Islam
and socialism
“Socialism
and Islam are very close, other than on the existence of God”
(George Galloway, Sunday Times, 14 August).
We’ve
heard of Jesus the Socialist. Now it’s
Mohammed the Socialist. What next? As the MP for Bethnal Green,
elected by Muslim votes and with the help of the SWP, Galloway would
say this. Even so, it is a curious statement for him, as a Catholic
who claims to be a socialist, to have made, acknowledging as it does
that socialists don’t accept “the
existence of God”.
Since,
like all religions, islam lays down precepts for organising life on
Earth as well as on what to do to get to heaven (and avoid hell), is
there any basis for Galloway’s claim that
islam is very close to socialism if its religious side is overlooked?
The
French historian and orientalist, Maxime Rodinson, who died last year
and who adopted a generally Marxist-materialist approach (even
though, like Galloway, entertaining some illusions about Russia),
certainly didn’t think so. In his Islam
and Capitalism (1966) (written to refute the view that islam was
an impediment to the economic development of Muslim countries), he
wrote:
“Economic
activity, the search for profit, trade, and, consequently, production
for the market, are looked upon with no less favour by Muslim
tradition than by the Koran itself” (p. 16).
“[T]he
justice advocated by the ideology of the Koran is not that which
socialist thought has established as the ideal of a large section of
modern society. Muhammad was not a socialist” (p. 23).
“The
alleged fundamental opposition of Islam to capitalism is a myth,
whether this view be put forward with good intentions or bad” (p.
155).
“[T]he
notion that it is possible to use the traditional concept of property
found in the Sunnah, and the relative restrictions it imposes, in
order to advocate and promote a move by Muslim societies towards
socialist structures . . . is utterly fantastic” (p. 175).
In
a previous book (1961), Mohammed, Rodinson had provided a
materialist explanation of the origins of islam. In Mohammed’s
time (he was born about 571 of the present era and died in 632), the
Arabian peninsula was, we can see now, in a process of transition
from tribal society, which was breaking down, to a state, for which
Mohammed was to be instrumental in laying the foundations.
As
Rodinson described it:
“A
mercantile economy was growing up in the chinks of the nomadic world.
As well as barter, money transactions using dinars (gold derniers)
and dirhams (silver drachmae) were becoming commonplace. The Bedouin
borrowed from the rich merchants of the towns, got into debt and were
sold into slavery or at any rate reduced to dependent status. The
disintegration of tribal society had begun. Large and prosperous
markets grew up, like the one at Ukaz, attracting foreigners as well
as Arabs from every tribe. The tribal limits had been overstepped”.
Mohammed
himself, although from a modest background, had become one of the
wealthy merchants that had emerged, but he realised that something
needed to be done to keep Arab society from completely disintegrating
under the impact of the unbridled spread of money-commodity
relations. His solution was to create a new Arab community welded
together by a new religion that would regulate the emerging
money/trading economy by imposing some obligations on the rich and
some relief for the poor.
Of
course as a mystic, Mohammed was not as rationally calculating as
this but expressed himself in religious terms. Thus, in the koran
(which he believed was dictated to him by the archangel Gabriel, but
which in fact, whether he realised it or not, expressed his own
thoughts), the greedy and selfish rich are denounced (it is Allah,
the Zeus of the pre-islam Arabian pantheon who Mohammed makes dismiss
his fellow gods as fakes, who is purportedly speaking):
“Whoso
is mean and bumptious on account of his wealth,
Who
denies the most excellent reward,
We
shall smooth his way to ultimate misery.
His
fortune shall not profit him when he falls into the abyss”
(Koran
xcii, 8-11)
Rodinson
describes some of the regulations that Mohammed brought in when in
627, after slaughtering the previous rulers, he became the ruler of
Medina:
“There
are a number of articles laying down fairly strict rules about
inheritances. This was apparently necessary in the unsettled
situation which resulted from the disintegration of the tribal
structure. The stronger must have found it easier to lay hands on the
family or tribal possessions of the weaker. The rule of the Koran
guaranteed everyone his share, which was worked out in a somewhat
complicated fashion. Women were allowed a share in the property.
(This seems to have been the custom in Mecca, although not in
Medina.). Admittedly their share was only half that of the men . . .
Slavery, naturally, persisted. People were urged to treat slaves well
and encourage them to gain their freedom.. . . Loans at interest or,
more probably, some form of them, were forbidden. This prescription
seems in practice to have been aimed chiefly at those who, in the
early days of the move to Medina, refused to make loans to the needy
without interest . . . But there seems to have been no intention of
prohibiting the normal practices of Meccan trade.”
So
what does Mohammed’s “socialism”
amount to? Only certain rules to prevent the excesses of the rich
from leading to the decomposition of society in 7th
century Arabia, but which still accepted the basis of the
money/trading economy that had emerged and was spreading. The
economic precepts of the koran laid down a framework for the less
disruptive functioning of such an economy, placing some obligations
on the rich to help the poor while still accepting the division of
society into rich and poor.
No
doubt it is these limits on the unbridled and selfish accumulation
and use of wealth by private individuals that is behind Galloway’s
claim that “socialism and islam are very
close”. But this reveals more about his
conception of “socialism”
than it does about islam. As a former Labour MP, he still thinks in
terms of socialism being the control or regulation of capitalism in
the interest of the non-rich. But that’s
not socialism, but reformism. Islam is no more incompatible with this
than it is with capitalism. In fact, it is very close to it, except
when the religious element which gives its clerics an undue say is
brought back. Socialism, properly understood as a non-monetary,
non-market society based on the common ownership and democratic
control of the means of production, and islam have nothing in common.
ADAM
BUICK
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