When the Iranian cleric Ruhollah Khomeini set foot on Iranian soil again at 9:39 a.m. local time on 1 February 1979, for the first time in more than 14 years, he did so with strong backing from the political left. Iranian and European leftists alike supported the radical Shia cleric.
At first glance, that seems absurd, given that Karl Marx himself had described religion as the opium of the people. Yet at the time, it was the left, of all forces, that helped bring a pre-modern Islamic cleric to power.
The absurdity never quite disappears, because the contradictions cannot be resolved on their own terms. Yet the pattern is still with us today, visible in left-wing groups, NGOs, global movements such as Queers for Palestine and numerous other alliances between left-wing and Islamist activism.
A Cleric Takes Power
Iranian leftists, European Marxists and Western intellectuals helped bring to power in 1979 a cleric who would soon persecute them, imprison them, torture them or drive them into exile. The Iranian-born writer and left-wing activist Chahla Chafiq later described the catastrophe as an act of political self-deception. She had supported the revolution and, indirectly, Khomeini. Only later did she recognize how badly the left had misread the ayatollah.
Khomeini was viewed through the lens of anti-imperialism. Because the shah was seen as a Western proxy, Shia Islamism could be mistaken for a popular uprising. Women’s rights, secularism and individual freedom were pushed aside and dismissed as secondary contradictions.
The same pattern has survived to the present day. Anyone who sees the West, shorthand for liberal, free societies, as the main enemy will regard almost any force as progressive, as long as it speaks against America, Israel or liberalism itself. Khomeini offered no shortage of such rhetoric. His Velayat-e Faqih, later adopted as Iran’s state doctrine, had already provided the ideological blueprint for the Islamic Republic in 1970.
Foucault’s 13 Essays
The French philosopher Michel Foucault shows just how badly European intellectuals misread the Iranian ayatollah, if they had read him at all. At the time, he wrote 13 essays on the Iranian Revolution. He was less interested in Iran as a state than in Iran as an event.
What he sought, and found, was a revolt that did not fit Europe’s narratives of progress. It was not a Marxist class struggle, not a liberal reform movement and not an anti-clerical revolution in the French mold. That was precisely what fascinated him. Foucault saw in Iran the possibility of thinking about dignity, justice and freedom beyond the intellectual map of the European Enlightenment.
Khomeini himself refuted Foucault only a few months later, when he forced women to veil, drove them from public life and had opponents persecuted and killed. The political glue holding coalitions between leftists and Islamists together is ultimately neither affection nor any form of rationality, but a temporary alliance of convenience.
Foucault’s example shows why any attempt to explain that alliance rationally is bound to fail. Its core is shared hostility toward third parties and a partly shared hatred. A radical leftist and an Islamist do not need to agree on women, homosexuals, religious freedom or class politics. It is enough that they can agree on the same enemy.
Everyone Against the West
The enemy is always the West, Israel, capitalism and, more recently, colonialism. Emmanuel Karagiannis and Clark McCauley, a Greek and an American scholar, have described and critically examined this convergence as a red-green alliance. Green refers here to Islam, traditionally associated with the color. Both milieus, the scholars argue, rely on the broad framing of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. The result is not a coherent worldview, but a temporary alliance against a common enemy, with its contradictions postponed until after the revolution, so to speak.
Chahla Chafiq explains the error from the perspective of young left-wing women in Iran partly by saying that they ignored the position of women. Her group saw feminism as Western feminism, not least because it was indeed an idea from the hated West. The left-wing groups were thoroughly anti-Western, and feminism was therefore not something they considered supporting. Today, she says, that was a major mistake.
The Lesson Remains Unlearned
The political left remains resistant to learning when it comes to radical political Islam. One could spend thousands of pages poring over theoretical texts or simply look at reality.
When hundreds of thousands of migrants from Islamic countries streamed into Germany month after month in 2015 and the years that followed, it was mainly left-wing groups that shouted “refugees welcome” and gathered well-meaning but naive people into welcoming committees at railway stations across the country. A striking number of them were young women. Anyone who asked at the time about possible cultural conflicts, antisemitism, patriarchal milieus or Islamist leanings among the refugees quickly came under suspicion of doing the work of the far right.
Ten years later, reality shows a sharp increase in Islamist violence and crime directed against the host country’s Christian and Western cultural identity. Wherever liberal or bourgeois Western culture seeks public expression, for example at folk festivals or Christmas markets, previously unknown security standards have become part of everyday life.
They are the direct consequence of major Islamist attacks, from Paris and Brussels to Nice and Berlin. In July 2016, that threat took the form of the truck massacre in Nice on France’s National Day. Only a few months later, the same pattern appeared in the assault on the Christmas market at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz.
The terrorist threat from Islamism in Europe has not abated since. Radical political Islam hates the West and now fights it on streets and squares across Europe.
High Five With a Mass Murderer’s Envoy
Today’s political left turns away from that reality and denies the connection between migration and Islamist violence, because it sees migrants as the best means of opposing the hated Western culture and civilization.
The same reflex appears in practical politics. Germany’s then minister of state for culture, Green politician Claudia Roth, raised fierce objections to the restoration of Bible quotations on Berlin’s rebuilt City Palace. Christian symbolism in public space represented too much of a claim to power for her. In a so-called “art action”, she therefore even had the historic inscription on the building temporarily covered.
Yet while the government to which she belonged placed great emphasis on a “feminist foreign policy”, the same politician had no problem appearing in Iran wearing a headscarf or greeting the Iranian ambassador enthusiastically with a high five. That gesture came despite Iranian Islamism, which responds to every assertion of women’s rights with violence and forces women and girls to veil.
The same pattern was visible in the antisemitism scandal surrounding Kassel’s Documenta, the controversial German art exhibition that made headlines while Roth held political responsibility for culture. The episode suggested a broader left-wing habit of cultivating an antisemitism that is repeatedly denied, yet latently displayed.
The Queers for Palestine movement shows how far the contradiction between political demands and chosen allies can go. Queer activists who romanticize Islamist organizations, religious rule or Hamas as liberation movements are embracing forces that would deny them the very freedoms they claim to defend.
Political Islam, whether represented by Hamas, Iranian clerics or Salafist groups, is openly hostile to queer self-determination. A member of that movement who came out under Hamas rule in Gaza would, in effect, have signed his own death warrant. In the hated West, by contrast, he can pursue his sexual and political convictions freely and without fear for his life.
First They Help, Then They Are Killed
Yet Islamists have rarely objected to left-wing support from the hated West. Ayatollah Khomeini was no exception. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s pro-Soviet communist party, backed Khomeini and the new Islamic order after the fall of the shah. From 1979 to 1983, the party was tolerated as an ally of the new regime.
The logic was classically anti-imperialist. Because Khomeini stood against the US, the shah and Western influence, the Tudeh Party regarded him as an objectively progressive force. The ayatollah repaid that loyalty with imprisonment, murder and torture, as the example of Noureddin Kianouri shows. The general secretary of the Tudeh Party had initially backed Khomeini after 1979, but was arrested in 1983, tortured and forced into a televised confession.
His broken hands, visible during the coerced television appearance, became a symbol of the party’s destruction. Islamist “gratitude” toward communist allies later took an even more murderous form: in 1988, on Khomeini’s orders, an estimated 2,800 to 5,000 people were murdered in Iran.
Lenin’s Logic
The leftists in Iran never believed Khomeini would bring socialism, the writer Chahla Chafiq says today. To them, he was merely a stage on the way to the socialist state they wanted to build. They stood behind him because he embodied anti-Western anti-imperialism.
They assumed he would take power for a while and then disappear, she says, describing a mistake made then and still repeated today. They imagined it as a transitional phase of the kind described in theory during the Russian Revolution.
In the end, it was indeed the same logic Lenin once applied when he eliminated the Trotskyists after the revolution. In Iran, however, the ayatollah emerged victorious.