A cynical alliance: Islamism and Britain's left

The veteran London-based human rights activist Peter Tatchell often cuts a lonely figure on the pro-Palestine marches that have snaked through the city’s streets repeatedly since the current conflict began in Gaza. Tatchell’s placards condemn Israeli military action but also attack Hamas and Hezbollah over human rights abuses. Many on the political Left in Britain today do not want to hear this.

On recent demonstrations, Tatchell has highlighted the case of Odai al-Rubai, a 22-year-old beaten for hours with a metal bar by Hamas, after which his broken body was dragged through the streets as a warning to others. Tatchell also speaks out against Hezbollah and the Iranian regime as totalitarian Islamists.

What Tatchell is exposing to public view is a cynical alliance that has been forged between some on the western political Left and global Islamism. To Tatchell, it’s an unprincipled pact:

“Sadly, some on the left prioritise the fight against US imperialism over the human rights of people in the Middle East. They support reactionary Islamists, like Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, even though they are antisemitic, misogynist and homophobic dictatorships that oppress their own people. These leftists would never tolerate such bigotry and tyranny in the West. Why do they think it is okay for Middle Easterners? It's racist double standards.”

So why did the Left get into bed with Islamism? This curious relationship got underway in the 1990s as some Marxists and socialists concluded that the “white working class” in Europe and America lacked sufficient revolutionary potential. They looked to Muslims, often regarded romantically as a homogenous bloc, as the future of the movement for radical change.

A very revealing essay was published in 1994 by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a small Trotskyist group in the UK that exerts an influence far beyond its numbers. Titled The Prophet and the Proletariat, it argued that the Left had to stop regarding Islamists as Middle Eastern reactionaries and fascists, instead join with them as allies in the fight against western imperialism.

Even though Harman was eager to court the Islamists, it was impossible to ignore the fact that this ideology was created to combat both western capitalist and communist influence in the Middle East. Harman urged his comrades to pursue “a careful course through the contradictions of Islamism”.

Marxists and socialists, he wrote, should align with Islamists on anti-imperialist and anti-racist campaigns in countries like France and Britain, which is exactly what has happened since. Harman then added this rather Machiavellian statement: “Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be, ‘With the Islamists sometimes, with the state never’.”

What to make of this? Sir John Jenkins has enjoyed a distinguished 45-year record in British diplomacy having been an ambassador to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, as well as consul-general in Jerusalem, and director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). In 2021, he wrote a detailed analysis of this “red-green alliance” titled Islamism and the Left, for Policy Exchange.

Speaking to The Beiruter, he explained that the Left’s flirtation with Islamism has been both tactical and ideological. From a tactical perspective, the Left imagines they can use Islamists then discard them once they had outlived their usefulness.

Ideologically, he blames post-modern identity politics. “The minute anyone enters a convincing case for membership of the victimhood Olympics; he or she is welcomed with open arms.” Another factor is “submerged but persistent Orientalism” where western left-wingers shut down their critical faculties and blindly accept Islamists as fellow revolutionaries.

“The Left seem to think that when Islamists talk of God and the jahiliyyah, they are simply talking about the sort of freedom Marx and Engels promised everyone after the inevitable triumph of the proletariat - with added identitarianism. But Islamists reject entirely the legitimacy of any system not based on Quranic revelation. You can’t fit Marx, Engels, Lenin, Benjamin, Adorno, Gramsci, Sartre etc into this framework.  But they’re going to find this out too late.”

If some on the Left still felt uneasy about this proposed political marriage, Harman assured them that “as well as defending Islamists against the state we will also be involved in defending women, gays, Berbers, or Copts against some Islamists”. But there’s been a strong feeling, since these words were written, that human rights and equality have taken a distant second place to anti-imperialism

Some on the Left think this whole debate has taken grains of truth and distorted them into a “sweeping paradigm”. That is the view of Dr Jonathan Galton who was briefly involved in Your Party, a proposed left-wing alternative to the governing Labour Party that was bedevilled by arguments between socially conservative Muslims and more secular oriented socialists. Though as Galton points out the two leading figures in that debate were both Muslims.

Now in the Green Party, which has made significant inroads into Labour heartlands in recent elections, he regards “Islamo-Leftism”, as he terms it, “a caricature, rather than an outright fabrication”. Put another way, Muslims are being turned into bogeymen to scare people away from left-wing causes.

“It helps to think of it as part of a long lineage of caricatures that pairs 'the left' with a threatening outside force. In the mid-20th century it was the Soviets, in the early 20th century it was Jews (as in the 'Judaeo-Bolshevism' trope). Now Muslims or 'Islamists' are the threatening outside force par excellence that can be invoked to discredit leftwing politics (and, ironically, Jews have become the partially accepted insiders perceived as under threat from Islamo-Leftism).”

Things have undoubtedly changed since the early 1980s when Britain’s political Left condemned the Khomeini regime in Iran as undemocratic and reactionary. Now, you’re very likely to see Iranian flags and organisations with links to the regime on pro-Palestine marches in London.

Also present is the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), founded in 2001, bringing SWP activists, other socialists, and Islamist groups under the same roof. In the early 2000s, some on the liberal left, like journalist Nick Cohen, challenged the growing association between the Left and Islamist groups.[1] But it’s now become very much the new normal.

The question is, in this scorpion dance between the Left and Islamism, who will get what they want? And in the process of dancing together, will the rights of workers, youth, and women in the Middle East be quietly brushed under the carpet?