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We can explain this by borrowing Max Weber’s notion of “elective affinities” — a phrase that Weber himself borrowed from Goethe. We can see such affinities between communism and the myth, if not the reality, of the original Christianity: see, for instance, how Rosa Luxemburg tried to assimilate early Christianity to communism in her 1905 essay “Socialism and the Churches.” Likewise, there are elective affinities between the myth, if not the reality, of early Islam and the Islamic fundamentalism of our time. A major difference though is that, in the case of Christianity, the official religious orthodoxy strongly objects to the communistic interpretation, whereas in Islam’s case, the official religious orthodoxy favors the fundamentalist interpretation by upholding a literalist dogmatism. This is related to the fact that Islamic orthodoxy has become heavily influenced by an ultraorthodox brand of Islam propagated by two fundamentalist states: the Saudi kingdom, for Sunni Islam, and Iran’s Khomeinist republic for Shiite Islam — both states enjoying an important oil rent, to boot.

From the 1960s a significant part of the sociopolitical dissent in Christian communities, especially in South American countries dominated by US imperialism, took up a position in line with the communistic interpretation of Christianity called liberation theology. Indeed, it most often did so against the official churches, which were allied with dictatorships and imperialism.

What happened in Muslim communities was the opposite, as Islamic fundamentalism embarked on its rise. Tellingly, while 1979 saw a revolution in Nicaragua propelled by socialist dynamics and involving a significant left-wing Christian component, in Iran that same year the revolution was propelled by reactionary fundamentalist dynamics and led by a clerical leadership. The left-wing activists who misconstrued the meaning of the Iranian revolution paid a very high price for that: they were brutally crushed by the new government that they had contributed to bringing about.

This included Iran’s Islamic left, the most sizable of all Islamic movements comparable to Christian liberation theology: the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. Taking their inspiration from the left-wing Shiite theology elaborated by Ali Shariati, the People’s Mujahedin were among the first to be crushed, after having been targeted from the start by the spearhead of the Khomeinist reaction, Iran’s Hezbollah. Later, the Mujahedin degenerated in exile into the dubious sect that counts Rudy Giuliani among its best friends.

The Iranian experience shows, on the one hand, that an approximate equivalent of liberation theology is possible in Islam and did indeed exist. We could also mention more limited experiences within Sunni Islam, the most recent of which is Turkey’s anticapitalist Muslims, who drew some attention during their participation in the 2013 Gezi Park mobilization against Erdogan’s Muslim-conservative government. On the other hand, the Iranian experience shows that it is illusory to expect these movements to reach mass proportions comparable to those that the Muslim Brotherhood, a reactionary and fundamentalist movement, so rapidly achieved in Egypt. This is illusory because Islamic-left movements must swim against the powerful current of Islamic orthodoxy, with an interpretation of Islam that bears few true affinities with early Islam and is thus not very credible in its attempt to reinterpret that legacy.

It is wrong to expect, through a kind of Christian analogy, the emergence of an Islamic replica of liberation theology. The Left in the Muslim world will be only marginally theological. It will, rather, be an essentially “lay” phenomenon, in the sense of the contrast between clergy and “the lay people.” Lay left-wing currents claiming the Islamic faith as a key part of their identity have been a key part of the Left in Muslim-majority countries and were even hegemonic therein. Nasserism is the most important example: the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser was the greatest embodiment of the left-wing radicalization of the 1960s in both the Arabic-speaking and the Muslim worlds. He did so in a dictatorial manner, to be sure, but that was largely inspired by the Soviet Union’s “actually-existing socialism” at a time when the latter could still promise to “bury” the capitalist states, as Khrushchev could assert in 1956 without making a fool of himself.

In 2012, in the framework of the ongoing Arab Spring, everybody took note of the very powerful appeal in today’s Egypt of a nostalgia for what one might call “Nasserism with a human face,” that is to say a democratic version of Nasserism. It was represented in the first round of that year’s presidential election by the left-wing Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahy. He was the great surprise of that election, somewhat like Bernie Sanders in the US presidential campaign of 2015–16. Sabbahy got the largest vote in Egypt’s two main urban centers, Cairo and Alexandria, and over one-fifth of the votes overall, tailing closely behind the two front-running candidates representing the old regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. Only lay “secular” currents of this kind, not theological ones, will mobilize large masses of believers on the Left.

Such left-wing lay currents dismiss the atheism of Marxists, but they are somehow inspired by their analyses, like the followers of liberation theology. Their leaders are believers and, in some cases, ostentatious observants, but their relation to God is not mediated by the equivalent of a bishop or a Pope (this is easier in Sunni Islam than in Shiite Islam, since the latter is more clerical, as Catholicism is when compared with Protestantism). They keep God on their side, one might say, and they denounce as impostors those who invoke God for reactionary purposes. At the peak of Nasser’s popularity, which coincided with the peak of his regime’s radicalization, the Muslim Brothers, perceived as collaborators of the Saudi monarchy and of the CIA (which was true on both counts), were marginalized and discredited in the whole region. Nasser did not hesitate to stigmatize the Saudi rulers as traitors to Islam, accusing them of being the enemies of the poor. Popular majorities supported him without any need for him to engage in theological subtleties in order to win them over: here is a good illustration of the Latin adage vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God).