally installed by the British, in its brutal repression against and expulsion of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Most explicitly, the "brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" (as they were infamously eulogized in the Rambo film) worked in tandem with the United States to overthrow the revolutionary communist government of Afghanistan established in 1978. Thus, wherever the modern incarnation of "Mazdakism" needed to be undermined, the Islamists were there to do it.

Not all Islamic theology has been predicated upon disdain for radically egalitarian messages, however. For some Mazdak was even a religious figure that could be rehabilitated within the framework of a sort of "Islamic liberation theology," one shares some characteristics with its Catholic counterpart in Latin America. For instance, as Shireen Hunter notes the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati "believed the Iranian mind has always been attracted to ideas of social activism for the sake of justice." Shariati, who spiritualized Marxist notions of class conflict and social struggle within the lexicon of Shia Islam, appeared to have held an interest in Mazdak himself.[8] Shariati brilliantly satirized the arguments put forward by the class of religious elites, such as the Grand Mufti quoted above, who perpetually told the poor to be content with their lot in life.

"Have patience, my religious brother. Leave the world to those who are of it. Let hunger be the capital for the pardon of your sins. Forebear the hell of life for the rewards of paradise in the Hereafter. If you only knew the reward of people who tolerate oppression and poverty in this world! Keep your stomach empty of food, O brother, in order to see the light of wisdom in it. What is the remedy? Whatever befalls us. The pen of destiny has written on our foreheads from before: The prosperous are prosperous from their mother's womb and the wretched are wretched from their mother's womb. Every protest is a protest against the Will of God. Give thanks for His giving or non-giving. Let the deeds of everyone be accounted for on the Day of Reckoning. Be patient with oppression and give thanks for poverty. Do not breathe a word so that you do not lose the reward of the patient in the Hereafter. Release your body so as not to require clothes! Do not forget that the protest of a creature is protest against the Creator. The accounting of Truth and justice is the work of God, not the masses. In death, not in life. Do not pass judgment for the Judge of the judgment is God. Do not be shamed on the Day of Resurrection when you see that God, the Merciful, the Compassionate forgives the oppressor who you had not forgiven in this world. Everyone is responsible for his own deeds." [9]

Thus, for Shariati these views that condemn the poor to a life of misery were mere religious facades intended to placate the population and perpetuate economic inequality. The religious leaders who tell the masses to wait for their pie in the sky and dare not shake the foundations of social inequality while on Earth were the real scoundrels.

In stark contradistinction to the Sunni Islamists who condemned "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati laid forth his revolutionary and radically egalitarian theology in the quintessential work The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel. There Shariati posited that "History represents an unbroken flow of events that, like man himself, is dominated by a dialectical contradiction, a constant warfare between two hostile and contradictory elements that began with the creation of humanity and has been waged at all places and at all times, and the sum total of which constitutes history." This "contradiction" began with the origin of human history, the struggle between Cain and Abel. Abel, as the manifestation of pastoralism, represents a sort of "primitive communism" where accumulation is impossible. Alternatively, Cain is a reflection of agricultural modes of production and represents the first schism between social classes in human society. Thus:

"In my opinion, the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain represents a great development, a sudden swerve in the course of history, the most important event to have occurred in all human life. It interprets and explains that event in a most profound fashion scientifically, sociologically, and with reference to class. The story concerns the end of primitive communism, the disappearance of man's original system of equality and brotherhood, expressed in the hunting and fishing system of productivity (equated with Abel), and its replacement by agricultural production, the creation of private ownership, the formation of the first class society, the system of discrimination and exploitation, the worship of wealth and lack of true faith, the beginning of enmity, rivalry, greed, plunder, slavery and fratricide (equated with Cain). The death of Abel and the survival of Cain are objective, historical realities, and the fact that henceforth religion, life, economy, government and the fate of men were all in the hands of Cain represents a realistic, critical and progressive analysis of what happened…

The wing represented by Abel is that of the subject and the oppressed; i.e., the people, those who throughout history have been slaughtered and enslaved by the system of Cain, the system of private ownership which has gained ascendancy over human society. The war between Cain and Abel is the permanent war of history which has been waged by every generation. The banner of Cain has always been held high by the ruling classes, and the desire to avenge the blood of Abel has been inherited by succeed­ing generations of his descendants‑the subjected people who have fought for justice, freedom and true faith in a struggle that has continued, one way or another, in every age. The weapon of Cain has been religion, and the weapon of Abel has also been religion…

This inevitable revolution of the future will be the culmina­tion of the dialectical contradiction that began with the battle of Cain and Abel and has continued to exist in all human societies, between the ruler and the ruled. The inevitable outcome of history will be the triumph of justice, equity and truth.

It is the responsibility of every individual in every age to determine his stance in the constant struggle between the two wings we have described, and not to remain a spectator. While believing in a certain form of historical determinism, we believe also in the freedom of the individual and his human responsi­bility, which lie at the very heart of the process of historical determinism. We do not see any contradiction between the two, because history advances on the basis of a universal and scientif­ically demonstrable process of determinism, but "I" as an individual human being must choose whether to move forward with history and accelerate its determined course with the force of knowledge and science, or to stand with ignorance, egoism, opportunism in the face of history, and be crushed."[10]

Whereas Bakheet condemned Mazdak for inciting revolution amongst the masses and Al-Soltani issued his invective of "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati invites the revolutionary and egalitarian struggle. Far too many Islamists have lent their services to the "system of Cain" contra the socialist and left-wing "system of Abel." Naturally, Mazdak was a manifestation of the latter. It is imperative for the future of humanity that we follow in the footsteps of Mazdak and Shariati's Abel, not the oppressive forces of Cain and their religious interlocutors.

Notes

[1] See Hossam El-Hamalawy, MERIP, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/comrades-brothers

[2] Alternatively translated as "Socialism is the Descendent of Mazdakism."

[3] See Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830-2000: A Short History, 171-2.

[4] Stora, 171.

[5] M.N. Dhalla, History of Zoroastrianism, http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history5.htm

[6] See Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Sa'id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988, 164.

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

[8] Shireen Hunter, Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, 54.

[9] See Ali Shariati, Religion vs. Religion.

[10] Ali Shariati, The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel.