The Left and Islamism: Antisemitism and Antikurdism
by Peshraw Mohammed
The following essay originally appeared in German in Siebter Oktober Dreiundzwanzig: Antizionismus und Identitätspolitik, ed. Vojin Saša Vukadinović (Berlin: Querverlag, 2024), and appears here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
More than ever, leftists, political Islam, and postcolonial intellectuals have joined forces in an unholy alliance. Lacking an understanding of the history of Islamic expansionism, Arab colonialism, and Islamic antisemitism, parts of the Western left have come to regard any countermovement to the West as a fight against American imperialism. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah are understood to be part of an anti-imperialist bloc. These tendencies were already observed in connection with the rise of the “Islamic State” (IS). When its terrorists attacked the Kurdish city of Kobanê, Kurdish militias fought IS in cooperation with U.S. forces. Some leftists in Germany, Britain, and the United States demanded that the United States stop its bombings.
What was the point of their demand? The United States carried out air strikes to support Kurdish ground troops in order to defeat Islamic terrorism. Failure to bomb IS positions would have resulted in IS conquering Kurdish areas in order to enslave or kill women and children. In the end, as in the case of the Yazidis, genocide could have been the outcome. The anti-Zionist cultural historian Hamid Dabashi compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees a prospective establishment of an independent Kurdistan as the “second settler-colonial Israel.”1
The fixation of large parts of the left on the United States while simultaneously remaining indifferent to Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or Turkish imperialism has led to serious political misjudgments. This includes the idea that every form of Western thought, art, or literature is part of a colonial project. The works of progressive philosophers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and even Frantz Fanon are now viewed as contributing to the reproduction of European white hegemony and are consequently rejected.
This may have helped to foster a variety of conservative, backward, and fanatical ideologies, ranging from Islamist movements to dictatorial rulers hostile to the West, especially in the case of Iran. Due to this perspective, large sections of the left have become unable to understand the nature of these Islamic and conservative forces, as they insist on the untenable principle that the enemy of the enemy is a friend. Instead of supporting progressive, secular, liberal, and left-wing movements in the Middle East, the left is turning to political Islam.
Islamofascism and Islamic Anti-Judaism
In 2017, I arrived in Germany for political reasons from the autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq. I expected to live in Berlin, in a city full of left-wing and liberal people, and to be able to express my political and philosophical beliefs in a free environment. After almost three years, I came to the conclusion that the local left was not what I had imagined.
If I wanted to openly express my views on fascist elements in Islam and antisemitism, not only was I not listened to by many, but I was also portrayed as someone who either did not belong to the left (it was not uncommon for the implication to be that I was considered a right-wing extremist) or understood little about Islam. It was obviously inopportune to discuss Islamofascism. But it is now high time to speak openly and unambiguously about this matter.
The appeal of fascism for Islamic radicalism is not a new phenomenon. As early as 1935, Hasan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote approvingly of Mussolini’s policies. And conversely the appeal of political Islam for fascism can also be traced back a long way. A famous example is the important fascist thinker and founder of “primitive fascism,” Julius Evola.2 His numerous works on the topics of tradition and modernity are still considered a point of reference by neo-fascists of various currents today. However Evola was also fascinated by Islam. He praised its traditional morality and clearly defined social roles as early as the 1930s. After the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, he was confident about a revival of Islam: “The Arabs are undoubtedly an important people. At present they are in a desolate state. Arab socialism does not suit them. The global advance of Islam has not yet been stopped. When the time comes—and I am sure it will soon—they can restore the caliphate.”3 In the Islamic Republic of Iran, intellectuals regard Evola as an important philosopher. Hezbollah terrorist Fouad Ali Saleh, who was responsible for a series of attacks in France in the mid-1980s, also quoted passages from Evola’s work Revolt Against the Modern World in his trial.4
In recent times, scientists and authors have increasingly addressed fascist elements in Islam or analyzed political Islam as a modern form of fascism. Middle East scholar Manfred Halpern was one of the first to describe politicized Islam as a fascist movement; in his groundbreaking 1963 study The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, he spoke of “neo-Islamic totalitarianism.”5 French Marxist Maxime Rodinson described Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood as “a kind of archaic fascism” whose goal is the establishment of a “totalitarian state” in which the “political police” brutally enforces the moral and social order.6
In 2014, Egyptian-German political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad traced the ideological roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in fascist ideology in his book Islamic Fascism.7 He points out that some Arab-Islamic extremists use the Koran to demean and look down on non-Arabs, claiming that superiority of the Arabs is proven by the fact that the final revelation of God was made in their language.
Given this background, current phenomena such as IS definitely deserve to be understood as fascist. Flags of Taliban and IS terrorists were also seen at the supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Essen and Hamburg in late 2023. Secular, liberal, and left-wing migrants in particular have long been warning German society about the dangers of a rise of Islamism but have been ignored. When I pointed out this problem to my German left-wing friends, I was quickly labeled “Islamophobic” and in some cases branded “racist” against Muslims.
Left-Wing Reality Denial
Large parts of the left deny or relativize Islamic fascism and antisemitism in Islam. They see it as an exclusively European problem. The fact that Islamic forces were allied with Hitler in various ways is ignored or denied.8
The reports of antisemitic slogans at “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in Europe are not surprising for two reasons: first, because of the stigmatization of Jews in the Koran, which has been passed down for 1,400 years, and second, because of the influence of modern ideologies on Islamic thinkers and the Islamic world.
The Koran states that Jews were punished for turning away from the revelations of Allah, among other things because they practiced usury. As in Christianity, Jews are also accused of murdering the prophet. At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, they had to pay the poll tax (jizya), de facto protection money, in a humiliating ritual. The most important anti-Jewish Islamist is generally considered to be the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the author of an influential essay in the 1950s entitled “Our Struggle with the Jews.”9 Qutb is considered a kind of chief ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood; Sunni jihadist movements in particular refer to him. He distilled a specifically Islamic antisemitism from religious tradition and Western conspiracy theories.
Qutb wrote that the Jews had been hostile to Islam since its founding in Medina by Muhammad. He further claimed that Islam had suffered continuous “tests” in a “war of 14 centuries” and was now the victim of “tribulations” and “machinations” caused by the Jews.10 Qutb blamed them for the assassination of the third Caliph in 656 and the resulting schism in Islam. He also attributed Jewish influence to the British occupation of Egypt from 1882 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. In addition, Qutb viewed the Jews as the creators of modernity, including Marx, Freud, and other “Jews” who intended to destroy Islam.
The Jews, Qutb said, recruit “lackeys,” that is, Western-educated and Westernized Muslims or “Jewish-influenced Muslims,” to undermine Islam and the fighting spirit of the Muslims. Therefore, he urged Muslims to always remember the Koran’s teaching that “the worst enemies of Muslims are the Jews” and that “God has cursed them.” Over the centuries, God had sent “his servants” to punish the Jews, and so he “made Hitler rule over them.” Qutb believed that their plan to start a “crusader-Zionist war” would result in Allah punishing them again by destroying Israel.11
The appeal to Muhammad’s tirades against the Jews of Medina and to verses in the Koran, says Ronald Nettler, the editor and translator of Qutb’s essay, lends an “Islamic conviction” to these negative views in the Middle East and beyond, as they appear to be based on history and tradition.12 From Qutb’s perspective, the ruling class in the Islamic world has been corrupted by Jewish and Western thought. Jews are also alleged to have directly established rulers and regimes in the Islamic world in order to advance the conspiracy against the community of believers.
Solidarity or Antisemitic?
When I joined the political left in Germany, it became clear to me after a while that the left, despite its assurances of solidarity with the oppressed, is selective in its support. As a Kurd, I experienced this very personally early on. I was often told that one could only support the Kurds on the condition that they did not form alliances with the United States, the EU, or Israel. When it came to Palestine, however, leftists argued for unconditional support for the Palestinian movement, including Hamas and all Islamist groups.
Why does the European left unconditionally support the Palestinian Islamist movement, but much less the Kurds, even though the Kurdish movement is secular, left-wing, liberal, feminist, and social democratic, and shows the least influence of Islamism? It took me a while to understand the answer: the left’s selectivity and antisemitism are inextricably linked.
The anti-Western rhetoric is also represented by some leftists from the Middle East. This supposedly left-wing attitude is particularly evident in the Middle East context, where writers and scholars such as Edward W. Said, Tariq Ali, and the Iranian-born Hamid Dabashi have sided with the Palestinians in the fight against the United States and Israel, but have rarely addressed the political concerns of the large Kurdish population in the Middle East, which repeatedly experiences ethnic discrimination, language oppression, and forced cultural assimilation.
Dabashi, for example, compares the Kurds to the Jews and sees the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as a “second settler-colonial Israel.” He argues that “the creation of an independent Kurdistan would be catastrophic for all peoples of the region, including the Kurds themselves,” and that this process would mean an “Israelization of the Arab and Muslim world” by Kurdistan.13 Antisemitism and chauvinism are thus found not only in the political right but in parts of the political left.
The attitude of the Iranian, Turkish, and Arab left toward the Kurds is certainly shaped by nationalism and their respective imperial ideas. Both the Iranian and Turkish nationalist left have been influenced by the European left. Paradoxically, Dabashi, who sees the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as a catastrophe for the Middle East, sees the establishment of a Palestinian state and the dissolution of Israel as the path to peace. A fundamental insight follows from this: the antisemitism that was once represented by the political right in Europe is now finding a home in parts of the political left. The Jews, according to the Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, are recruiting Westernized Muslims or “Jewish-influenced Muslims” to undermine Islam and the fighting spirit of the Muslims.14
Since the 1960s, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have been embedded in a broader ideological framework that includes anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and a strong distrust of U.S. policy. In the eyes of many people in the developing world, Jews became a symbol of the West and thus a target of hatred. One’s position on the “Jewish question,” while not of paramount importance in itself, became an indicator of affiliation with a larger political movement, political beliefs, and general cultural choices.
In the past, Jews were blamed by European antisemites for the emergence of capitalism and the destruction of the supposedly organic societies of the feudal era. Later, antisemitic Europeans accused Jews of acting as anti-capitalists and undermining bourgeois civilization. Sometimes they were blamed for wars, sometimes for peace, since as “money people” they needed peace to run their economies.
Today it is not the least leftists who blame Jews for every disaster in the Middle East. They demonize Jews as white colonizers and denigrate all those who recognize Israel’s right to exist. None of them dare to denounce Hamas’s terrorist attacks on civilians, the kidnapping of people, or the rape of women. They claim that all the problems in the Middle East only began in 1948, and they propose eliminating the State of Israel as the solution. Antisemitism is currently, even if this is not immutable, nearly a core part of the left-wing worldview or at least an accompanying feature of left-wing political movements.
I once thought that I could speak openly in left-wing spaces, imagining them to be the most democratic and free. For the first three years in Berlin, I had no idea, since I could not yet communicate in German and could not understand the reactions to my ideas. It took me a while to realize what was going on. Whenever I wanted to talk about philosophy, society, or literature, I felt like I was not being taken seriously. Some friends were less reserved: I should say what they wanted to hear, not what I wanted to say. I still believe that left-wing spaces need to be saved because they are important. But above all, they need to be democratized.
This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations
Hamid Dabashi, “On the Kurdish Question,” Al Jazeera, November 27, 2017.
See Jan Raabe and Andreas Speit, “Ritt auf dem Tiger: Der Mystiker und Kulturphilosoph Julius Evola erlebt eine Renaissance in der deutschen Rechten,”Jungle World 51 (1998).
Cited from Frank Ahmad Gelli, Julius Evola: The Sufi of Rome (2012).
See Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, “Terror, Islam, and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 13 (2002): 7.
Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 154.
Maxime Rodinson, “Islam Resurgent?,” Le Monde, December 6, 1978; quoted from Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 233.
Hamed Abdel-Samad, Der islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse (Munich: Droemer, 2014). See also Hannes Bode, “Heiliger Faschismus,” Jungle World 22 (2014).
See Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009); David Motadel, Für Prophet und Führer: Die islamische Welt und das Dritte Reich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2017).
See Vojin Saša Vukadinović, “Drei Herrscher der Schöpfung: Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Mohammed Qutb und das Erbe der Moslembruderschaft,” in Antisemitismus—Antifeminismus: Ausgrenzungsstrategien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Frauen und Geschichte Baden-Württemberg (Roßdorf: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2019), pp. 131–58.
Quoted from Robert L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist’s View of the Jews (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), pp. 73–89.
Ibid.
Cf. ibid., p. 6.
Dabashi, “On the Kurdish Question.”
Quoted from Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations, p. 83.