Why Islam is the new Marxism

The similarities of communism and Islam are considerable. Both are egalitarian and advocate radical and economic change. They both demand a domination of the public space and share a dogmatic, ideological view of the world.

Political Islam is also supplying the social services in a collective context that communism promised, and the prestige of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah depend upon this. Their facilities are often described by locals as superior to those provided by the ruling governments.

It also promises to deliver the poor masses from oppression, except instead of the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie, the uprising to be encouraged is by hapless, impoverished Muslims against their oppressive Western masters, or puppet Arab leaders.

On a more fundamental level, despite communism being ultimately atheist, it, like Islam, believes the collective must be preserved at the expense of the individual. It takes a stance on what a human being is and therefore how we should be organised. It says that we are social beings first, individuals second.

Islam holds a similar view. Its laws and regulations, medieval though they may seem, are driven by a determination to preserve the cohesion and honour of the collective, which in Mohammed’s time was the tribe. God comes second. Politics, in the form of social science, comes first.

When I ask local Muslims, especially those that build cultural fortresses aimed at warding off the heathen West, what it is they feel they are preserving, their answers are almost always the same. They cite morality as the reason.

The belief is that despite the overwhelming superiority of the West in terms of technology, economics or military, at least the Muslims have one thing over their rich, powerful masters. They lead better moral lives.

Why? Because they believe they are better at maintaining families and communities and thereby contain the potentially corrupting energies of individual expression and endeavour.

The children raised in such cultural fortresses are often the ones most alienated, unable to compromise between opposites. They are the most vulnerable to radical ideologies which offer them a supra-national identity.

The promise of Islamism is a successor to communism, for it offers a better life for the poor, oppressed and alienated. It is cloaked in God, but its essence is strongly secular.

Unless the West fights the war of ideas at this level, offering a competing vision of morality as well as economics and technology, the lure of Islamic extremism will continue to flourish, especially while the television shows the Western class oppressors dropping bombs on the Muslim proletariat.