A recent article by Thomas Riggins dealt cogently and insightfully with the recent controversy over an anti-Muslim book, While Europe Slept, which received a finalist nomination for a National Book award. Riggins presented an accurate distinction between “radical Islam” and Islam as a religion, and highlighted the open racist politics of group which have campaigned on chauvinist political platforms (“Keep Sweden Swedish”) while claiming to defend the civil rights and liberties of women, other religious groups, and minorities threatened both by Muslim “terrorists” and by Muslim populations hostile to these values.
As the non Marxist philosopher-athelete, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, said, “this is dejavu all over again.” Although the global political situation may be different, present-day anti-Muslim racism (broadly defined) not only bears a good deal of resemblance to the anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of the social economic factors are similar, as are the political forces exploiting and developing this racism.
In this essay, I will not dwell on the Marxist concept of religion as a manifestation of idealist philosophy, and its social role, which Tom dealt intelligently with. Rather I will look at how the relationship of longstanding hostilities rooted in religion to modern racist mass politics has functioned.
In that regard the comparison of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, Great Britain and the U.S. a century ago can I think is fruitfully compared to the present-day immigration of Muslims, mostly from non European countries, to West Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.
East European Jewish immigrants were a visible part of a huge migration of Eastern and Southern European populations to the U.S. Britain, and other advanced capitalist countries, a migration created by the economic and political fallout from the rise of industrial capitalism and the huge inequalities which developed from its subjugation of non-industrial regions.
Muslims are part of a similar migration, this time non-European, from South and East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, which has been created by the present advanced stage of imperialism, drawing both individuals with education and some capital and millions of marginalized poor to the developed world.
Although Jews were from a number of Eastern and Central European countries and had significant ethno-cultural differences among themselves, many were highly visible because of their religious garb, their distinct dietary laws, and the fact that they were non-Christian.
Muslims are also distinct from many other immigrants for similar reasons, encouraging chauvinists (called 'nativists' a century ago) to target them especially as a group that does not wish to integrate into the general society, but wishes all the privileges of citizens in the general society, essentially a parasitic group, an “enemy within.”
In reality large numbers of Muslims in the United States and in European countries, are working to have their children advance in schools and integrate into the society as productive professionals. This is exactly what large numbers of Jews in the United States did along with other immigrants.
But Jews belonged to a different religion which, even in the U.S., where religious freedom as a concept co-existed with the idea of a “Protestant Christian nation,” led chauvinists to separate them from the European Christian immigrants, just as the view that Islam is somehow a warlike religion threatening “the West” has led writers like the author of “While Europe Slept” to separate Muslims from Hindu, Buddhist, and other non European and non-Christian contemporary immigrants.
Some Jewish intellectuals a century ago played a leading role in developing the concept of cultural pluralism, which meant that immigrants could integrate into a society while retaining some of their old world customs and institutions and adding those customs and institutions to their new country, in the process improving both through their interaction.
This was essentially a concept rooted in the view that cultures developed, improved through diversity and interaction, rather than through exclusionary policies aimed at maintaining static often idealized conditions. This view of cultural pluralism, of interaction and growth, fits with Marxist dialectical materialist analysis, although it deals with the cultures of religious groups, not with their religious ideologies or their clerical institutions.
Chauvinists also blamed the economic dislocations created by industrial capitalism on mass immigration and established groups and eventually enacted legislation to restrict mass immigration based on racist criteria. For those who could not be kept out through exclusionary quotas or deported for political and other reasons, chauvinists advocated a coercive policy of “Americanization” by which they meant compelling immigrants to imitate White Anglo Saxon Protestant life styles, while accepting exclusionary policies in employment and housing, a second class citizenship above that of African Americans but clearly below that of the Anglo-Protestant “middle classes” who constituted the “backbone” of U.S. society.
Although various nationality groups of this mass immigration a century ago were attacked in the popular press and by racist politicians and groups, Jews who maintained separate appearances and institutions in ghettoized neighborhoods (which were usually forced on them by poverty and discrimination, not by their desire to live in places like the lower East Side slums) were special scapegoats, seen as the cause of crime and vice, not its victims, and the most persistent advocates of “alien radical” ideas.
Nor were these views limited to ghettoized religious Jews whose appearance and customs looked different to other Americans and to seculiar radicals in the slums. Jews who distinguished themselves in business and the professions were seen as taking privileged positions away from “real (read Anglo Protestant) Americans” and advancing anti-American “Jewish interests” as doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers, trade union leaders, etc.
Chauvinists put the ideological icing on the cake of racism by identifying Jewish immigrants with socialism, communism, anarchism, all of which were connected to bomb throwing terrorists and assassins seeking to use force and violence against “America.”
Chauvinists define Muslim men and women by their beards, hats, and veils, as Jewish men and women were defined by their beards, hats, and wigs. Although concepts of religious freedom and tolerance have been broadened significantly over the last century, Mosques are still seen as strange foreign places as Synagogues were seen as strange foreign places of worship, not equal in the minds of many, with Churches.
The existence of large secular populations among Muslim immigrants is rarely acknowledged in mass media, much less by those who contend that Islam and the people who define themselves as Muslims are essentially a foreign body inside European nations and the United States.
Those who challenge expressions of intolerance against Muslims in the U.S. are mocked by chauvinists and the political Right generally for being “politically correct” as those who praised the achievements of Jewish immigrants and the richness of Jewish immigrant culture a century ago were mocked by chauvinists and the political Right as naïve and misguided believers in a “melting pot” society who were protecting socially dangerous elements.
Those who contended a century ago that Judaism was the foundation of Christianity were not taken seriously by conservative religionists, who were a long way from accepting the existence of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” which is now generally accepted. Although Islam is directly linked in its history and theology to both Judaism and Christianity, we are a long way in the U.S., not to mention Europe and Britain, from stating the obvious and having it understood and accepted in these societies, that is, that a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, not Islam as a foreign religion and way of life, is as real as a “Judeo-Christian traditions.
Although many would argue that monotheism, the belief in one God, leads to conflicts and intolerance much more than polytheistic belief systems, the inter-relationship of these three monotheistic religions in their theological concepts is a matter of fact, and all can be interpreted by those who wish to as either religions of peace and cooperation or religions of war and social repression. And they have, depending on the interests and political agendas of the interpreters.
That Euro-American majority Christian countries with Jewish minorities have developed the secular institutions and ways of living associated with both advanced industrial capitalist and socialist societies much more than less developed majority Muslim countries is true, but this does not really effect the relationship between the three major monotheistic religions of the world, which are directly interconnected to one another, or the belief systems and values of those who either adhere to those religions or have grown up in societies where the institutions of those religions have played an important part. It also doesn't in any way mean that Muslim immigrants to these countries today are not following the cultural pluralist and secular integrationist patterns of East European Jews or Eastern and Southern European Roman and Orthodox Catholics whose Christianity and customs were also seen as foreign and threatening to many a century ago.
The analogy could be carried further as the statements of secular Jewish radicals were taken out of context blamed for political developments until the post WW II era, just as the statements of rightwing Muslim leaders are spread through the world by mass media to highlight the danger that they represent.
Of course, these radicals were not speaking in the name of Judaism as a religion as right-wing Muslim leaders today are. But the media that sought to connect the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 with the anarchist lectures of Emma Goldman because the assassin had attended one of those lectures were not only denouncing Goldman as a foreign subversive and advocate of terrorism, but also as a Jewish woman. Anti-Semitic subtexts highlighting “alien radicals” with names the general population considered to be Jewish were long a fixture of mass right-wing propaganda in the Euro-American world.
Today, “international terrorism” has replaced “criminal anarchism,” “Bolshevism,” and “international Communism” for those who want wars of some kind or other, “cold wars,” wars against terrorism,” to be both open-ended and infinite so that they can profit from them.
Although “terrorism,” attacks on civilian institutions and individuals of a designated enemy to both mobilize support and produce either fear and/or over-reaction in the designated enemy, is essentially a tactic rather than an ideology or movement (which has been shown to fail over and over again), and is fetishized today as “the enemy.” Just as the cold war enemy, the “Soviet bloc,” lived behind the Iron Curtain, “international terrorism” for chauvinists lives in the Muslim world and Muslim immigrants to the developed capitalist majority Christian world are looked at with suspicion whether they are religious or secular, unskilled service workers pumping gas or PhD's working in research labs.
Marxists should encourage the view that the broad left has the responsibility of fighting this both through mass action and through theoretical analysis, connecting these specific recent manifestations of racist ideology and advocacy to the changes in the global labor market and the convenient political amnesia which rightists, who a generation ago funded, supported and hailed as “freedom fighters” those whom they today condemn as terrorists fighting a religious “Jihad” against innocent civilians and the whole “civilized' world.
As Marxists we should make it clear that we advocate and support a socialist system in which cultures will integrate and synthesize dialectically; that such societies cannot come about through coercive state policies, whether those policies pull veils from women's faces in the name of some coercive definition of anti-religious public conduct or force veils on their faces in the name of a clerical state.
As Marxists on the general question of religion we must, as we have in the past, support individual freedom of religion and individual freedom from religion. We neither privilege nor persecute religious institutions, but separate these institutions from the state and maintain that separation in law. For example, individuals, including clerics, have the right to say or support anything that they wish, but no right to do state work and receive state subsidies for that purpose, Bush's unconstitutional Faith Initiative to the contrary.
We do not have to state and restate Marx's and Lenin's famous anti-religious pronouncements or explain or qualify them in a defensive way. While we may consider all religions to be idealist, there are also secular forms of idealism, including liberalism, with which we can share many specific goals, even if our world-view is basically different.
We must also understand that while the capitalist class uses idealist philosophies to advance its interests, that class practices a relentless mechanical materialism in which all ideas and beliefs are both reduced to monetary values and seen as instruments to sustain capitalist class power.
As Marxists we must both understand and oppose the present attacks on Islam as a religion and Muslims as people as a continuation of both the search for scapegoats at home and enemies abroad by the most reactionary supporters of our ruling class, just as we actively fought and fight against anti-Semitism. This does not mean that we share anything with or support in any way right-wing religious or secular Muslim groups no more than it meant and means that we support right-wing religious or secular Jewish groups. But our analytical opposition to contemporary anti-Muslim racism, like our continued opposition to modern anti-Jewish racism, is necessary to both strengthen working class and progressive forces, to maintain their focus and their unity, in the struggle against imperialism and war.
