Islam and Marxism

[maerd2003]

"The anthropologist Ernest Gellner writes that the Marxist world of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and that of Islam are mirror-images of one another in two key respects. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the Marxist faith has collapsed and people are yearning for the return of pluralistic civil society in preference to strong, centralized states. But there has been no loss offaith in the Muslim world, and though civil society has been eroded in Islamic societies there is little callfor its return. Gellner offers an explanation of how these parallelisms came about."

here is the article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2621215


kind of related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_socialism

discuss..

[Helm]

At least Islam has a spiritual element at it's core, Communism was materialism without any of the material, not a great combination.

[Anakarsis]

Communism is not a "belief", is a polytical and mainly economical organization. I dont think that is as discredited or "collapsed" at the level of consciousness as you seem to believe, i really cannot assure that there is "less" communist people now than in 1970 worlwide. It basically collapsed as a world power. Some (even communists) theorics effectively treat this fall as a "loss of belief" in communism by the leading elites of the main communist countries. If this would be true, then it means that the communist economical system itself never failed, it was only that people or the ruling classes get bored of it. I personally think that it was something in the middle, but answering to your question, i would say that communist "belief" was based on rational, real, "material" elements, that when they ceased to exist in enough scale made the sustaining of the trust of the people in the system poorly able to support it. While ISlam, that does not have any rational element, would not be affected by history proving it to have failed as a social system, even when, compared with communist countries, islamic countries has a violently greater levels of social violence, illiteracy, poverty, lack of socio-economic development, lack of individual oportunities, poverty, breach between poor and rich, scientific and academic development, freedom of speech act and conscience, equality of rigths, and many many more. Really compare both shows a worrying level of ignorance of sociology, anthropology, economics and science development, besides being comparing two things that are not meassurable.

[Helm]

Communism is a political sustem based around materialism while Islam is a political system based around monotheism. Islam was somewhat civilised and scientifically/culturally advanced relative to Europe back in the day though, in the last 500 years it seems to have been left behind in the middle ages however.

[Dr. Oza]

Communism is a political sustem based around materialism while Islam is a political system based around monotheism. Islam was somewhat civilised and scientifically/culturally advanced relative to Europe back in the day though, in the last 500 years it seems to have been left behind in the middle ages however.

you cant speak of islam as one entity.. it has never been centralized under specific leadership or dogma as the christian faith was and is

[Helm]

you cant speak of islam as one entity.. it has never been centralized under specific leadership or dogma as the christian faith was and is

Islam was more a kind of unifying political ideology based on submissin to Gods will from the start, Christianity took a few hundred years to get to that stage, even then there were some bust ups between the established church and the differing sects and heretics.

[Shams al-Ma'rifa]

Marxism? Islam allows most aspects of free trade with the exception of interest and monopolies..

[Dr. Oza]

well islam does have compulsory wealth redistribution

zakat is an early form of socialism , state takes a special tax from the richer and uses it for public services for the poor

[Anakarsis]

Free trade is a king of highest moral value?? Would you say that banning it is on the same level of the repression and death penalty for ridicule causes that some Islamic countries imposse?

Islam is not a single phenomenon, that is true. Malaysian and Indonesian islam does not imposse the same penalties for women than Arabic-culture Islam. Indonesia even had a female president. I also find that Islam grows more fanatical and intolerant when they feel threatened. Most Islamic countries today, even being fully muslim inside, feel the trheatening of most of the world. Even rivals during Cold War always considered Islam a worse menace than the other political side, acted in consequence, and as a result Islamic countries grown in paranoia and became more and more aggresive, specially towards what some of them see as a continuation of the Crusades (a.k.a Israel).

Muslim in Europe also became more and more urged to be "militant muslims" in the face, i think, of being treated with discrimination and fear as foreigners. In my country, Argentina, there is about 800.000 Muslims (2% of the total population), inside a population of perhaps 3-4 millons (10% of total population) of people of direct Arabic, Syrian or Iranian blood. We have the largest Mosque in all South America. Well, muslims here are pretty civilized people. Nobody sees them as strangers or different people, at least not for being muslims. In return, they not only never apply their traditional "questionable" customs here, nor they intend to do it, but also are generally very polite and allows the members of their community to invite non-muslims (and even people that is "not of the book", as there are a lot of atheists and some buddhists in Argentina), to their religious ceremonies (specially marriages and the like, but Mosques are anyways opened to everyone that want to enter at all times). They did not proselitism, nor they offend or seek problems with other religions, not even with Jews (my country have the third world largest jew population after Israel and USA). There was never the slightest intention of asking for Sharia law (and public universities in my country banned religious symbols since 1917, althrough nobody is going to tell somebody to not to carry a cross, but i have never seen a woman or girl with a veil in all my life), multi-woman marriage or the like (polygamy is a felony in my country). The worst thing they did was support the Catholic Church in their crusade against the Same-Sex marriage (take into account that our Catholic archbishop, representing a nominal 90% and a real 75% of the population, is a madman that appeared in TV screaming that "Same-sex marriage is the doing of Satan and this is the war of God" XDDDD).

I really think that they way in wich people is treated has a lot to do with how they behave.

For all this, i dont think that Communism and Islam has to be evaluated on the same basis. One is a polytical system, a public matter; the other is a belief, a personal matter. You cannot have more than one polytical system in a country, it simple does not work (althrough people of Sweden may say that they apply marxist distribution principles over a free trade economy and it worked, but now that is another system, not two systems operating at the same time). However, you can have as many religions in your country as you want, and this is not going to cause any turmoil per se, except if intolerance makes people want to impose their beliefs over others or to feel threatened because not everybody shares their beliefs.