A Marxist history of early Islam - Jad Bouharoun

all right thanks Nigel I mean comrades if you're if you're at Marxism this year it means that you're probably aware that Islamophobia is the latest you know cutting edge of racism in the West and this is true for obviously the capitalist states but also for the far right who are trying to make a comeback under the banner of Islamophobia under the banner of a particular hatred for Muslim women for Refugees and so on and so forth and with this you deal politically right you organize against racism in your neighborhoods on the streets in your unions and workplaces and really this is why Socialist Worker is carrying a call for mobilization against Donald Trump on the 13th of July and against the fascists what's his Tommy Robinson the day after that but but really outside or maybe on the margin of of the hardcore racist circles we often have really lazy assumptions which have some somehow you know trickled down to to some sections of the left so those are lazy assumptions about Islam as a religion that there is something particular about Islam that makes it stand out from other religions and makes it you know very very rigid very oppressive unchanging weather you know throughout history or among social classes so those are essential essentialist assumptions and you know sometimes we must it's not always easy but we must differentiate between people that we have to fight and people we have that we have to convince so you know perhaps a good place to start is to you know try to try to paint a picture of the emergence of early Islam who were the first Muslims you know why did they really adopt this religion and and and these moral and even actually political principles so the first question is not the first question the first period we're gonna look at this is we're in the fifth century okay and what we call today the Middle East so roughly between the Atlantic Ocean the Mediterranean Sea and all the way to modern-day Iran really in the fifth century this this region of the world is dominated by two great empires we've got of course the Byzantine Empire with its capital Constantinople which is obviously the Eastern Christian Empire and we've got the Sassanid or the Persian Empire over modern-day Iran and and and Iraq and of course our other empires and so on and so forth and China and India and all that but you know right now we're concerned with this really big historical playing field that is the Middle East particularly we want to look at the Arabian Peninsula so today it would be Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia all the way to Yemen all the Gulf countries and so on and so forth and and actually ancient Greek geographers had had a relatively accurate knowledge of the region so they tell us that today's Yemen is was inhabited at the time by people that they call the southern Arabs so it was this really a string of kingdoms and city-states that were relatively advanced and that played a really important role in trade between China India the Persians and the Byzantine Empire because they controlled ports along along the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and they were separated from from modern-day modern-day Syria by a huge desert to the north so which called the rub al-khali which is today Saudi Arabia basically and this desert was inhabited by a different kind of Arabs the Greeks called them Sarika no I'm certainly mispronouncing but it means people who live in tents and they simply identified as the Arabs in general now the words of the French historian Maximo now some kind of really paint the picture he says that the contrast was great between the southern Arabs settled civilized living in complex and organized states with the permanent bureaucracy and the desert Arabs an ensemble of wandering tribes with rough manners deprived from almost any material wealth hungry and free and yet history is a bit ironic because it was amongst those unlikely nomads that one of the greatest world religions will emerge with there are only a few generations and they would they would also be able to build to carve out an empire that was you know bigger than the Roman Empire at one point so you know how and why did Islam emerge in this unlikely context the the the Lebanese Communist say in a new way who's who's one of the main sources for this talk he writes that Islam by its social content as well as its religious doctrine emerged as an evolution of what was already brewing in the depth of pre-islamic society okay so we have to look at pre Islamic society and this is what I'm gonna start by doing so we need to take a closer look at those desert Arabs the first question that we asked is quite simple which is how do they make a living so we're all right I've already said that they're nomadic people so they're always wandering they're never they never stay at the same point for any length of time so they cannot be peasants okay because you have the land and it takes time and so on and so forth but it doesn't mean it doesn't mean either that they are isolated hunter-gatherer tribes because you're in the desert so there isn't much to hunt there's even less to gather so you know you can't really make a living in this way you know what they are is there a special type of nomadic people there are pastoral people okay so mainly they live from herding camels okay so they have camel herds which they sometimes eat but most of the time they use them for transportation and for their milk and they exchange camel milk with you know dates other agricultural products really really rough perhaps you know craft products and stuff like that from nearby settled communities okay those communities were usually Christian or Jewish but so we have a very important element here is that they're nomadic they're not completely isolated okay there is trade so there is this idea that they do have to trade with people who are fundamentally different from them now this is Trey that's still a very very very basic level but it will play a very very important role in the future but for now they lead a very precarious lifestyle so there is no real material wealth to be to talk of all it consisted of was tents and the candles that they had so so you know on this basis there there basically isn't enough for there to be rich people and poor people so it's a classless society okay there are no social classes the the the the scarce property that they had was shared and it was supposed to be communal so it's a classless society but it's not a completely horizontal society there is a chief and it's usually a man and and this Chiefs role is kind of leading the tribe in its interaction with nature because they move they wander from one water water spot to another and in their interaction with other tribes but the leader doesn't really it's it doesn't mean that there is a state okay he doesn't have a police doesn't have an army he doesn't have any civil servants to kind of enforce his will so he leads by consent okay and and and in this context the principal ideological value of this society is tribal honor okay the the the Chiefs honor was the measure of his capacity to sacrifice himself for for his for his fellow tribes people and to maintain the honor of the tribe by avenging any killing that came from another tribe okay so there are a bunch of tribes in the desert there are no unifying set of laws it's basically tribe against tribe which means that you could end up with really long periods of vendetta between tribes but also it meant that even when they were looting or fighting sometimes tribes were reluctant to kill because they knew that this could you know really escalate and start a very long run that that so they have rough manners but they weren't you know always at each other's throats so okay so their religious beliefs at the time were polytheistic okay so each tribe as it wandered around the desert carried its own idols those those idols were generally linked in one way or another to to nature but they were very much linked to every tribe so every tribe had its own idol and and in terms of cultural production that was it really because they're they're living in such harsh conditions and while material conditions don't mechanically determine your culture but they certainly set a certain set of limits beyond which you cannot go and and when you're a wandering tribe looking for food and water you know you can't do much in terms of cultural production you can't really have sculptures architecture is really out of the way so the only other bit of cultural production and the principle bit of cultural production of those people it was spoken word it was poetry each tribe had its poets and they were the historians they were the entertainers they were the ideologues of the tribe and they kind of they played the role of political agitators you know if if a tribes member dishonored himself or herself by their behavior you know they could be sure that they will get a good beating by the poet that would be really humiliating so he kept Skye he kind of kept everyone everyone in line in a way okay and those pre-islamic poets actually many of them have many of their verses have survived until today so they're still recited today in the indie in the Arab world but this is only a preliminary picture okay Islam emerges ultimately because there are huge dramatic transformation that are sweeping through these these these these societies one one of the main reasons is the slow decline and collapse of the southern Arabs kingdoms so these decline collapse we don't really have time to go into why and how this happened but the consequence is that trade the Silk Road is disturbed okay the reports don't really function anymore so caravans have to start crossing the desert to get into Egypt to get into Damascus to get up to Mesopotamia and they start crossing the Arabic territories and I mean there's no pretty way of putting it but there's a business transacted transaction that happens the Arabs basically tell the traders well that's a very nice Caravan you got here it would be a shame if someone looted it so do you want to pay us for protection protection from whom well our cousins are probably ambushing you you know a bit down the road anyway it's very complicated we don't really understand business here on Marxism but they start accumulating wealth they start accumulating wealth and it's not enough wealth to disturb the trade between the great empires but it is enough wealth to disturb the internal functioning of Arab societies okay so now that they're accumulating wealth they start running their own caravans so they have goods to carry and so they need to settle somewhere we come because you can't always be wandering around and this is how the first towns begins to emerge begin to emerge the main town is Mecca okay and I want to I just want to you know give you a sense of the historical urgency you have this change okay this isn't really hunter-gatherers who over thousands of years with the Neolithic Revolution are adapting to agriculture and so on and so forth this is happening within a few generations they're settling and there's an ancient poetry that describes Mecca at the time as a land which refuses to yield so there is absolutely no agriculture in Mecca so it can only survive off trade so it is a trade hub okay this is this is very important and the consequence of this newfound prosperity is of course social inequality the old communal regime is completely shattered you have usually a small layer of you know entrepreneurs who start accumulating the wealth usually around the tribe chief who uses his influence and camel herds grow in size they become really really big we're talking about hundreds and even thousands of camels but they're privatized so there's no longer communal property pastoral land is also privatized what water is privatized you know the Tories didn't really invent anything which means that you've got the majority of the tribes member are deprived from their means of existence so you know you've got this really big contradiction that yes you're reaching a higher level of civilization you know on condescendingly we can say that but the same time you're leaving behind the vast majority of your population who are now basically the urban poor and so the powerful tribe of Quraysh it is the most powerful Arab tribes it seizes Mecca and the ancient poetry tells the story of its leader koozai and it describes him as he became wealthy and thus his honor increased so we have the first link between political power and wealth this is something new for Arabs but we also have you know in in the symbolic of now our honor used to be about communal property about about the values of solidarity in the desert and so on and so forth and now the most honorable man is the richest man and he's leading a tribe of really poor people so we've got this you know really big contradiction between what their ideology is supposed to express and what it's actually describing um okay now so the institution of the tribe doesn't disappear and the and and tribal culture doesn't disappear but is modified by those economic tensions the aristocracy the Croatia aristocracy settles around the sanctuary called the Kaaba which is still the the the main destination of pilgrimage today for for Muslims so they settle around the Kaaba and they put their idols there and they put the idols of the other tribes there so the Kaaba itself becomes a religious symbol and it becomes a destination of pilgrimage for tribes from all over Arabia okay it's still polytheistic okay you've got many gods and such and so on and so forth but there is this kind of you know material pull towards a unification of religious practice and of course there is a pilgrimage season it lasts three months every year and you know by by by a very fortunate coincidence it's also a period of truth between the tribes so they stopped fighting and they start trading during this time so it becomes a really big long trade hub becomes a big trade fair you know as many as 15 20,000 people gather in Mecca at the time and and this is this is we're talking about tribes that numbered maybe hundreds of people only two three generations before so this is a really big shift so they have giant trade fairs and leader leaders of the tribes don't really set up state institutions but they have sort of councils and they talk to each other and they discussed matters of trade and war and so on and so forth and then you have a kind of unification of Arabic culture for the first time you can talk about an almost unified Arabic culture Arabic language begins to organically unified around around the Qureshi dialect because everybody's flocking to Mecca and you have to trade with them and so we're going to talk a bit like them and this is more or less the Arabic that we know today this is the Karachi Arabic and the poets acquire an even bigger bigger role because now they're they're sort of you know spin-doctors for for rich tribal leaders and they engage in really epic oratory battles with one another you know they they still talk about the virtues of communal life but it's a life that no longer exists and then you know they sing the praises of their of their of their leaders and they try to ridicule their rivals and this is in front of hundreds of people so they become really kind of stars of at the time and the most famous of them are still famous today so we've got this this tendency towards cultural unification but the problem is that all of this from the point of view of the ruling class all of this rests on the politic worship and actually still the the the political division amongst the between the tribes okay so it's as if the tribe leader kind of created the objective economic basis for a superior ideological unity of the Arabs but their position as a ruling class means that they abhor any kind of challenge to their ideology which is still tainted with tribal divisions so this is a big contradiction and another big contradiction is that at the time there is word that reaches mecca of really the two big pillars of the old world for them the Persian Empire and the Byzantine Empire they're searching to vacillate there's word of military pressure on them traders bring words words of social unrest and famine and so on and so forth so you can imagine that at the time you know Arabs are feeling that you know there is something world historic going on perhaps this is reflected in the in the very dramatic and sometimes even apocalyptic tone of the early Quranic revelations so in this context it is usual for groups of people or individuals to start you know challenging the dominant ideology and and one of them is Muhammad bin Abdullah he's born in the year around the Year 571 and he's a member of the ruling Quraysh II tribe but he's one of the poor ones okay so he doesn't have any wealth of his own so it's this contradictory position that he's protected by the tribal owner of the most powerful tribe but at the same time he doesn't have a new wealth of his own and so he has to find work on a caravan for his rich cousin rich and widowed cousin Khadijah and he witnessed the aristocracy Europe really stink ostentation you know really badly flaunting their fortune that they amass through trade monopolies and at the same time you had small merchants artisans and craftsmen and other townspeople who were really cut off from the source of wealth and they formed the mass of the urban poor around whom loitered all sorts of you know moneylenders middlemen and other other scavengers now at some point Rhodesia proposes marriage to Muhammad he agrees which which sort of freeze him freeze him from the burden of constant work so he has you know more time to meditate and so on and so forth and it was during one of the one of his meditations in in a cave over Mecca you know according to tradition the first revelation was made to him by Gabriel and that he learned that he was the Prophet the messenger of allah and those revelations constitute you know over the rest of his life constitute the quran what we know today as the quran now before we go on okay i'm assuming that some of us in this room are religious believers and some of us aren't i belong to the second group but you know we can still find a common ground around this I think one enlightenment critic of of Muhammad's I think it was Voltaire I'm not sure but they simply argued that he was an impostor you know he was a very cunning and very skilled in posted they don't deny his historical role that he played but he was nevertheless a liar who was motivated by sheer ambition and kind of you know manipulated really ignorant and superstitious people now this is this is an interpretation that we as Marxist must absolutely reject I think first of all I mean there is a lot of evidence a lot of psychoanalysis that has been done on Muhammad that shows that actually he was it was most likely that he was very very sincere but I think more fundamentally the the kind of easy idea of you know an intelligent impostor and irrational people kind of coming together and and and and beginning Islam it actually sort of obscures the real social reasons the question we have to answer is why did his message actually find the grip in that social reality okay so we don't dismiss religion we obviously don't dismiss religious believers but we take it very seriously and we try to find you know the kind of the rational kernel in every religious message that's what I'm gonna try to do okay so say anyway argues that the very the various quranic' surahs' that is the chapters and the verses are concrete illustrations of phenomena that that shaped 7th century arabian society even if these are sometimes expressed symbolically metaphorically in the shape of vague or precise guidelines or even as promises of heavenly rewards or hellish punishment so we don't have much time so I really want to focus on two main ideological concepts that we find in the Quran the first is now heed which means it's Arabic for unification obviously is the unification of of worship so you have one God there's a lot of insistence in Islam on the unity of of God because you know an emergent in a very poetic but the the late Chris Hartmann writes that Islam we're not simply a set of beliefs or rules for moral behavior it was also a political program for reforming society replacing the barbarism of competition often armed between tribes and families with an ordered on ma community based on a single code of laws okay so now heed it takes on a further social meaning okay and we will see that the the very process of religious unification of the Arab tribes under Islam is actually a process of cultural ideological and political unification and the second concept is akhirah which is which you might you might call it Judgment Day so it basically says that again I'm using the words of sanam Rui it's an explicit promise of heavenly salvation for the socially deprived and your oppressed and the problem is of eternal punishment for the oppressors okay so many of Muhammad's early followers included slaves and former slaves and and poor people you know the oppressed of the time because slaves are not only you know and it not only sucks to be a slave but even after you're free you see you're still not a member of any tribe so you can be killed really really easily because no one's gonna be who's gonna have to avenge your life so so these people are completely you know remote from the tribal organization and actually oppressed by it and and they see Islam as as a great calling but it was not only the oppressed it was also songs of some of the wealthy merchants of Mecca at the time which shows that even among people linked to the ruling class there was a sense of something was wrong and something had to change okay now over the year we have a small sect of dozens and then hundreds of Muslims that that can emerge in in Mecca and I'm not using the word section in a sect in a in a negative manner it's just that they're in a very hostile environment so they have to you know really keep keep tight-knit and and closing it um but the mass that the Muslim appear appeal starts to grow and then there's a there's two events a few weeks apart that are very important for Muhammad and are really devastating the first one is the is the death of hadisha she was older than him and she played she was the first convert and she played a very important role as a as a support and also as kind of an authority for for for Muhammad so he was really affected by that and then a few weeks later his uncle died now his uncle was it was a member of Quraysh he never converted but he remained close to Muhammad and he was really his protector in Mecca this is why Muhammad was not killed in Mecca it's because his uncle belonged to Quraysh and people still had this thing about tribal honor but with him out of the way the leaders decided to kill Muhammad so they held an election and they elected this is and you know the story goes they elected one month one member from from each tribe to participate in the assassination of Muhammad so that it would look like a like a that kind of kind of a common endeavor a way of unifying the tribes Muhammad heard about this and he was really unimpressed by this wonderful display of democracy and he entered into talked with leaders of Medina which is a settlement a couple of hundred miles from Mecca and he decided to leave and this is the hijra Muhammad and hundreds of his companions leave in the year 622 and this is year one of the of the of the Muslim calendar Medina it was it was a smaller trade hub less successful than Mecca but it was also an agricultural center so which means that you had Jewish people actually there so they were there for a very long time because they were they were settled so you had Arab Jewish tribes and politic Arab tribes and it was the leaders of the tribes of the other politic tribes who had you know welcomed Muhammad and this is really the moment where Islam can start to be practiced openly it goes out of its of its shell it's it's it's an it's in a friendly environment the first mosque is built very quickly it becomes you know a gravitational Center first for the Muslim community and then for the whole town and you know slowly but surely Mohammad won the conversion and the palette and the political adhesion of the politic tribes he could propose an alternative worldview which valued the individual as part of a larger community and he was able actually to put an end to the endless vendetta's that that really played life at Medina and he put in practice forms of social solidarity charity towards the poor he bans the excesses of the rich you know like usury and and and and stuff like that and he praises the ideal Muslim is the honest merchant you know so it there's no shame in making money but you have to do it honestly and in a moderate manner so there is an attempt with Islam to really early attempt to harmonize and conciliate society that nevertheless carries social antagonisms okay but islam is here to not radically distribute redistribute resources but rather you know bring some sort of cultural and also material harmony to society but even if we wouldn't call it revolutionary today it was certainly a revolutionary at the time because the mere thought of the rich mechons having a responsibility towards the poor was really abhorrent for that for the ruler sure it required the revolution to actually to actually impose it so in Medina we have the first germs of Islamic institutions there is still no state so Muhammad leads by consent this consent rests on of course his religious legitimacy but also his his political skills he was he was a very very good politician actually you know he knew when to take a step back he knew when to push he knew when to emphasise this or that aspect you know he kind of bended the sticks the stick when it was needed I know if it maybe it reminds you of someone okay so and he can muster an army and after after a while the mekin leaders start thinking that well maybe it's better if we welcome Mohammed because our trade is being really disturbed and everything and and Islam has become really a powerful force in in in the region and so they they they open Mecca back and Muhammad goes back to Mecca and this is when really almost the whole of the arabian tribes embrace islam and they send emissaries to Mecca and so on but it was a short-lived success two years later Mohammed dies and you know all the latent tensions start to emerge a lot of the of the of the of the last-minute converter converted kind of convert back from Islam and we have what we may call a counter-revolution that begins you know wars against against Islam and it was certainly the period that religious zeal was at its height okay so it was a really bloody civil war the Muslims nevertheless win it they unite Arabia and which means that they can start invading Persia and Iran and it and it and they have spectacular success because they're on the rise and those empires are actually hated by the people that lived under them so barely a few years after Muhammad's death we have the mekin leaders ruling over Damascus over Alexandria over a lap oh and so on and so forth so it's a completely different environment and they're ruling over mostly Christians and Jews and they don't really ask them to convert and the Christians and Jews you know some of them greet the Muslim as liberators paradoxically there's a flourishing of all the small Christian sects that use sects that used to be called heretics by the by the Greek clergy and even the clergy itself is quite happy with the Muslims because the Greeks are gone and now the locals can rise in the ranks so they become actually the Damascus clergy is actually a support of the early Islamic caliphate and and this is when so there is you know really big religious tolerance they do take a special tax from non-muslims but this is a any rate lower than what the Byzantines used to take so people are kind of okay with it and there's even this this really ironic I don't know if it's funny letters that come from Muslim civil servants sending really angry letter to the Caliph to the leader of the Islamic nation asking him to issue a religious fatwa against conversions to Islam because it was disturbing their tax collection you know so you can't get any more pragmatic than that and and the Caliph himself Omar was was really pragmatic there is a French orientalist veggies blonde cher who says all my raised pragmatism to the level of genius because he started a thing called HT HOD which is the creative interpretation of Holy Scripture so fundamentally it meant that he was discarding some of the teachings of Mohammed who had barely died a few years before and he was emphasizing others because you know he realized that now he had a huge state to run and they were no longer in Arabia okay so in in this way he plants the seed of of what becomes Arab Islamic philosophy um now unfortunately the contradictions the social contradictions don't go away at the Meccan rich who had fought Islam for almost 20 years are now ruling in its name over really a vast empire they amass more and more wealth and very soon you have an Islamic or a stock recei and the Islamic urban poor and so Islam itself from the religion of the United people it becomes itself kind of an ideological terrain so the rulers the conservative rulers try to rule in the name of Islam and then there are social revels also in the name of Islam you know various Shia heresies the partisans of Ali and so on and so forth so I guess to sum up and thanks Nadia for being so indulgent and I guess to sum up Islam was never even from the beginning even you know in those dark times dark ages it was never a fixed ideology that hovered above society commanded the full adhesion of you know the blindly faithful okay it was rather you know like any religion like like like any ideology we have to look at there really at the social context of people who believe in it and and start asking you know why what's appealing about this okay so I'm yeah so I'll just up here and I guess you know of the discussion will be will be interesting thank you so that was a great talk I learnt an awful lot one of the one of the questions before I came was I was I was asking myself well why did Islam establish itself in that particular place in that culture and you've explained that very well one thing I have got a question about as you know you talked about how Islam and and the state that developed spread outside Saudi Arabia and that seems to have happened very very quickly in historic terms my question is how do you explain if like the rapid development of off of that Empire into into North Africa and obviously the Middle East first but into North Africa as well how how did why did that happen so quickly Miriam will be followed by a commuted from and you told us that the Jews were around and Jewish tribes and obviously Jews who were a monotheistic and I just wondered how much influence and how it happened that Jewish stories the Old Testament stories and the patriarchs got into the Quran yeah and basically I have a question I had a discussion in Frankfurt in Germany just a couple of weeks ago sort of a debate and the young one was talking about progressive Islam was that she gave one concrete example which is quite convincing that women can also have heritage and pass on their wealth and so on so forth so that's that is progressive but on the other hand how many women had so that's a bit so perhaps you could say something about that thank you I'd like to call the guy at the back and then the brother on the side here with the headphones around his neck you could come forward by the way in the meantime you just raised their hand in the last slots key do it again okay got you right two questions can you explain the Satanic Verses business right secondly according to Christian propaganda the Muslims were prevented from conquering the whole of Europe by a Christian military leader called Charles Martel who fought a battle which prevented the Muslim getting up from Spain into France so could Islam of conquered the whole of Europe and wipes out Chris western Christianity but Frederick angles wrote something where he said that he gave a different explanation he didn't just say the Christians won a battle and the whole of history would have been different if they Butler gone different he said something like Muslim ideology wouldn't have fitted wouldn't have suited European society and that was why it didn't spread any further than the north of Spencer do you know anything about that place thank you yes so mine is that really a question but just from a perspective from a British Muslim you know I often get asked by friends oh so were you've forced into Islam this is very early on in the 90s why did you come become Muslim now I'm looking they're denying it I became Muslim because obviously I was born to a Muslim family right so I'm gonna deny that however when I started developing my own critical thinking and I and I put that around between 16 and 18 and stroyed I started questioning my faith I realized contrary to when I hate idiots especially from the right say Oh Islam is backwards actually when I've looked into Islam I found it incredibly forward-thinking especially for its time period for exam prior to Islam women will be female babies were being killed because they were considered expensive to keep and with the introduction of Islam the Quran outlawed that saying that this is a domination this is not the way to behave this is not how simple people are Muhammad peace be upon him was an actual feminist not only was his wife a businesswoman and his employer and a lot of blokes find that a bit odd but I'll tell you something he championed our women's rights throughout his life and also even on his last sermon he explained in a patriarchal society the importance of a woman's position in society he also reported a woman as the feet of the mother is entrance to heaven so women had a very strong position in society similarly when women did it have rights in Arab society you could have sex with them and discard them what happened was that Islam said if you you have to marry women you can't just have sex with them you can't just discard them so it gave women financial rights you also had to give a divorce settlements before marriage so in the event that you get married and divorce she's got some financial asset furthermore if she gets pregnant she's got financial securities again these are a couple of just a couple of points as to why I see Islam as very progressive and the reason why lives of black people and loads of Asians adopted an embrace Islam is because it is against capitalism it doesn't allow the rich or the poor to divide each other to look down on each other no there's no difference between black and white and I think that's the reason why no the poor people sword is safe and food you know what I can be an equal to my brother whether he's white black Asian Chinese whatever so that I just wanted to give that perspective from my perspective [Applause] no I wanna start really by thanking the speaker because I think that the entire talk has really helped to dispel this whole myth that somehow there is just one homogeneous development of Islam which is predicated upon violence jihad terrorism and what-have-you and I think that really well it speaks volumes of its the rich diversity of different types of traditions different influences that we see across the Arabian Peninsula evolving over many many many many many decades and generations I think that the whole question about the spread of Islam and how it appears to be so rapid and it is rapid in in many respects but I think it's also important to bear in mind that you know as as Chad said you had the development of Islam happening in the middle of two major empires these are the two superpowers of the time in terms of the Byzantium Empire and the Sassanid Empire in the east and these empires they were oppressive they were exploitative they had to prevent them minorities that were oppressed so the Byzantium Empire oppressed Christian minorities such as a historians like Jewish community so there were lots of reasons for discontent and internal internal discontent and dissent within these empires and then she begin to see the complete and utter collapse and disintegration of these empires it throws the societies that they had dominated including the Arabian Peninsula into complete free fall you know all the old values where the old cultural traditions the old tribal sort of networks that existed they completely a torn asunder and it's in this kind of society that you begin to see why both materially as well as politically and socially the sort of message of Muhammad could begin to make sense this was a region in which there have been many forecasts that you know a new Messiah was going to return now these ideas emanated out of the two other monotheistic traditions predating Islam both Judaism and Christianity believed that there was going to be a messiah that would come they obviously had an impact Muhammad's ideas and his particular fitted at this moment in time the one of the great things about his teachings and I thought dad put it really well when he talks about how he's trying to sort of homogenize and unify a society which is still wracked full of all sorts of antagonisms the teachings of early Islam could speak to both elites as they were merging and dominating as well as to the poor as well as to slaves that would convert to Islam because both different classes could see a message in this that fitted their particular needs and that's why it's important I think to register when you look at this total development in its historical in its material context is political context that's why we're examining any particular religion it's not a question of saying oh it's long as more progressive or Islam is more barbaric I mean that kind of simplistic analysis is really what the right wing really want and those Islamophobes want because they want to have a world divided between you know Christianity which is somehow seen as being liberal and Islam seeing is being barbaric and completely violent no we have to go much deeper into that to understand at every moment in each twist and turn why it is a particular set of ideas whether they're expressing themselves politically or whether expressing themselves using a mixture of religious language as well as political language can begin to find expression and can begin to make sense to people in different moments in time and that really is what the beauty of Marxism and it's a kind of analysis that we're trying to put forward is in terms of attempting to explain this because if you're able to explain and understand it in that context then you're also able to begin to explain how we as humanity can go much much further beyond just the limitations of any particular religion into really fighting for something which is far better than that [Applause] all right I'll call you up and then I saw a woman raised her hands with glasses yep if you come up as well but you can speak first thanks very much I thought it was absolutely brilliant talk just one particular question some modern historians argue that really the Arab conquests arise from the periphery of the old Byzantine and Persian Empire slogging each other out slogging it out to a knockout draw knocking out each other's and really what you get is it's really from the periphery of the Levant that you get the rising of the Arab armies sometimes from the old soldiers of the previous armies and the references within the Quran are more pertaining to the periphery of the eleventh rather than to Mecca itself and that if you look in the early Arab empires there is not a great Islamic preference in terms of symbols it takes a few decades before those actually emerged and later Islam comes along as providing the ideological glue and justification for the Arab conquests as a new ideology for a new Empire conveniently using a dead prophet from the Arab desert be interested in your comments I've got a couple of questions and there's one other thing I think it's really important to emphasize why people would choose I mean I'm on your tux you start with the fifth century and I'm going right up to a bit more but today still that people would choose to become members of the Islamic phase because if you look at somebody like Malcolm X even then you can see how that faith actually was to actually had some appeal to people because she could be a Muslim and he could be black and that was fine you know you didn't have you could be a Black Muslim in America and be part of a community which actually had something to say about the racism American society and you can see that today I think I think that strand of what's happening is it's still true the only thing I wanted to ask your questions I mean he said you start you talked about diversity in Islam that and there's and I think that's because [Music] after the next speaker do you like to come to the front question is there any historical or political connection to be possibly made between the economic structures of the early slimy describe the taxation structures the what what we could call some degree of social security cut on well etc etc and and the later development of the welfare state in the West could could there be some movement of ideas that could be traced between those two concepts it's just a far-fetched the next speaker so hand raised at the back if you'd like to come to the from history but I have a question regarding the remarks of the coma right before about the sort of modernization question by Mohammed I think that women's oppression can't have been very strong in a society which is living in such a basic level so I can't imagine that women had very inferior and fury or role the nomadic society and the question is whether these laws regarding women were more a reflection of this life and not some sort really of modernization and intriguing idea of helping women and so on I'd like to thank God for his trunk like many other comrades but I do think that it is extremely important for us to really absorb what he said because not just on the right wing of British society but unfortunately in areas of the left there is a latent or unexpressed Islamophobia and the assumption that somehow Christianity is more progressive than Islam and when you listen to jazz explanation unruhe minded actually all the explanation of the rise of Christianity Christianity was a small and irrelevant sect until the Roman Empire was so torn apart that it was in the interests of Constantine and that ruling class to adopt a unifying ideology and the way in which God has presented his argument shows that there are important parallels there and I think what God has said is important for another reason it is that really under many Muslim regimes the question of Tolerance or fall both Jew Muslim and Christian to live together was very often not always but often the norm and the comrade earlier mentioned andalusia al andalus and yet that was a society which actually is really well written about by Taric Ali among other people but it underlines that it was a tenement society that was then smashed pieces boy the keister and you already have to go to cordovero seville to see the most appalling way in which muslim culture was obliterated by building churches or mosques by oppressing people and so on awesome next speaker saw a hand at the back yeah you actually both of you can come down one after the other and yeah after that will be the final contribution before I bring up Jed who's got a lot to get back to so on the question of the context of Islam within Christianity and Judaism Islam sees itself as the end of the monotheistic message so that's the kind of context so he incorporates Jesus Christ is a prophet Islam I'm elapse Muslim by the way so I get to know this I get to say but but so Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam too John is considered a posture of it in Islam Christians are protected and revered you know is the Prophet sort of in same image with Judaism so that's the context that the people existing who were Christians and was and Jews could it was a short leap to accept even nominally that the notion of monotheism paternalistic monetary-ism that goes its roots maybe back to Zoroaster and I can add another another one of the subject obviously so but the appeal of Islam is its universality that there are rights rich and poor being equal black and white being equal Billy men and women of course so that equality that he got notion of legality appealed plus the legal concepts like of giving that there was a framework in law plus the idea of taxation the idea of the the common Treasury these appealed to people Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia comrades didn't become Muslim because armies arrived at that door something appealed to the notion and that appeal is that kind of an egalitarian classes the analysis it appealed to the working classes because they saw themselves as equals even to their financial betters so that's an important thing I think I'm backing up on a couple of points that people kind of alluded to a few gee it came to Gleneagles that's how long ago it was I worked for a guy who was a Muslim he wanted to bring up okay I was proofreading the book for him and he said the book was going to be titled Islam it's just Bolshevism plus God and we had the most fantastic chats about it I was like that obviously but he the trash we had were very interest and a couple of things that people have mentioned just made me think of that thank you and so how much import can we place into that just Bolshevism plus God that's the best question look one of the things that they kind of Islamophobes throw it Islam to underline their argument that's you know uniquely backward and so on is to say you know where's your enlightenment where's your Reformation where's your your Renaissance and and I think you know the dad left the story about the development of if I'm about this huge expanding Empire I mean my all too limited reading you know what what you then see is actually a huge transformation in the means of subsistence an agricultural revolution which transforms a level of surplus in society and it's true there's not a cruel interrelationship between material wealth and culture but if you have more wealth more food and so on one of the things you can do is create an army of intellectuals and what you see in say it's a Cultural Revolution that takes place I think it's eight ninth century you see something called the translation movement overcome where you know ancient Greek texts in particular things lost in much of medieval Europe are translated absorbed into the intellectual culture feed into the development of an independent philosophy and if you think about the university within Islam there was an survived in northern Spain with Christian diversity and it could not happen without Islam no Islam no renascence all right thanks thanks everyone um Bolshevism + God I mean this is what you get when you say that Mohammed bended the stick right but more more more seriously it does ask the question that you know I think two other contributors make which is you know what's the deal with Islam and capitalism can there can there be social inequality in Islam what about the question of interest well yeah interest was banned that was one of the first things that one of the first teachings and one of the first things that was actually implemented was the banning of interest but it's because you had a very small financial aristocracy that landed money would like two hundred percent interest today - really poor people so there was this the whole question of interest was a it was kind of a symbolic cutting edge of the despotism of of the financial elite of the time and there's a whole book that deals with the question of interest actually and how it was actually applied in Islamic societies and it's written by maksim hasan it's called capitalism in islam it's not all good but it does have a lot of empirical evidence that actually this man was never really respected and Muslims were really really quick to find a way around it and that's what that's why you have Islamic banking today which is basically like you know judeo-christian banking except you know they don't call it interest but at the end of the day the same result and this happened really really really quickly because again the question that we have to ask is well who's controlling society who's the ruling class and and which you know which way are they going to bend the stick you know when you're when you're ruling aristocracy that is now ruling in the name of Islam well you're not gonna you know insist on the question of interest you might insist on the question of charity because you know there's this paternalistic thing towards the poor and so on and so forth but really to sum up there is nothing in Islam that prevents or encourages capitalism okay because there's also the other argument that you know Islamic countries are more backward because Islam is not like Protestantism and it was kind of a barrier to capitalism as an ideology there's absolutely no actual evidence of that okay and you can find this kind of contradiction where Islam can appeal poor people because when you talk about equality before God and so on and so forth poor people can start thinking about you know material equality while rich people will say well equality before the law that means law and order that means a respect of property and and this is I'm really summing up but this is this is the ideological flexibility which explains even today organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood which are extremely contradictory which have pull which can pull the poor which can pull a core cater of middle class people who are you know by their material condition kind of between the poor and the rich and you couldn't pull section of the sections of the rich who are really encouraged by the conservative aspect of the message okay so we have to ask who's interpreting before we we decide that this or that ideology is absolutely progressive absolutely reactionary okay now on the question of the quick spread III I mentioned the enlightening enlightenment explanation of Mohammed being a fraud and fooling people into into into following him and then unfortunately someone else talked about kind of a historic historic fraud of imposing Islam after they had conquered because they needed you know a justification after that that's not how ideology happens okay no one comes and says okay I'm going to I'm going to impose this ideology because you know it'll be a great impostor this is this is I'm sorry this is kind of a lazy explanation the reason the reason why Islam spread so quickly or the Islamic armies spread so quickly it's explained by Chris Hartmann they're on the rise they've got religious zeal and they've got all this energy and all this fighting experience and they have camels cannons are extremely important okay they can go hundreds you know 100 mile a day in the desert carrying two hundred kilograms without eating for like five days you don't get anything else like that until the internal combustion engine is invented and the Muslims knew how to use this against the really static lazy heavy Byzantine armies and as I've interest as I've also emphasized the Jews and the Christians didn't want to support the Byzantines against the Muslims and you even had Christian tribes Christian Arab tribes who had bit kind of assimilated in the Byzantine Empire that fought on the side of the Muslims it's it's the example of the Hassan it's for instance um and but it is true that the Muslims didn't really impose their ideology at first because think about it put yourself in their shoes you were in the desert for a very long time and suddenly you know you'd heard of Damascus and you'd heard of Aleppo and you'd heard of Alexandria and suddenly you're there and you have to rule they didn't impose themselves and they didn't destroy the Byzantine with the Byzantine States at first the first generation you know so for decades they settled in small camps on the fringes of the of the town small military camps they were called the am SAR and this is where the word muscle comes from which is Arabic for Egypt so they settled there because well I simply don't know yet how to rule how to rule this state and they slowly ease themselves into it and another reason why there was not this really quick kind of cultural homogenization is that there was civil war for a very long time in the Muslim empire no right after all my dies so this is 12 years after the death of the Prophet we've got a new caliph which is really the who really represents the aristocracy and this starts a civil war and from this you have the really long struggle after this caliph is killed by an angry mob well angry you know protesters then you have the long struggle between Ali on the one hand and more are we on the other and it is the ultimate victory of Maha RIA because Ali compromised and was actually killed by his own supporters you know some of his own supporters basically declared that Ali was an infidel and in a posted and they killed him because he tried to compromise with the aristocracy because you know he wanted unity and and and and this was also his his his his weakness and it is only after that yet that you have really the cultural flourishing of the Islamic empires under the under G the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus and then you've got the Abbasid who make a revolution move it to Baghdad and then you've got a new Caliphate that emerges in in in Cairo so there is always struggle yeah on the question of women's oppression yes at the time it was progressive one one comrade said that women couldn't have been so oppressed in a nomadic society we're no longer in a nomadic society we're in a society where old values of solidarity of equality are trampled to the its you know it's really shocking it's a cultural shock for the people who are on the receiving end of those changes and this includes women who actually belong to the ruling classes you know we're talking about Omar Omar II was the second caliph how did he the story goes that he was converted by his own sister after he wanted to kill her he meant to kill her and then she tried to he meant to kill her for converts to Islam she converted to Islam before him and he wanted to kill her and she could kind of convince him and so on and so forth so and many women of the ruling class or of the better you know better off sections of society that turned to Islam too and it was not only the the oppressed although the first martyr of Islam is considered to be soo Miah and she was a woman and a former slave and obviously very very poor and she was killed before because she was a former slave because she wasn't protected by any tribe but so again I don't want to get into is Islam absolutely progressive towards women or is it not you know if you want an answer ask Muslim women today okay I think they wouldn't you know the one among themselves who considered themselves feminists certainly wouldn't accept to live the way the first Muslim women lived because you know they have something better and they can conciliate their faith with a new social reality and that's kind of okay you know so it really depends on context so it can be liberating and it can be sometimes you know non liberating but we have to look at social forces that are using it is Islam liberating for women in Saudi Arabia absolutely not can Islam be a form of rebellion a form of liberation for a young woman in France wearing a hijab yes it can okay because it's a defy it can be seen as a defiance to against racists and and and and the French state okay yeah I think yeah one last one last thing about Judaism yes there is a link between Islam and Judaism because the meccans knew about Christianity they knew about Judaism because of the settled tribe with whom they exchanged actually you know before they settled in Mecca they knew about Christians and Jews before they settled in Mecca because it's it's those people that saw them dates but they knew really weird versions of Christianity which if you go if you go into in into into details of the Koran and and so on and so forth there are references to Christianity that might seem odd today because Mohammed actually got them from you know what we might call heretic Christians so yeah there is actual knowledge on and actually Muhammad is supposed to be had him and never Yin so he is the last of the prophets which ends a long list that includes you know Moses Abraham Jesus and so on and so forth and the relationship with the Jews yes there was a relationship with the Jews in Medinah and it was in Medina that Muhammad first started the the institutionalization of Islam so you know that you should pray that there is Ramadhan that there are certain religious discipline discipline to observed are things that you can't eat things that you cannot in many ways it was really close to the Jewish practices of the time and we see an attempt to kind of differentiate Islam from those Jewish tribes when conflicts arise in Medina between the Jews and and and and the Muslims okay is there anything else yeah now Satanic Verses basically the explanation is that if if if you're not a religious believer you have to tell yourself that the revelations come to Muhammad from his subconscious in in one way or another okay it is the same kind of inspiration that that artists can get it comes in many forms and so on and so forth and so there is there is a case for it's a careful case but there is a case for tracing the chronology of the revelations so the verses of the Quran to Muhammad situation you know his doubts he goes through really it's a it's an exhausting process you know getting a message from God for for for for Muhammad you know it's very it's psychologically physically very difficult and so he gets doubt and I think the question of the Satanic Verses was that there was introduced an ambiguity about is there only one God or is it was there one main gods and you know there are some secondary gods I think that this can be traced back to the fact that some of the polytheists who worshiped around the Kaaba view D they're you know individual gods their idols as some sort of intermediaries between them and us and what we may call a single deity so there was this this kind of ambiguity at the time and the word Allah it's not the Muslims who invented it it's the meccans is the politic meccans but in Arabic it means the gods so there was this kind of ambiguity and this is perhaps something that was you know tormenting Muhammad at the time so yeah this is the Satanic Verses and I'll and I'll stand I'll stop it here thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: SWP TV

Views: 3,772

Rating: 4.1384616 out of 5

Keywords: Marxism Festival, Marxism 2018, Socialism, SWP, Socialist Workers Party, Marxism, islamophobia, racism, anti-racism, Islam

Id: 73t4a9pyINQ

Length: 68min 45sec (4125 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018