One of the most puzzling features of politics over the past 30 years or so, not just in Britain but in Europe more widely and indeed lately in the US, has been the way in which Islamists and the Left have made common cause in a combined assault on the western liberal order. This has recently become a matter of broader public debate partly because of the response by the current French government to what it describes as “islamo-gauchisme” — mirrored in various ways in Austria and elsewhere. Predictably, the New York Times and other establishment newspapers in the US have accused France and Austria of racism and Islamophobia. Equally predictably, they’re wrong. Here’s why.
The concepts of “Islamism” and the “western liberal order” need unpacking, of course. In a 2020 Policy Exchange paper on the subject my co-authors and I examined in detail why Islamists and certain people on the Left dislike the latter so much: I take it in general to mean the commonly accepted rights, freedoms, practices and habits of mind which we have inherited from the European Enlightenment. These include individual equality before the law, free and independent thought and speech, a tolerant and reasoned understanding of complexity, and the tools to change any or all of this for the better by rational public debate, and democratic consent.
And yet we now find ourselves in a position where these things, which we once regarded as self-evident, are deemed structurally oppressive and indeed racist both by Islamists – who have always been hostile to the secular-liberal order — and certain groups on the Left. They have, that is, become allies. Given that Islamists are generally strongly against many of the things for which the Left claim to stand — gender equality, freedom of sexual choice, freedom of religion, the secular nature of the public sphere and so forth — this is very odd.
It has led to a situation where liberal or secular Muslims can be stigmatised not just by Islamists but by many on the Left as ideological enemies, with Marx’s class-based materialism replaced — in a bizarre adaptation of colonial-era taxonomies — by re-imagined racial, religious and communal identities. As a result, in 2019 the Swiss-Moroccan writer and secular activist, Kacem El Ghazzali, could write, “I criticised political Islam and identity politics. And suddenly I’m a Rightist. Why? The world has simply gone mad. Atheist “progressives” defend the freedom of women to veil. Reactionary Islamists cheer them on. Both agitate against “the white man”. Anyone who doesn’t go along is “radical right”. What’s at stake is enlightenment and free thinking”.
He goes on to point out that it is only in the West that critics of Islamism are accused of being rightist, reactionary or racist: in the Muslim world they are accused instead of being degenerate or apostate. He remarks that liberal Muslims are seen by the western Left as inauthentic: hence the latter’s fetishisation of the veil and other markers of identity which they construe as expressing the eternal otherness of the Muslim subject — in a sort of ‘reverse orientalism’.
It used to be thought — and still is in some quarters — that this alliance was and remains a marriage of convenience, with the Left hoping to mobilise Islamists and their clients in support of a progressive revolution before dumping them once utopia has been achieved. This is sometimes seen as a mirror image of the way the US and UK sought to use Islamists in Afghanistan against the USSR — or indeed how the Eisenhower Administration and successive Saudi Kings thought the Muslim Brotherhood could advance their interests without contaminating the source. We now see the folly of this strategy.
And if something similar was ever true for the Left, it has also proved counterproductive. As so often, it is Islamism that shapes its partners, not the reverse. So for much contemporary progressive opinion, Hamas and Hezbollah are not simply to be understood as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of the global Left”, in the notorious formulation of the American Queer Theorist, Judith Butler. They are also — in the equally notorious formulation of Jeremy Corbyn — “friends” of progressives everywhere.
For too many others on the Left, Islamists have become an essential part of what they seem to construe as a new Popular Front against the oppression and injustice of neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism which — it is claimed — arise from the deification by the post-Enlightenment western state of instrumental reason and Eurocentric universalism. You can see this in the Stop the War Coalition. You can see it in the common cause Islamists and Leftists make over the issues of Palestine or Iran. And you can interestingly see it in shared attitudes towards Israel more generally, where Jewishness often becomes — as Stephan Malinowski has recently reminded us — the emblem of a wider and deranging capitalist modernity.
It was Marx and then Hannah Arendt who suggested that antisemitism could function as an anti-Enlightenment/anti-modernist cultural code. And it is this belief in the wrong turn the Enlightenment represents that binds Islamists and Leftists together in an unholy alliance against the Enlightenment’s heirs. This belief is in practice founded upon 200 years of largely European Counter-Enlightenment thought, privileging cultural relativism over Kantian universalism, nativism over cosmopolitanism, Being over Scientism, romanticism over rationality. It can be traced from Vico, Herder, Fichte and le Maistre through Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Croce and Sartre to Derrida and Deleuze — among many others. And it powerfully influenced the development of Islamist thought, sometimes at second-hand, sometimes more directly.
In my Policy Exchange paper, I take Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, theorist and activist, as an example of the reciprocal influence of this intellectual current. In Iran in 1978 he saw in Khomeini and his followers the birth of what he described as a new “political spirituality”, reenchanting the dismal Weberian bureaucratic state and dissolving oppressive power structures. That judgement was harshly criticised for its ignorance at the time by the great French scholar, Maxime Rodinson. And it has not (ahem) stood the test of time. But Foucault had been shaped by the thought of Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Fanon and other critics of the Enlightenment. So had many Iranian revolutionaries. And this current of thought, with all its faults, remains intensely seductive to those in search of an ultimate meaning beyond instrumental reason, especially if it is enables them to reject the West at the same time as they make it central to their own discontents. It is present in different ways and to different extents in Hassan al Banna, Abul A’la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati and Yusuf Qaradawi. It is why Ali Khamenei can regard the West as doomed at the same time as he thinks Les Misérables is the greatest novel ever written. And it is fundamental to a way of thinking about the world shared by too many on the Left.
The fact they tend to believe truth is unobtainable, while Islamists claim to have exclusive access to it, that when Islamists take power, one of the first things they do is turn on the Left, the fact that among the first targets of Islamist insurgents are feminists, lawyers, novelists and journalists and the fact that Islamists are constitutively misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, illiberal, antisemitic and wholly intolerant seems to be lost on them.
They don’t care — not because they don’t know but because whatever else may divide them, the higher goal, the drive for a “counter-Enlightenment in the garb of post-Enlightenment”, is precisely what Islamism and the self-styled progressive and postmodern Left share. If it ever arrives, it will be a disaster for all of us.
Sir John Jenkins is a former UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia. This is based on the Sir John’s recent Policy Exchange Paper, Islamism and the Left, and forms part of Policy Exchange’s series of contributions to the JC.
