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Historian, journalist and Marxist intellectual, Vijay Prashad, describes to Afshin Rattansi the growing relationship between the US, CIA and radical Islam.



As Prashad points out:



The Muslim intellectuals - of, firstly, the Tsarist Empire, but then, all the way out to Iran and to Indonesia - understood and recognized that the promise of equality and humanity was not going to be established merely spiritually. And so, you had an attempt by many scholars - again from Indonesia out to Iraq - trying to reconcile Islam and Marxism. Historian, journalist and Marxist intellectual, Vijay Prashad, describes to Afshin Rattansi the growing relationship between the US, CIA and radical Islam.As Prashad points out:The Muslim intellectuals - of, firstly, the Tsarist Empire, but then, all the way out to Iran and to Indonesia - understood and recognized that the promise of equality and humanity was not going to be established merely spiritually. And so, you had an attempt by many scholars - again from Indonesia out to Iraq - trying to reconcile Islam and Marxism.





This was such an enormous threat that in the 1960s, the CIA colluded with the Saudis to create a group called the World Muslim League, whose express purpose was to break this link. And they forcibly pushed a kind of right-wing Islam to undercut it, whether it's up in Dagestan and Chechnya, or it's in Indonesia. And you see the fruits of it today.





Afghanistan was not a country of very conservative hyper-masculinist form of Islam. It was a very heterodox country where sections of the Imamate were very pro-Marxist, pro-Communist, pro-Socialist, pro-Republican, but they had all to be marginalized. And that's the role that the CIA played from the 1960s onward.







