Egypt: For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism
Part Two
(Women and Revolution pages)
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 1027 (12
July).
By the end of the 19th century, there were stirrings in Egypt of
struggle for independence from British rule as well as for basic rights for
women. But it was the proletarian October Revolution of 1917 in Russia that
galvanized mass struggle for social and national emancipation in Egypt and
elsewhere in the colonial and semicolonial world and inspired workers
internationally in the fight to overthrow capitalist rule.
Under the leadership of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the workers of Russia
rallied behind them the peasant masses and seized state power. The Revolution
overthrew bourgeois rule, sweeping away the tsarist autocracy and the state
church, and pulled Russia out of the interimperialist carnage of World War I. In
the course of a bloody three-year Civil War against imperialist-backed
counterrevolutionary White armies, Soviet power was extended to largely Muslim
Central Asia. The workers state’s victories there held out the possibility of
emancipation for the downtrodden masses of the Muslim East, especially women. An
Egyptian observer reported at the time that “news of success or victory by the
Bolsheviks” in the Russian Civil War “seems to produce a pang of joy and content
among all classes of Egyptians” (quoted in Hanna Batatu, The Old Social
Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq [1978]).
Shortly after the seizure of power, the Bolsheviks, true to their
word, published secret treaties from the tsarist archives. Among these was the
1916 Sykes-Picot treaty in which Britain and France agreed to carve up the
Ottoman Empire between themselves, notwithstanding their promises of
self-determination to the Arab subjects of the Ottoman sultan. The revelations
helped fuel a series of national revolts and popular uprisings from North Africa
and the Near East to South and East Asia.
In Egypt, a group of nationalist politicians led by one Saad
Zaghlul formed a delegation (Wafd) to present a petition calling for Egypt’s
independence at the 1919 Versailles Conference, where the victorious imperialist
powers were dictating terms to defeated Germany following the end of World War
I. When Egypt’s British occupiers responded by arresting Zaghlul and sending him
into exile, the country exploded in strikes and protests. As a result of the
massive upheaval, Britain agreed to putative independence—with conditions that
left military control of the country and the Suez Canal in British hands. In
1924, the Wafd formed a government under a constitution imposed by the
British.
The 1919 revolt marked the decisive entry of the working class into
Egyptian political life. In 1919, under British prompting, Egypt’s Grand Mufti,
Sheik Mohammed Bakheit, issued a fatwa against Bolshevism. Delighted, the
British published it far and wide. But this backfired as it piqued the interest
of the population in something so deeply hated by their brutal colonial
overlords.
In 1921, the Egyptian Socialist Party was founded, becoming a
section of the Communist International in 1922 and changing its name to the
Communist Party of Egypt. The party played a leading role in organizing the
newly militant working class, including in the industrial districts of
Alexandria and Mahalla al-Kobra. One of the party’s leaders, Joseph Rosenthal, a
Russian Jew who had become a naturalized Egyptian citizen, organized the General
Union of Workers. By 1923 the union had 20,000 members. The party’s program
called for the nationalization of the Suez Canal, repudiation of all state debts
and capitulation agreements with foreign powers and an eight-hour workday.
When the Wafd came to power in 1924, one of its first campaigns was
to savagely crush a series of militant strikes demanding shorter hours, higher
wages and improved working conditions. Saad Zaghlul’s government declared the
strikers “transgressors and outlaws” and went after the Communists with a
vengeance, interning the entire leadership and deporting foreign-born
Communists. The pro-Communist Confederation of Trade Unions was disbanded and a
series of anti-labor laws was introduced. As a result of intense repression, by
1925 the Communist Party had effectively disappeared as an organization, later
re-emerging in a period marked by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union
and the Comintern.
Nasser and the Myth of “Arab Socialism”
The end of World War II triggered a renewed upsurge in the
nationalist movement in late 1945 and early ’46. By that time, the Wafd was a
spent force, discredited and weakened because of its failure to end British
occupation. The upheaval was marked by huge strikes involving textile workers,
transport workers, Suez Canal and Alexandria port workers and many others. In
this cauldron of social struggle, the Communist-influenced National Committee of
Workers and Students (NCWS) as well as the left-nationalist Wafdist Vanguard
attracted mass followings. The government under King Farouk clamped down heavily
on protesters in February 1946, when British armored vehicles drove into crowds,
killing many.
Leading Egyptian Communist Henri Curiel described the period as one
in which the “masses were still ready to follow us. But we no longer knew where
to lead them” (Gilles Perrault, A Man Apart [1987]). The emergence of the
NCWS, the growing militancy of the student movement and the radicalization of
the Wafdist Vanguard all spoke to the revolutionary potential pregnant in this
upsurge. In 1951, trade unions organized demonstrations calling for cancellation
of all treaties with the British, extension of democratic liberties, abolition
of the political police and friendship with the Soviet Union. It was becoming
increasingly clear that the ruling class was incapable of solving the political
and economic crisis of Egyptian society.
The 1952 military coup led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his
Free Officers Movement, which overthrew King Farouk, was meant to stabilize the
country and stem the tide of the upsurge. The U.S. ambassador in Cairo predicted
that the new junta could “save Egypt from the red tide” (quoted in Raymond
Flower, From Napoleon to Nasser [2011]). One of the Free Officers’ first
acts upon coming to power was the grisly public execution of two leaders of a
textile workers strike. They were arrested, condemned to death for “a grave
crime against the state” and hanged on factory grounds. The Communists were
banned, strikes were outlawed and a corporatist regime was set up to place the
trade unions under state control.
Initially, Nasser’s Free Officers leaned toward the Western
imperialists, who promised economic aid and financing for the construction of
the Aswan High Dam. But the trickle of funds from the U.S. fell far short of
what Nasser had anticipated. Frustrated, he appealed to the Soviet Union,
souring relations with the West. In 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal,
which generated revenues on the order of $100 million annually. Eager to make
Nasser pay for this affront to their interests, Britain and France invaded
Egypt, with Israel as a junior partner. But the invaders were forced to withdraw
under pressure from the Soviets as well as from the U.S., which feared that its
imperialist rivals would reoccupy a region it wished to dominate.
Standing up to the tripartite invasion won Nasser, with his
nationalist rhetoric and socialist pretensions, wide adherence throughout the
Near East and beyond. In the Spartacist tendency’s first article on the Near
East in 1968, at a time when much of the Western left was hailing Nasser as a
revolutionary, we addressed this myth:
“In the absence of a viable national bourgeoisie, many ex-colonial
countries have seen the development of single-party dictatorships—led by the
civil and military intelligentsia, based on national and social
demagoguery—which seek to build the economic and social base for native
capitalist exploitation. To do this in the face of world imperialism and
domestic underdevelopment requires central control and the nationalization of
major sectors. But statification of the economy by a bourgeois regime in no
sense alters the capitalist character of a society. In this case it is merely
symptomatic of the underdevelopment of the economies involved.”
— “Arab-Israeli Conflict: Turn the Guns the Other Way,”
Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968
Nasser carried out an extensive nationalization of industry that
allowed increased opportunities for employment, expansion of education, free
health care and increased social benefits. Nasser’s limited land reform,
intended to pressure large landowners to invest in nationalized industry,
rallied poor peasants behind him, though it affected less than 10 percent of the
cultivable land. Billions in Soviet aid were instrumental in furthering
industrial development, including the gigantic Aswan High Dam, and helped
improve the standard of living for sections of the population. Women benefited
from job opportunities and education and were granted the right to vote—whatever
that meant under military rule. Free birth control was made available through
thousands of family planning centers, part of the regime’s aim to control
population growth, which was straining the country’s limited resources.
By the mid 1960s, however, Egypt was in deep economic crisis. The
promised prosperity never materialized. Instead, the “workers’ socialist gains”
were served up in the form of IMF-dictated austerity measures delivered through
rifle butts as widespread sit-ins and wildcat strikes were suppressed. Israel’s
swift victory in the June 1967 Six Day War left the armies of Egypt, Syria and
Jordan shattered and large parts of their territories occupied by Israel. This
humiliating defeat exposed the fragile foundations of Nasser’s bourgeois regime
and triggered an explosive mass reaction. Demonstrations of workers and students
engulfed the country from Alexandria to Aswan. The regime was so discredited
that Nasser’s right-hand man and army chief, Abdel Hakim Amer, committed
suicide. Nasser himself offered to resign. The 1967 defeat signaled the downward
spiral of Nasser’s “Arab socialism” scheme, though he did not live to see its
final demise at the hands of his successor, Anwar el-Sadat.
Nasser was a bourgeois-nationalist strongman of the era when the
U.S.-led Cold War against the Soviet Union allowed him some latitude to maneuver
and seek funding from one side or the other (or, in Nasser’s case, both). Still,
Nasser could not free Egypt from the control of the imperialists or transform
the country into an industrial power. As the failure of both the Wafd and Nasser
regimes testify, the indigenous bourgeoisies of the colonial and semicolonial
world are incapable of achieving qualitative modernization in the imperialist
epoch.
Stalinist Betrayal over Nasser
By the time Communism had again become a factor in the Egyptian
working class in the early 1940s, the Soviet Union had undergone a political
counterrevolution, bringing to power a parasitic bureaucratic caste led by J.V.
Stalin. The Stalinists repudiated the Bolshevik program of international
socialist revolution in favor of the nationalist dogma of “building socialism in
one country.” This was a flat denial of the Marxist understanding that
socialism—a society in which class divisions disappear in conditions of material
abundance—can be built only on an international basis through destroying
capitalist imperialism as a world system and surpassing its level of
technological/industrial development and productivity.
The Stalinist bureaucracy’s search for “peaceful coexistence” with
world imperialism—a corollary of “socialism in one country”—led to the
transformation of the Communist International from an instrument for world
proletarian revolution into an agency for Soviet diplomatic maneuvers. But while
the Stalinists had betrayed the program of the October Revolution, they had not
overturned the socialized foundations of the Soviet workers state. While calling
for workers political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, Trotskyists remained
steadfast in unconditional military defense of the degenerated workers state
against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution as part of their
revolutionary proletarian internationalist program.
The Stalinists, searching for allies among the emerging
bourgeoisies of the colonial and neocolonial world, resurrected the old
social-democratic/Menshevik formula of “two-stage revolution.” This meant
supporting an allegedly “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” national
bourgeoisie—in fact, a class of brutal exploiters—while postponing proletarian
revolution to the indefinite future, i.e., never. As seen as early as 1927 with
the crushing defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution, which was sealed by the
Guomindang (Nationalist) party’s massacre of tens of thousands of Communists and
other militants, the end result is not “democracy,” much less socialism, but
defeat after defeat for the toiling masses and the slaughter of leftists,
workers and peasants. The Soviet bureaucracy sacrificed Communist parties around
the world in pursuit of alliances with bourgeois “anti-imperialists.”
In the anti-colonial struggles of the 1940s in Egypt, the refounded
Communist organizations were supported by the dominant and most militant
sections of the working class. But the Stalinists’ program subordinated the
proletariat’s class interests to bourgeois nationalism. Pro-Soviet and
anti-Zionist, the movement was greatly shaken when, after two decades of
conciliating and promoting Arab nationalism, Stalin changed tack and supported
the United Nations’ partition of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist state
of Israel. Compelled to endorse the partition plan, the Egyptian Communists
suffered a serious erosion of influence.
In the wake of the partition, confronted with an explosive climate
of inflamed nationalism and anti-Semitic pogroms, the Stalinists adapted to the
reactionary tide. The Communist organizations had been built largely through the
efforts of Jews like Henri Curiel, who founded the Egyptian Movement for
National Liberation, which fused with another group in 1947 to become the
Democratic Movement for National Liberation (DMNL). DMNL militants had
courageously defended Jewish shops against pogromist mobs incited by the Muslim
Brotherhood. But in 1949, when a new Communist Party of Egypt was formed out of
a merger of a DMNL faction and other groups, it excluded Jews—and women—to avoid
“sexual dissolution, moral dissolution,” in the words of Fuad Mursi, one of its
founding members. The number of Jews in the movement began to decline, largely
the result of the deportations of leftists, among them Curiel, who was deported
to Italy in 1950.
Nasser’s repression of the working class and his virulent
anti-Communism did not prevent the Egyptian Stalinists from pledging their full
support to him, claiming he would achieve the tasks of the “national democratic
revolution.” “The fact is,” one Communist leader would later say, “that we and
the others all met on the platform of fascination with Nasserism” (quoted in
Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa’at El-Sa’id, The Communist Movement in Egypt:
1920-1988 [1990]). Even with many of them jailed, tortured and
executed, the Stalinists continued to foster illusions in the “anti-imperialist”
leader. Prominent Communist Shuhdi al-Shaf’ie continued to support Nasser even
while being bludgeoned and hauled to his death. Meanwhile, Moscow continued to
lavish arms and funds on Nasser as he repressed the working class and persecuted
Communists.
In 1965, the Communist Party capped its capitulation to the regime
by formally dissolving itself and liquidating into Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union
(ASU). In a telegram to Nasser, who had just been “re-elected” president, the
party declared that “the most beautiful thing we present to you on this historic
occasion” was the news that its representatives had just decided to “put an end
to their independent organization because of their belief in your call for the
unity of all the socialist forces in one revolutionary political organization,
and that this one party under your leadership is the substitute for our
independent organization” (quoted in The Communist Movement in Egypt:
1920-1988).
Dissolving their party and joining Nasser’s ASU was consistent with
the Stalinists’ historic orientation. The various organizations in Egypt at the
time that claimed to be communist shared the perspective of two-stage revolution
from their inception, seeing the national struggle as their primary political
task. Never promoters of working-class independence, they politically chained
the proletariat to bourgeois nationalist forces. Nasser succeeded in isolating
the Communists by implementing the nationalist core of their program—ending
British occupation, land reform, nationalization, promoting
government-controlled economic planning—as well as alliance with the Soviet
Union. This was passed off in Stalinist jargon as “the non-capitalist road.”
Even as he destroyed their organizations physically and politically, Nasser used
the Communists as propagandists and consultants.
The year 1965 saw the annihilation of another Communist party on
the eastern end of the Islamic belt. In one of the most savage massacres in
modern history, over a million Indonesian Communists, workers, peasants,
intellectuals and sympathizers, along with ethnic Chinese, were slaughtered at
the hands of General Suharto and Islamic reactionaries with the direct aid of
the CIA. Here was, once again, the bloody result of “two-stage revolution.” The
Indonesian Communist Party—then the largest in the capitalist world—had paved
the way for the massacre by pledging its full support to the “progressive”
nationalist regime of Sukarno, disarming the workers as part of a policy of
“national unity” with the Indonesian bourgeoisie and its military. Deceived and
disoriented, the working class could neither defend itself nor come to the
rescue of its leaders when reactionary military leaders turned on them. (See
“Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No.
55, Autumn 1999.)
Ostensible Trotskyists and “Arab Socialism”
Also seizing on Nasser’s “Arab socialism” was a trend of political
revisionism that began to assert itself in the Trotskyist Fourth International
under the leadership of Michel Pablo in the early 1950s. According to this
revisionist current, various non-revolutionary forces around the world—from
Stalinists to social democrats to Third World nationalists—were propelled by
events to take a revolutionary course, thus negating the need for
Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties. In the Near East, Nasser and other
militarists were painted as liberators of the Arab working class and peasants,
with the role of “Trotskyists” relegated to that of their cheering section. In
1965, Livio Maitan, a leader of the Pabloite “United Secretariat of the Fourth
International,” proposed that countries like Egypt that had carried out
extensive nationalizations could become workers states without a social
revolution.
Gerry Healy’s International Committee (whose descendants today
operate as the Socialist Equality Party of David North) initially appeared to be
orthodox defenders of Trotskyism, sharply attacking the liquidationist politics
of the Pabloites. But by 1967, they were also enthusing over the “Arab
Revolution,” eventually carrying this to its logical outcome by acting as paid
press agents and finger-men for one or another Arab bourgeois regime. In that
capacity, Healy & Co. hailed the 1978 execution of 21 members of the Iraqi
Communist Party. (See, for example, “Northite Blood Money,” WV No. 523,
29 March 1991.)
The Spartacist tendency emerged out of the struggle against the
Pabloite degeneration of the historic party of American Trotskyism, the
Socialist Workers Party, and went on to break with Healy & Co. over their
own revisionism. As we have always insisted, the idea of a trans-class “Arab
Revolution” was a mystification that impeded the task of forging Trotskyist
parties as the necessary leadership for proletarian revolution—the only road to
national and social emancipation.
Feminism: Obstacle to Women’s Liberation
While the modernizing impulse of the early nationalist movement in
Egypt placed the question of women’s emancipation on the agenda, the
bourgeois-nationalist leadership’s developing hostility to women’s equality
would help spur the rise of a distinct feminist current. Women’s liberation
first became an issue in Egypt in the nationalist ferment at the end of the 19th
century. In 1894, a Coptic lawyer, Murqus Fahmi, published a book titled The
Woman in the East. Criticizing Copts and Muslims for secluding women, he
attributed Egypt’s backwardness to the conditions of women and the family.
Another early proponent of women’s rights was Qasim Amin, a lawyer and appellate
court judge of Kurdish stock. He called for abolishing the veil, giving women
primary education and reforming laws governing polygamy and divorce. Amin’s
proposed reforms were modest and colored by a cautious definition of Islamic
practice rather than its abandonment. Nonetheless, they evoked a storm of
attacks from other nationalists and religious leaders.
Amin was inspired by his experiences as a student in France, where
he had been exposed to the writings of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. In his
works, namely The Liberation of Women (1899) and The New Woman
(1900), he espoused a Western model of development. Arguing that there can be no
improvement of the state of the nation without improving the position of women,
Amin concluded that their liberation was a prerequisite for the liberation of
Egypt from foreign domination.
In contrast, Mustafa Kamil, founder in the 1890s of the short-lived
National Party, opposed women’s rights as a diversion from the struggle against
British domination, a “foreign” idea identified with Western culture. While Amin
stood for a slow withdrawal of British domination and the buildup of a native
Egyptian ruling class, Kamil appealed to the Ottomans for aid in expelling the
British. The aim of these early nationalists was to remove the obstacles to the
exploitation of Egyptian toilers by a native ruling class. They accepted the
class structure of society and the institution of the family as they existed,
proposing limited reforms at most.
Women became a visible factor of political life during the 1919
upheavals. Facing off against armed British soldiers, some 300 veiled women
organized by Huda Shaarawi poured into the streets of Cairo to protest the
arrest of Wafd leaders. The daughter of a wealthy slaveowner and the wife of a
leading Wafd member, Shaarawi was one of Egypt’s first feminists. In her
autobiography, Harem Years, she recounted coming of age among the upper
and middle classes, where the sexes were kept apart. Guarded by castrated
slaves, women were secluded at home and carried their seclusion with them when
they went out by veiling their faces. Shaarawi is best known for her dramatic
public unveiling in 1923 at the Cairo Railroad Station upon her return from a
feminist conference in Rome, the first time an Egyptian woman had shunned
tradition so visibly.
Around that time, Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union
(EFU), a classic bourgeois feminist formation. Made up primarily of women from
wealthy and prominent families, its goal was to seek equal rights within the
confines of existing class society. The EFU sought to reform personal status
laws (marriage, divorce, custody, etc.), win the vote and the right to hold
office, establish educational opportunities and secure other reforms that, while
supportable, posed no threat to Islam or the institution of the family. Shaarawi
died in 1947.
One of Shaarawi’s admirers, Durriyyah Shafiq, founded the
organization Bint al-Nil (“Daughter of the Nile”) in 1948, amid the upheavals
that engulfed the country after World War II. Bint al-Nil’s leaders were more
militant than their EFU mentors. In 1951, Shafiq led 1,500 women in a
demonstration that stormed the parliament, demanding political rights, equal pay
and reform of the divorce laws. This action provoked outrage among Islamic
conservatives who petitioned the king to keep women within their prescribed
bounds. After she staged a hunger strike against Nasser’s dictatorship in 1957,
Shafiq was placed under house arrest and her organization was banned. Her
associates distanced themselves, calling her a “traitor to the revolution.”
Isolated and demoralized, she committed suicide in 1975.
For a time, the Communist movement carried out special work among
women. In the period after WWII, the NCWS included the Association of Egyptian
Working Women, the first such organization in Egypt, headed by Communist textile
worker Hikmat al-Ghazzali from the Shubra al-Khayma mill. Communists also
launched the League of Women Students and Graduates from the University and
Egyptian Institutes, which proclaimed that freedom for women “cannot arrive
under the shadow of the imperialist” nor “under the shadow of enslavement and
exploitation” (quoted in Selma Botman, “Women’s Participation in Radical
Egyptian Politics 1939-1952,” in Women in the Middle East [1987]).
However, for the Stalinists the question of women’s emancipation was subordinate
to unity with the nationalists. They subsequently neglected this work, leaving
the feminists unchallenged as defenders of women’s rights.
Nawal El Saadawi, a heroic fighter against women’s oppression, lays
bare the heinous conditions of women in Muslim Arab society in her writings. She
has been sacked, imprisoned, forced into exile and featured on fundamentalists’
death lists. However, while Saadawi in The Hidden Face of Eve recognized
the “patriarchal class system that has dominated the world since thousands of
years” as a root of women’s oppression, she rejects the understanding that
eliminating that oppression requires the overthrow of the class system. As the
book makes clear, she sees the struggle through the prism of feminism, as one of
women against men. According to Saadawi, “the real reason why women have been
unable to complete their emancipation” is that “they have failed to constitute
themselves into a political force powerful, conscious, and dynamic enough to
impose their rights.” This ignores the fundamental class divide in
capitalist society: Hosni Mubarak’s wife Suzanne, who postured as a champion of
women’s rights, and the textile workers of Mahalla al-Kobra stand on opposite
sides of that divide.
Saadawi rejects the Marxist understanding of the working class as
the motor force for historical progress. Searching for another agent has
sometimes led her to support the very forces that oppress women. As well as
serving for a time as a cabinet member in Sadat’s government, she supported
Khomeini’s Islamic “revolution” in Iran in 1978-79. In her 1979 preface to the
English edition of The Hidden Face of Eve, Saadawi vilified those in the
West who accused the mullahs’ “revolution” of “being reactionary, of imposing on
women the veil and the chador.” She claimed, “The Iranian Revolution has
lifted the banners of Islam overhead, as banners of freedom from imperialist
oppression.”
As we will detail in Part Three of this article, Khomeini’s
movement made no secret of its reactionary program. More than a decade after it
took power, long after leftists, union militants, Kurdish nationalists and
others had been imprisoned and slaughtered by the Islamic regime, Saadawi along
with numerous other feminists and self-styled socialists cynically backtracked
on their support for Khomeini. She acknowledged that “Khomeini was terrible,”
lamely claiming that the “revolution” had been “aborted” by the “colonial
powers,” who are “much happier with a religious, fanatic revolution than a
socialist revolution” (Progressive, April 1992).
While often courageous and defiant, bourgeois feminists can offer
nothing to the deeply oppressed and exploited women of the working class and
peasantry. Because it accepts class society, from which the oppression of women
springs, feminism is incapable of attaining women’s emancipation. In late 2011,
half a century after Nasser dissolved it, the EFU was revived. Now it seeks to
“find powerful Egyptian women and convince them to run for election” (London
Guardian, 1 December 2011). Tellingly, the EFU publication,
L’Egyptienne, is published in French, accessible only to a narrow sliver of
upper-class women.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1029 |
6 September 2013
| ||||||||
Egypt: For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The Rise of Religious Reaction
Part Three
(Women and Revolution pages)
This article concludes below. Parts One and Two appeared in
WV Nos. 1027 and 1028 (12 July and 9 August).
Since deposing President Mohamed Morsi in a coup on July 3, the
Egyptian military has massacred adherents of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, most
graphically in clearing two protest encampments in mid August, and imprisoned
much of its leadership. In the name of fighting the Islamists, the crackdown has
been extended to striking workers, journalists and liberal activists. The
struggle between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood—both reactionary
forces—has set off a new wave of violence against the oppressed Coptic Christian
minority. Historically, Egypt’s military-backed strongmen have alternately
repressed the Brotherhood and unleashed it against leftists and workers
struggles.
The ascendancy of political Islam as a mass movement of religious
fundamentalism based on the lower middle classes and the poor has been a
reactionary response to the manifest dead end of bourgeois nationalism in the
semicolonial countries of the Muslim world in the absence of a communist
alternative. Though looking to the 7th century for inspiration, political Islam
emerged out of the oppressive conditions of the 20th century.
With their social expectations born in the struggle for national
emancipation shattered, the dispossessed masses —desperate, ragged, illiterate,
unemployed or forced to labor for a pittance—find solace in religion and comfort
in the false hope of happiness in the hereafter. Noting that “Man makes
religion, religion does not make man,” Karl Marx wrote:
“Religious distress is at the same time the
expression of real distress and also the protest
against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is
the opium of the people.... To abolish religion as the
illusory happiness of the people is to demand their
real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing
state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs
illusions.”
— “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law:
Introduction” (1843-44)
It is not only the solace of superstition that the Islamists offer
to attract the downtrodden but also some very material social services. With
funding from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich sheikdoms, Egyptian fundamentalists
established wide networks, centered around the country’s more than 170,000
mosques, for providing services the state does not deliver. In her book, A
Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam (1999),
journalist Mary Anne Weaver described how the Muslim Brotherhood and other
Islamists had built their own welfare system in the impoverished Imbaba district
of Cairo. For example, mosques under the control of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the
hardline Islamic Group, provided meat at wholesale prices and set up discount
clinics, schools and day-care centers as well as furniture factories where the
unemployed got work. Weaver observed:
“Despite an aggressive $10 million social program launched by the
government at the end of 1994, the Islamists’ institutions remained generally
far more efficient and far superior to run-down government facilities. Along
with the collapse of every secular ideology embraced by Egyptian politicians and
intellectuals during this century, it was government repression and ineptitude,
far more than militants’ guns and bombs, that was fueling the Islamic flame.”
Muslim Brotherhood: Enemy of Workers, Women
Founded in 1928, Egypt’s Society of Muslim Brothers was the
prototype for subsequent Islamic movements in other countries. The writings of
its early leaders Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb have been translated into all
the languages of the Muslim world and remain the prime sources for those who
aspire to overthrow “impious” society and build an Islamic state on its ruins.
Indonesian Islamist leader Amien Rais paid tribute to the Muslim
Brotherhood by writing his doctoral thesis on the movement. Egyptian Islamist
teachers brought in by the Algerian government in the 1970s as part of an
“Arabization” scheme were instrumental in building a base for the Islamic
Salvation Front, which went on to wage a bloody but unsuccessful civil war
against the nationalist military regime in the 1990s. Muslim Brotherhood leaders
fleeing repression in Egypt contributed to the growth of the fundamentalist
movement in Jordan, while the Palestinian Hamas originated as a branch of the
Brotherhood. Sudanese and Syrian youth studying in Egypt carried home the seeds
of the Brotherhood, establishing regional branches in the 1930s and ’40s.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the period following the
bourgeois-nationalist Wafd party’s failure to achieve independence through the
1919 uprising against British rule. Its establishment was a reactionary response
to the abolition of the caliphate, the 1,300-year-old system of Islamic rule, by
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nationalist founder of modern Turkey, in 1923. The
Brotherhood’s purpose, expressed in the slogan “the Koran is our constitution,”
was to establish an Islamic state modeled on the caliphate of the 7th century.
The organization began to grow explosively during the Great Depression of the
1930s, when the educated sons of the petty bourgeoisie could no longer count on
secure government jobs after graduation. Disenfranchised urban youth gravitated
toward radical organizations—many to the Muslim Brothers on the right, others to
the fledgling Communists. Soon the Brotherhood swelled into a mass movement of
hundreds of thousands.
During the upsurge in class and social struggle in 1945-46, the
monarchy used the Muslim Brotherhood as shock troops against striking workers,
Communists and the left-nationalist Wafdist Vanguard. The Brotherhood
established a base of support among factory owners, foremen and backward
workers, fingering strike leaders for state repression and attempting to
undermine or destroy militant unions. The Communist-led Congress of
Private-Sector Trade Unions issued a statement denouncing the Brotherhood for
“fascist methods using their sticks” against leftist students and workers at the
combative Shubra al-Khayma textile mill and “for [religious] sectarianism aimed
at splitting the ranks of the people for the benefit of imperialism.” The
statement concluded with a sharp warning to “worker colleagues against joining
any committee formed by the Muslim Brothers” (quoted in Joel Beinin and Zachary
Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian
Working Class, 1882-1954 [1987]).
But the Brotherhood’s growing strength soon alarmed the monarchy
itself. After a series of assassinations of government officials and other
violence attributed to the Brotherhood, the organization was banned in 1948.
Secret service agents assassinated al-Banna the following year.
Colonel Nasser, supported by Islamists and Stalinists alike,
pragmatically embraced the Brothers in an effort to win their mass base and to
use them against the Stalinists. Six weeks after the 1952 military coup that
brought his Free Officers Movement to power, the Nasser regime executed two
strike leaders. The Brotherhood hailed the act, calling on the government to
“strike these Communists…with an iron hand so that they are driven to their
dens” (quoted in Workers on the Nile).
The honeymoon ended in 1954 when a Brotherhood member allegedly
attempted to assassinate Nasser. By that time, the Islamists had served their
purpose in helping to suppress the Communists, and the regime had built a wider
base of support, including through limited land reforms. Six Brotherhood leaders
were executed and thousands of its members jailed. The crackdown culminated in
the 1966 execution of Sayyid Qutb.
Sadat Rearms Islamists
Nasser, who died in 1970, was replaced by his protégé and vice
president, Anwar Sadat, a former adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat would
go on to cancel Egypt’s “friendship” treaty with the Soviet Union and order the
withdrawal of Soviet military advisers, paving the way for closer ties with the
United States. He launched his policy of infitah—economic liberalization
based on an open door to imperialist investment—whereby key industries were
denationalized and Nasser’s land reform was scrapped. Sadat’s policies drew
increasing opposition from Nasserites as well as Communists and other leftist
elements.
To deflect growing anger over the country’s perpetual economic
crisis, Sadat fostered mysticism and superstition. He made several pilgrimages
to Mecca and acquired the title of “pious president.” He affirmed Nasser’s
declaration that Islam was the state religion and decreed that sharia was
the prime source of state law. Thousands of mosques were built and prayer rooms
were added to office buildings. Day and night on television screens, robed,
turbaned and bearded sheiks expounded the virtues and morals of Islamic society.
Pedestrians were bombarded with taped Friday sermons blaring from newsstands,
food carts and passing taxicabs. The 1973 military offensive that inflicted a
black eye on Israel was launched by Sadat in the month of Ramadan and code-named
“Badr” after the Prophet’s first victorious battle in 624. And the battle cry
was “God is great.”
Initiating in 1971 what he called the “Rectification Movement,”
Sadat arrested Nasser’s chief lieutenants and suppressed a student revolt the
next year. He released imprisoned Islamists and enabled them to gain control of
the Egyptian Student Union, the prime objective of which, according to a 1976
presidential decree, was now “to deepen religious values among the students”
(Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt [2003]). By 1977, the Islamists
held sway over student unions on a national scale. Using the considerable funds
and facilities now at their disposal, they organized “Islamic summer camps”
where thousands of students received religious and paramilitary training with
the patronage of the rector of the state-financed Al Azhar, the world’s leading
Islamic institution, and other regime officials.
The fundamentalists wielded such power that university campuses
were turned into “terra Islamica.” Iron bars in hand, thugs attacked couples and
unveiled women. They banned movies, concerts and evening dances. Rampaging
through the city’s nightclubs, they smashed windows and beat belly dancers. The
fundamentalists subsidized Islamic dress for women and offered segregated buses
for those who wore the veil. Emboldened by Sadat’s imprisonment of Coptic
Christian religious leaders, Islamists planted bombs at churches in Cairo.
Prayer rallies staged on religious holidays drew hundreds of thousands; in
Cairo, the rallies were held in the square facing Abdin Palace, the presidential
residence. It was perhaps out of gratitude that Islamist Egyptian president
Mohamed Morsi laid a wreath at Sadat’s tomb last October, an honor that Sadat
had never before received in the three decades since his death.
The Islamists’ agenda went well beyond the role designated for them
by Sadat’s regime. Kepel wrote:
“The infrastructure they were establishing, and the cadres they
were training in the summer camps and Islamic study weeks, were well prepared
for the possibility of taking on tasks other than smashing the Nasserist and
Communist left for the benefit of the ruling group. As far as they were
concerned, although Nasserism had been an especially execrable period of
jahiliyya [ignorance], fundamentally the Sadat era was scarcely any
better. Its internal contradictions, however, had enabled the [Islamic]
jama’at to grow in the regime’s shadow.”
Sadat’s trip to Israel in 1977 marked the beginning of the rift
with the Islamic fundamentalists, sealed by his signing of the 1979 accords that
made Egypt the first Arab state to recognize Israel. Sadat trumpeted the return
of Sinai to Egypt, but his embrace of the “Jewish state” was the ultimate
sacrilege in the eyes of the Islamists. In 1981, he was assassinated by army
officers and soldiers from al-Jihad, one of the Islamist groups that had
sprouted in the fertile ground Sadat had nurtured.
Repressed by Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak, Islamic
fundamentalists carried out a terror campaign targeting tourists, Copts and
secular intellectuals in the 1990s. Faraj Fawdah, a radical liberal intellectual
and lifelong crusader against religious zealotry and obscurantism, was
assassinated in 1992. In 1994, an attempt was made on the life of Nobel laureate
Naguib Mahfouz, a novelist who wrote compassionately about homosexuals and
prostitutes and of the lives of women in general. Three years later, 58 tourists
were massacred in Luxor.
Iran 1979: Ascent of Islamic Reaction
Sadat was not the only Near Eastern leader to foster Islamic
reaction. In the early 1980s, Turkey’s military rulers, self-proclaimed
guardians of secularism, spurred the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in their
effort to suppress leftists and trade unionists. Religious instruction was made
compulsory at all pre-university levels, and religious schools for imams were
set up. These schools became seedbeds for Islamic ideology and provided leaders
for the Islamist movement, including those who would go on to found current
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The
Zionist rulers of Israel consciously encouraged the growth of Hamas as a counter
to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with General Yitzhak Segev,
former military governor of Gaza, admitting: “We extend some financial aid to
Islamic groups via mosques and religious schools in order to help create a force
that would stand against the leftist forces which support the PLO” (quoted in
Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, eds., Political Islam [1997]).
“To some extent fundamentalism was of our own making, and was at
one time encouraged in order to combat the threat of communism,” Zine al-Abidine
Ben Ali, then the bonapartist ruler of Tunisia, told the London Financial
Times in a 1994 interview. “Such groups were fostered in the universities
and elsewhere at that time in order to offset the communists and to strike a
balance” (quoted in Political Islam). Decades earlier, the U.S.
imperialists had embraced Islamists and other religious reactionaries in the
Cold War against “godless communism.”
It was the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran in early 1979
that gave a huge impetus to the growth of Islamic reaction in the Near East.
This was not inevitable. The Stalinist Tudeh party had the allegiance of the
mass of the working class. Militant struggles by the Iranian proletariat,
especially the strategic oil workers, played a pivotal role in the ouster of the
hated, U.S.-backed Shah, posing the possibility of a fight for workers power.
Yet in the name of “anti-imperialism,” Tudeh and other Iranian left groups threw
their support to the mullah-dominated opposition led by Khomeini, as did the
bulk of ostensibly socialist organizations internationally. Khomeini swept into
power, and the result was a massive bloodbath against unveiled women, leftists,
trade unionists and Kurds, among others.
As we note in the International Communist League’s Declaration of
Principles (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):
“The 1979 ‘Iranian Revolution’ opened up a period of ascendant
political Islam in the historically Muslim world, a development which
contributed to and was powerfully reinforced by the counterrevolutionary
destruction of the Soviet Union. Khomeini’s seizure and consolidation of power
in Iran was a defeat akin to Hitler’s crushing of the German proletariat in
1933, albeit on a narrower, regional scale. The international Spartacist
tendency’s slogan ‘Down with the Shah! No support to the mullahs!’ and our focus
on the woman question (‘No to the veil!’) stood in sharp opposition to the rest
of the left’s capitulation to mullah-led reaction.”
Religious fanaticism, which is especially oppressive to women, is
not a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. Among Protestant televangelists,
ultra-Orthodox Jews, Catholic Opus Dei adherents and Hindutva fundamentalists,
there is no lack of zealots who believe they have a god-given mission to impose
the dictates of their particular “holy scriptures” and to exterminate the
faithless; pogroms by Buddhist mobs against the Muslim Rohingya minority in
Myanmar (Burma) are a recent example. The outlook of Islamists who see unveiled
women and leftists as infidels deserving the wrath of god is not fundamentally
different from that of Christian bigots who terrorize abortion providers in the
U.S. or of fascistic Zionists who spray Palestinians with bullets in the middle
of their dawn prayers.
What makes Islamic fundamentalism stand out is the particular
historical development of the region where it flourishes. In West Europe,
sections of Christianity and Judaism, which like Islam and other religions have
their roots in pre-capitalist society, were driven to adapt to rising capitalism
and its material advances over backward, feudal society. Islam did not have to
adapt in the same way. Until the 16th century, the Muslim societies of North
Africa and the Near East were qualitatively more advanced than Catholic Europe.
But centuries of stagnation and decay under Ottoman rule sealed the Islamic
world from the Renaissance, Enlightenment rationalism and the Industrial
Revolution. As Ottoman power waned, colonial occupation fettered capitalist
development and reinforced social backwardness as a prop to its domination.
Analogous in some key ways to pre-Reformation Christianity, Islam asserts
control over all aspects of individuals’ lives in societies where religion and
state have never been separated.
Afghanistan: Imperialists Foment Religious Reaction
During the period of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th
centuries, the nascent capitalist classes wielded science against religious
obscurantism in their struggle to destroy the feudal barriers to capitalist
development. But in its imperialist epoch of decline and decay, capitalism has
increasingly fostered retrograde beliefs. In their drive to destroy the Soviet
Union and stem the tide of Communism everywhere, the imperialists have allied
themselves with all manner of religious obscurantists—from the Dalai Lama to the
Indonesian Islamic Masyumi and the Afghan mujahedin. John Foster Dulles,
who would serve as U.S. Secretary of State at the height of the Cold War,
declared in 1950: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many
precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist
atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task
is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of
Growth [1968]).
Immediately after World War II, the U.S. recruited Soviet Muslims,
including many who had fought alongside the Nazis, for its covert operations
against the USSR. Some were used by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to air
anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1953, President Eisenhower invited three dozen
Islamist leaders, including from the Muslim Brotherhood, to the White House to
enlist them in Washington’s anti-Communist crusade. Dulles’ common bond was
called into service in 1965-66 when the CIA backed the slaughter of over a
million Indonesian leftists, workers and others at the hands of the army and
Islamists. It was further cemented in the anti-Soviet jihad in
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Upon taking power in Afghanistan in 1978, the modernizing,
pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party (PDPA) government embarked on a program of
reforms: canceling peasant debts, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting
forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. The PDPA’s
measures, particularly those aimed at freeing women from feudal tyranny,
threatened the mullahs’ stranglehold on social and economic life and provoked an
immediate, murderous backlash.
Most explosively, the PDPA made schooling compulsory for girls and
launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year.
The tribal insurgents denounced schooling for women as the first step in a “life
of shame,” and the earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s literacy, as
PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed. A
decree allowing women to divorce was not officially announced because of the
revolt. Even the New York Times (9 February 1980) acknowledged, “It was
the Kabul revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed
Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking
up their guns.”
After repeated urgent appeals from the PDPA regime, in December
1979 the Soviet government sent troops to Afghanistan to prevent a victory by
the mujahedin on the USSR’s southern flank. This was a necessary act of
military defense against imperialist counterrevolution. The conservative Kremlin
bureaucracy certainly did not send 100,000 troops to effect a social revolution.
However, an extended Soviet military presence opened the possibility of
liberation for the peoples of that benighted land, especially women. We
Trotskyists declared: “Hail Red Army!” and called to extend the social gains of
the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples.
Having helped provoke a Soviet military intervention, the
imperialists seized on it as a pretext for a renewed Cold War offensive, using
the woman-hating mujahedin cutthroats in a proxy war to kill Soviet
soldiers. To this end, the CIA launched the biggest covert operation in its
history, to the tune of many billions of dollars. Working through the Saudi
monarchy and the Pakistani secret service, the imperialists coordinated the
recruitment, arming and training of tens of thousands of “Arab Afghans” from
around the world. The Egyptian Brotherhood was a linchpin in this “holy war.”
Freed from prison by Hosni Mubarak and sent to Afghanistan, its members formed a
major mujahedin contingent. Important figures within the leadership
regularly visited Afghanistan. The Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian Medical
Syndicate organized and funded 95 percent of the doctors working for the
Islamist forces.
By the mid 1980s, the Red Army clearly had the mujahedin on
the run. But the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy pulled the troops out in 1988-89
in its further pursuit of the chimera of “peaceful coexistence” with
imperialism. We denounced this criminal betrayal not only of Afghan women and
leftists but of the Soviet degenerated workers state, warning that it was better
to fight the imperialists in Afghanistan than to have to fight them in the
Soviet Union itself.
The pullout from Afghanistan paved the way for capitalist
counterrevolution in East Europe and the USSR, a world-historic defeat for the
proletariat internationally as well as for women, ethnic and national minorities
and all the exploited and oppressed. The post-Soviet years have been marked by
drastic declines in the living standards of working people and the poor, a
tightened imperialist stranglehold on semicolonial peoples, intensified
repression against immigrants and a sharp rise in racist and religious reaction.
No longer constrained by the counterweight of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism
has proclaimed a “one-superpower world” in which it is free to throw around its
military might.
Afghanistan became once again a living hell for women. And the
“Arab Afghans” spawned and nurtured by U.S. imperialism went on to foment
reactionary movements elsewhere, tapping into deep popular resentment against
brutal nationalist regimes and imperialist-dictated austerity. When this
Frankenstein’s monster turned on its creator in September 2001, the U.S.
cynically declared its “war on terror.” In turn, every new imperialist military
attack in the Muslim world has driven fresh forces into the ranks of the Islamic
fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, the “war on terror” has not ended the collaboration
between Islamic fundamentalists and the imperialists. When in power, the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, like their Turkish counterparts in the AKP,
operated within the framework of the imperialists’ hold on the region. As Perry
Anderson observed at the time of Mubarak’s downfall:
“Earlier, the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood or its regional
affiliates entering government would have caused acute alarm in Washington. But
the West now possesses a reassuring blueprint in Turkey for replication in the
Arab lands, offering the best of all political worlds. The AKP has shown how
loyal to NATO and to neo-liberalism, and how capable of the right doses of
intimidation and repression, a pious yet liberal democracy, swinging the
truncheon and the Koran, can be.”
— New Left Review, March-April 2011
A Proletarian Revolutionary Perspective
The march of social reaction and imperialist aggrandizement across
much of the globe in the years since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the
Soviet Union demonstrates the enormity of that defeat. Accommodating to the
bourgeoisie’s false triumphalist declaration of the “death of communism,”
ostensibly socialist organizations the world over—most of which cheered the
collapse of the Soviet Union—have washed away any taint of association with the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and its Bolshevik leadership.
We in the ICL have not. The Bolshevik Revolution remains the high
point of contemporary history and the guide for successful struggle against
exploitation and oppression, with crucial lessons for fighters in Egypt and
elsewhere in the Near East who seek an alternative to military bonapartism and
Islamic reaction. It will take the revolutionary victory of the proletariat to
break the fetters of imperialism and feudal-derived reaction—a perspective that
must be linked to the fight for workers power in the imperialist centers.
The combative Egyptian proletariat must come to the fore at the
head of all the oppressed, including religious and ethnic minorities as well as
women, and fight for its own rule—a workers and peasants government. From
Egypt’s textile factories and Turkey’s auto plants to Iran’s oil fields, and in
the Israeli Zionist garrison state as well, proletarian concentrations in the
region point to the potential to sweep away all of its reactionary regimes and
forge a socialist federation of the Near East. To carry out this task, the
proletariat must be broken from bourgeois nationalism and all forms of religious
backwardness. And that requires revolutionary leadership.
This may seem a distant perspective at present. But there will be
no end to the exploitation of working people and no emancipation of women short
of proletarian revolution. The very workings of the capitalist profit system,
which in the economic crisis of the last five years have ravaged the lives and
livelihoods of workers around the world, sow the seeds of sharp class and social
struggle. It is through intervening into such struggles, fighting for the
political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois forces, that we
seek to forge workers parties of the Bolshevik type as sections of a reforged
Trotskyist Fourth International.
