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http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=318696

How Marx turned Muslim
Not ancient, but modern: John Gray argues that Islamist militants have
Western roots
27 July 2002
Some years ago -- just over a dozen, to be exact -- there was a good deal of
talk about the collision of East and West. In the media and academy, the
Cold War was routinely described as a clash between western liberal
democracy and something else (Russian despotism, perhaps) that was
definitely not western. In fact, the communist system from Lenin to
Gorbachev was one of several attempts to turn Russia into a western society
that the country had experienced since Peter the Great.

Soviet Marxism did not spring from an Orthodox monastery. It was one of the
finest flowers of the European Enlightenment. Equally, the USSR was nothing
if not an Enlightenment regime. The Soviet state was the vehicle of a
westernising project from start to finish. The Cold War was a family quarrel
among western ideologies, in which rival versions of political universalism
struggled for hegemony.

Today, we are watching a rerun of that uncomprehending struggle. Of course,
much has changed. Unlike communism, political Islam does not purport to be
secular. For that reason alone, it is a puzzle for the many who still hold
to the atavistic 19th-century faith that secularisation is the wave of the
future. But the view that something called "the West" is under attack from
an alien enemy is as mistaken now as it was in the Cold War.

Islamic fundamentalism is not an indigenous growth. It is an exotic hybrid,
bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic intelligentsia with
radical western ideologies. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven shows that
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian executed after imprisonment in 1966 and arguably
the most influential ideologue of radical Islam, incorporated many elements
derived from European ideology into his thinking. For example, the idea of a
revolutionary vanguard of militant believers does not have an Islamic
pedigree. It is "a concept imported from Europe, through a lineage that
stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks and latter-day
Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang".

In a brilliantly illuminating and arrestingly readable analysis, Ruthven
demonstrates the close affinities between radical Islamist thought and the
vanguard of modernist and postmodern thinking in the West. The inspiration
for Qutb's thought is not so much the Koran, but the current of western
philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and
Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical
Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century
Europe's experience of "the death of God" as to anything in the Islamic
tradition. Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist
ideology, it is unmistakeably modern.

Political Islam emerged partly from an encounter with western thought, but
also from revulsion against the regimes founded in Egypt and elsewhere in
the aftermath of European colonialism. In Jihad, Gilles Keppel argues
al-Qa'ida turned to global terrorism because, like fundamentalist groups in
other countries, it has failed to achieve its revolutionary goals on home
territory. In a magisterial study of the rise and decline of political
Islam, Keppel maintains that Islamist movements have never gained sufficient
support to produce a sustainable alternative to democracy. He argues
compellingly that the failed Khomeinist revolution in Iran gained much early
support from western-educated Marxists "projecting the messianic
expectations of communists and Third World Peoples on to revolutionary
Shiism".

The aspirations of these westernising radicals were defeated when Khomeini
set about constructing a theocratic regime. That regime proved highly
repressive, but -- if we credit recent reports of pro-western demonstrations
-- it failed to eradicate the yearning for a more pluralist government.

The political failures of radical Islam in Iran and elsewhere leads Keppel
to conclude that "the Islamist movement will have much difficulty in
reversing its trail of decline". Here he may be optimistic. As he notes in
his analysis of the Saudi regime, a major source of Islamist strength comes
from the growing numbers of dislocated young men in the Gulf. The Gulf
States are rentier economies, dependent on a single depleting resource to
sustain exploding populations. Fuelled by an insoluble Malthusian dilemma,
Islamist movements may well gain enough momentum to overturn pro-western
regimes. The likely outcome is chronic instability for the region.

In the first and last chapters of The Clash of Fundamentalisms, a hastily
assembled collection of autobiographical vignettes and commentaries on
Islamic themes, Tariq Ali writes that he is not a believer. The veteran
leftist need not be taken literally. What he means is that he has rejected
Islam for another faith: a rather crude version of Enlightenment humanism.

The Clash of Fundamentalisms is well worth reading, if only because it shows
that the harshest critics of fundamentalism are often exponents of a rival
fundamentalism. Tariq Ali performs a valuable service by reminding us that
Islam was once a tolerant and pluralist religion, more intellectually
advanced than anything Christendom had to offer. Ironically, though, he
seems to pine not for the complex culture that Islam once animated, but for
that monument to Enlightenment fundamentalism, the former Soviet Union.

Here Ali unwittingly testifies to an important truth. A common error of
western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to
view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact,
Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with neo-liberals
and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as
whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it
should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ
from "non-western" traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which
are much more restrained in making universal claims.

In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind,
the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way
of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are
led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: "the West" against
the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no
less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another
western family quarrel. 

John Gray's 'Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals' will be
published by Granta this autumn