Iran: the cradle of Islamo-leftism

As Israel’s shadow war with Iran finally ignited into the open this month, the so-called progressives of the Western left were in no doubt where their allegiances lay. Not with the liberal democracy of Israel, but with the repressive autocracy of Iran.

On the streets of Western cities, self-identified radicals have been flying the flags of the Islamic Republic, while on the highways of social media, they have been indulging in their ritualistic denunciation of the ‘genocidal regime’ of Israel. No doubt they have also been cheering on every successful Iranian missile strike, just as some of them celebrated Hamas’s orgy of slaughter and rape in southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

This is not anti-imperialism, despite what activists claim. They’re not showing solidarity with the Iranian people and their right to determine their own future. They’re actively siding with the Islamic Republic itself – with the oppressors of the Iranian people.

So here we are – at a juncture where those who claim to be on the right side of history happily link arms with the brutal reactionaries of the Islamic Republic. The roots of this unholy Islamo-leftist alliance run deep. They extend down into the left’s slow-motion abandonment, from the 1960s onwards, of class politics in favour of cultural, identity-based activism. And also in the broader disillusionment with modernity that has come to grip sections of the Western public.

A key part of Islamo-leftism’s development lies in Iran and the 1979 Iranian Revolution itself. A moment when Iran’s trade unions, left-wing political parties and student radicals joined arms with right-wing Islamist clerics to overthrow the hated monarchical dictatorship of Mohammed Reza Shah. A moment when leftism seemingly fused with Islamism.

The Iranian Revolution took many in the West by surprise. The CIA claimed as late as August 1978 that Iran was ‘not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation’. Yet the signs had been there for a while. The Pahlavi dynasty had ruled Persia-turned-Iran since Mohammad Reza’s father had staged a bloodless coup in 1923 and been appointed shah. It had never been in an especially strong position. The shah ruled in an uneasy relationship with Iran’s elected legislature (first established with the liberal, secular 1906 constitution) and a powerful clergy.

But what popular support the Pahlavi dynasty had was fatally undermined in 1953. Nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was attempting to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, taking it out of the hands, in the main, of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (a precursor to BP). Western powers, led by the US and the CIA, responded to this threat to their interests by organising a coup against the prime minister, and restoring full power to the shah.

The shah may have emerged victorious in this skirmish with parliament, but, in doing so, he had undermined what domestic support he still had. From that point on, he was seen as the agent of the imperial powers that had too long held Iran in thrall. He was cast as an emissary of the West. A foreign body sitting atop Iranian society. And as opposition to his reign grew, the increasingly paranoid shah relied ever more heavily on the Savak, his fearsome intelligence services, to suppress dissent, often brutally.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, opposition to the shah continued to grow. Assorted radical factions, boosted by Tehran’s burgeoning student body, challenged it from the left, as did the Stalinist Tudeh party. The Iranian nationalists of the National Front came at it from the establishment centre. And, thanks to the shah’s land reforms and modernisation drive proletarianising a large swathe of the Iranian peasantry, pushing them into urban centres, there was also a growing, increasingly restive working class. These former agricultural labourers, often living in slum dwellings, were particularly receptive to appeals from the right-wing Shia clergy – especially after 1963, when many senior clerics turned against the shah for granting extraterritorial rights to the US military.

There were clearly many differences between these oppositional elements, from leftists to nationalists to Islamists. But such differences were increasingly eclipsed by the opposition’s ‘inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle’, as Iranian sociologist Val Moghadam put it.

This wasn’t anti-imperialism as older generations of revolutionaries might have understood it. It was increasingly framed as a cultural – rather than a political, economic, class-based struggle – against Western modernity itself. A struggle against ‘Gharbzadegi’ (‘Westoxification’ or ‘West-struckness’), to use a term popularised by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in his crucial 1962 book, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West. A struggle, in the words of French-trained sociologist Ali Shariati (the so-called intellectual father of the revolution), to return Iranians to themselves. A fight to rediscover their authentic cultural selves, free of Western consumer culture. A spiritual war in which Iranians were to realise their Shia Islamic essence.

That Shariati’s ideas in particular – a fusion of Marxism, Third Worldism, Shia mysticism and a heavy dose of Sartrean existentialism – had actually been partially forged in the cultural tumult of the West, while he was studying at the Sorbonne, didn’t seem to matter. He along with other leading left-wing figures increasingly framed the struggle against the shah as a fight to free Iran’s spiritual essence – cast as religious and socialist – from the West’s cultural empire.

At the same time, during the 1960s and 1970s, Iran’s future supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was a leading, often dissenting cleric, dreaming of an end to Western domination and the revival of an Islamic civilisation. Indeed, in The Unveiling of Secrets, a little-known pamphlet written just after the end of the Second World War and circulated among the seminaries of Qom, Khomeini attacked Iran’s politicians in their ‘European hats’ strolling ‘the boulevards [and] ogling the naked girls’. A couple of decades later, in a series of lectures delivered in 1970, he called for a new polity ruled by Islamic jurists, and led by the wisest among them. Adherence to Islamic law would be enforced by a religious militia (basij). By that point, Khomeini was living in Iraq, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, following his participation in anti-shah protests.

The left-wing Shariati and the ultra-conservative Khomeini ought to have had little in common. Shariati dreamed of a popular, Shia-inspired liberation; Khomeini dreamed of Iranians’ forced submission to Islamic law. Yet thanks to the focus on fighting what was, in effect, a culture war against the West and its monarchical representative in Iran, any clear political conflict between left and right was becoming obscured. Leftist radicals and Islamist reactionaries were increasingly speaking in a common tongue, raging against ‘imperialism’, ‘Westoxification’ and consumerism. The political-cultural project of Khomeini sat all too easily alongside the anti-Western worldview of many leftists, some not uncoincidentally educated in the West.

The revolution, when it came, came quickly. The shah had been facing street demonstrations, factory occupations and strikes throughout the 1970s. And thanks to his import restrictions he had lost the support of the bazaaris – Iran’s merchant, bourgeois class. The world recession in 1976-77 hit Iran’s economy hard, intensifying working-class unrest. Widespread strikes across the oil industry, coupled with banks being burned down, in the autumn of 1978, quickened the shah’s fall. Flailing, he offered up democratic reforms, but it was too late. Huge crowds amassed in the Iranian capital calling for him to go. In mid-January 1979, Mohammed Reza fled the nation he and his father had ruled for over half a century, carrying a small box of Iranian soil.

The question of what was to replace the shah’s regime was uncertain. The left, which had done so much to drive the revolution on, was divided and many of its leaders imprisoned. (Shariati himself had died two years prior, aged 43, in England of a heart attack, though some suspect the hand of the Savak). Khomeini, with a strong support base, not least among Tehran’s poor and slum dwellers, seized his opportunity. He proposed a yes-no referendum on an Islamic Republic. Iran’s then prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, suggested adding the option of a ‘Democratic Islamic Republic’. Khomeini was not impressed, telling him, ‘Islam does not need adjectives such as democratic… It is sad for us to add another word near the word Islam, which is perfect.’

The referendum was held in February 1979. Backed by the left-wing parties, including Tudeh and the Shariati-inspired People’s Mojahedin Organisation, the foundation of an Islamic Republic was voted through with an overwhelming majority.

The dreams of Iran’s leftist ideologues and radical clerics alike seemed to have been fulfilled. Iran had thrown off the cultural yoke of the West. Now, it had the chance to be reborn as an authentically Iranian, Shia state. A chance to blaze its own trail, free of the dead hand of the imperial and indeed Communist powers – ‘Neither East, nor West – Islamic Republic!’. Or so the rhetoric went.

The theocratic repression that followed inevitably swallowed up the left. Having wanted to rid Iran of the toxifying influence of the West – some leftists even dismissed ideas like democracy as bourgeois, Western concepts – the left soon found itself being purged, all in the name of establishing an authentic Iranian, Islamic nation.

Khomeini quickly established a state in which parliament was subordinate to an ‘assembly of experts’ (largely clerics) and ultimately the life-long Supreme Leader – namely, the Ayatollah Khomeini, himself. He then set about consolidating his rule at the expense of his opponents.

He set up a shadow government, comprising the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic Republican Party and its own militia. He then used it to violently wage a culture war against the sickness of Westernisation. He introduced public whipping for alcohol consumption. His thugs attacked libraries if they held books deemed ‘anti-Islamic’. He ordered the censorship of all media. And he ensured that women were slowly but surely erased from public life. He decreed that women would be unable to serve as judges, only men could petition for divorce, and, infamously, that the wearing of the hijab would be mandatory.

The left, particularly in the universities, were attacked – in the words of the state radio, in order to ‘infuse new blood into the veins of the revolution’. Thousands were put on trial in so-called revolutionary courts, where a minor Khomeini-supporting cleric then oversaw their executions.

Khomeini’s 10-year reign (he died in 1989) was characterised by ruthless, bloody repression at home and Islamist adventurism abroad. He ordered his henchman – including future president Ebrahim Raisi – to execute over 4,000 political prisoners in 1988. At the same time, the Islamic Republic was starting to build up its army of regional Islamist proxies. In 1982, the Revolutionary Guard Corps set up Hezbollah in south Lebanon to menace Israel. And in the late 1980s, the regime developed its relationships with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

But the principal source of the regime’s legitimacy has always rested on the infernal energies that drove it into power – the constant demonstration of its anti-Westernism (especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union). On its ability, that is, to define itself against the West, in cultural opposition to the West, and in triumph over the West. Khomeini backed the Islamist ‘Law of Imam’ students who stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took several embassy staff hostage – seeing it as a useful PR pose against US imperialism. He used the war against a US-backed Iraq, between 1980 and 1988, to showcase Iran’s ability to fend off the Great Satan. And he exploited the scandal around Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, issuing a fatwa against its author in 1989, months after publication, to show off his regime’s commitment to protecting Islam from Godless Westerners.

Khomeini’s anti-Semitism, and above all his anti-Zionism, had always been of a piece with his overarching anti-Western worldview. As he put it in his 1970 lectures, the Jews were not only the long-standing enemies of Islam, they were also agents of the West. They were the carriers of the toxin of Western modernity, and, in the shape of Israel, an imperial imposition on Islamic land. As Iran’s supreme leader, his avowed commitment to ensuring Israel ‘disappears from the map’ was part and parcel of the Islamic Republic’s war against Westernisation.

If anything, Khomeini’s successor, the Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, has proven an even more pronounced anti-Semite and anti-Zionist than his mentor. He has constantly denied Israel’s right to exist, claiming in the early 1990s that any ‘entity ruling Palestine is illegitimate unless it is Islamic and by Palestinians’. And he has also defended backing Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah against ‘the usurper Israel, the nationless Zionists, and the illegitimate Israeli government’. His actions have matched his genocidal words. In 1994, Khamenei signed off on the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 and wounding 300. He’s utterly unrepentant, too. In 2012, he stated that the Islamic Republic will ‘support any nation, any group that confronts the Zionist regime, we will help them, and we are not shy about doing so. Israel will go, it must not survive, and it will not.’

Furthermore, under Khamenei, the Iranian state has pumped out anti-Semitism on an industrial scale. During the 1990s, the state twice re-published the 1906 Tsarist conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in both 1994 and 1999. And from 2006, it has run an International Holocaust Cartoon Contest where it awards the ‘best’ anti-Semitic work. And all the while Khamenei and assorted presidents have consistently denied that the Holocaust actually happened – claiming that it was a ruse to legitimise the creation of Israel.

This is the bitter fruit of the Iranian Revolution. What began, in large part, as a cultural revolt against Westernisation (influenced, ironically, by the cultural turn of the Western left during the 1960s), uniting radicals with reactionary, Islamist clerics, revealed its true face after 1979. What looked like national liberation, a triumph of anti-imperialism, turned out to be a form of never-ending and often violent cultural warfare against Western modernity. All signs of it, from dress to alcohol, were to be purged. All Iranians tainted by it, from radical democrats to working-class socialists, were to be liquidated. And all nations and peoples representing it, in particular the Jews of Israel, were to be erased from the map.

The alliance of the Iranian left with Khomeini’s Islamists was a tragedy. But the ever deepening affinity of the Western left towards the Islamists of Iran and their proxy militias is a grim farce. The political ground for this alliance had been prepared long in advance of the revolution itself. Disillusioned by the Stalinism of Western Communist parties and increasingly the working class itself, the New Left of the 1960s had been moving away from a political-economic critique of capitalism to a wholesale cultural rejection of Western modernity. Its leading figures no longer invoked the proletariat as the source of revolutionary change. They looked instead to the revolts of the Third World, to the wretched of the Earth – to those authentic others who they believed embodied an alternative to all that they loathed about their own societies.

This explains why, in 1978, Khomeini found such a receptive audience for his ideas in Neauphle-le-Château – a village outside Paris where he was spending what were to be the last few months of his exile. Sitting in the shade of an apple tree, he bewitched the Western reporters and intellectuals listening. The influential radical philosopher, Michel Foucault, was particularly impressed. In a 1978 article lionising Khomeini, he described him as a ‘saint’, a ‘man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people’. After the revolution, Foucault continued to praise the Islamic Republic for establishing a society free of the iniquities of the West. ‘Islam values work’, he concluded in 1979.

If Foucault can be forgiven for his enthusiasm for Islamism, given how little he must have known about its reality, there is no excuse for the legion of left-wing Islamic Republic apologists who came after him. They knew of the authoritarianism, and of the violent oppression of the Iranian people. And yet, such is their own disavowal and rejection of Western modernity, they continue to see, much as Foucault did, something of an ally in Islamism.

Think of theorist Judith Butler, who in 2006 said that ‘Hamas [and] Hezbollah [are] social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of the global left’. As sociologist Eva Illouz points out, Butler, alongside other US-based academics, effectively defended the theocratic, repressive nature of the Islamic Republic in 2009 on the grounds that the separation of state and religion and freedom of expression are Western norms. Supposedly, they are being used to unfairly judge and demonise the Islamic Republic.

This leftist critique of criticism of Islamism, of Islamic states and of blasphemy laws, effectively mirrors the Islamic Republic’s own self-justification – that it is engaged in a battle against the imposition of Western culture and norms. This is not just an intellectual move on the part of prominent Western left-wingers. It has practical, political consequences, too.

It allows privileged Western leftists to ignore the resistance and struggles of the Iranian people themselves. To wilfully disregard the strong strain of anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah feeling in Iran – ‘death to Palestine’ has been heard chanted at protests since at least 2018. It allows them to dismiss the Green Movement demonstrations in 2009, after a disputed presidential election, as just so much Western propaganda. And to downplay, in the name of anti-imperialism, the huge wave of anti-regime protests at the tail-end of 2019, which cost the lives of over a thousand protesters.

Indeed, against the background of the 2019 protests, leading American leftists, including Angela Davis, Doug Henwood and Vijay Prashad, signed a ‘Letter against US imperialism’, effectively defending the Islamic regime against US and Israeli ‘aggression’, calling for ‘political stability’ in Iran, and dismissing talk of liberal democracy and civil rights as just so much neocolonial cant.

Then there were the ‘Women, life, freedom’ protests which shook Iran in 2022. Hundreds of thousands bravely took to the streets, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the regime’s morality police for showing her hair in public. Yet the Western left seemed far happier looking the other way, as Iranians put their lives on their line in the fight for the most basic of freedoms.

What we’ve seen over the past week, as zealous ‘progressives’ happily take the side of one of the most repressive, anti-Semitic states on Earth, is hardly a surprise. It is the culmination of the Western left’s dark, cultural turn. Of the degeneration of its anti-imperialism into an all-encompassing anti-Westernism.

Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1978, an Iranian feminist took issue with the Western left’s embrace of the Islamo-leftism then insurgent in Iran. She wrote that while Islam may appear as desirable to someone like Foucault, ‘many Iranians are like me, distressed and desperate about the thought of an “Islamic” government. We know what it is. Everywhere outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for a feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression…’. She concluded that, ‘the left should not let itself be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease’.

Too few Western leftists heeded her warning then. That they continue to be seduced by the ‘cure’ to Western-sickness, despite the reality of the Islamic Republic, is a sign of the left’s intellectual and moral collapse. Its descent into a form of radical reaction that the Ayatollah Khomeini himself would be proud of.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.