Introduction
You often struggle to untangle the dense web connecting political Islam, Marxist theory, and the persistent legacies of Western colonialism. When you examine modern debates over religion and secularism, you find that traditional political categories frequently fail to explain the rise of reactionary movements.
Gilbert Achcar addresses this confusion by assembling critical essays that dissect how Marxist epistemology, religion, and cosmopolitanism intersect with Orientalism. You discover that Orientalism and its inversion distort political realities unless corrected by a rigorous materialist analysis of social structures.
The book guides you through four distinct thematic areas to clarify these ideological conflicts. You explore the materialist sociology of religion, the pitfalls of French Islamic studies, the evolution of Marx and Engels, and the true meaning of proletarian internationalism.
You can use this framework to answer several critical questions:
- How does religion function as both an expression of misery and a political banner?
- What caused French intellectuals to adopt a reverse Orientalism after the Iranian Revolution?
- How did Marx and Engels move beyond Eurocentric views of colonialism?
- In what ways does capitalist cosmopolitanism lay the groundwork for genuine internationalism?
1. Religion and Politics from a Marxian Perspective
Religion functions as both an expression of real social misery and a contested political banner, requiring a materialist sociology rather than cultural essentialism.
Marx's Critique of Religion
Marx viewed religion as both the expression of real misery and a protest against it. It functions as the inverted consciousness of an inverted world. You find that humans make religion because actual society is distorted. Religion offers illusory happiness and consolation because the true human essence lacks real reality.
Marx published his famous critique in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844 after drafting it in the summer of 1843.
An elective affinity exists between original Christianity and communistic utopianism. This connection explains why modern left-wing radicalisation often took on a Christian dimension. Max Weber and later analysts noted that early Christianity featured charismatic communism and an indifference to property.
Thomas Münzer led the early sixteenth-century German peasants' revolt, attempting to establish the kingdom of God on Earth by abolishing class differences and private property.
Islamic Fundamentalism and Historical Contingency
Muslim-majority countries maintained medieval socio-political structures where politics, education, and jurisprudence remained subordinate to theology. Kemalism in Turkey served as a major exception by actively aiming to westernize a formerly imperial state.
Islamic fundamentalism grew on the decomposing corpse of the secular left, filling the political void created by the collapse of radical middle-class nationalism. Following the defeat of secular leaders like Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1967 and his death in 1970, reactionary forces utilized Islam as an ideological banner.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran propelled Shi'i fundamentalism to prominence. Sunni fundamentalist groups later shifted their military focus from fighting the Soviet Union to fighting the United States.
Ultra-Orthodox Islam possesses an elective affinity with medieval-reactionary utopianism due to its strict scriptural literalism and historical focus on state-building through warfare. Mainstream institutional Islam preserves a high degree of literal adherence to the Qur'an.
The Saudi kingdom acts as the stronghold of collaborationist fundamentalism. The Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qa'ida represent anti-Western currents.
Viewing Islamic fundamentalism as an ahistorical, natural inclination of Muslim peoples is false and overlooks concrete historical counter-examples. You observe that during previous decades, mass political movements in Muslim-majority lands were dominated by secular or communist forces rather than fundamentalists.
In Indonesia before the military bloodbath in 1965, the largest non-governing communist party in the world operated inside the country with the largest Muslim population. The Iraqi Communist Party was the most massive political organization among southern Shiites in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Progressives must maintain an uncompromising stance for a secular society while practicing tactical caution and avoiding theological traps when confronting religious fundamentalism. Organizations like Hezbollah have fought against foreign occupation and accepted parliamentary democracy despite holding fundamentalist models.
You must follow specific tactical rules in these struggles:
- Declare oneself unequivocally for a secular society as a basic element of the democratic program
- Avoid falling into the fundamentalists' trap of fighting about religious issues
- Play down atheism rather than secularism
2. Orientalism in Reverse and French Islamic Studies
Post-1979 intellectual shifts in France produced a reverse Orientalism that romanticized political Islam and abandoned secular standards.
The years 1978-1979 marked a major turning point in Islamic studies driven by historical upheavals and theoretical critiques. The period was shaped by the Iranian Islamic revolution establishing an Islamic Republic, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978.
The uprising of Iranian masses under clerical leadership overthrew the monarchy in February 1979, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. The rise of intellectual sympathy for political Islam coincided with a broader ideological backlash against Marxism in Europe.
The Watershed of 1978-1979
Syrian thinker Sadik Jalal al-'Azm identified an internal trend in Arab and Western thinking called Orientalism in reverse. Al-'Azm noted that after Said exposed the essentialist ontological gap between Orient and Occident, some revisionist Arab thinkers and Western scholars reacted by inverting the dichotomy.
Sadik Jalal al-'Azm published his critique in Arabic and English in 1981 under the title Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse. Reverse Orientalism operates on six defining postulates regarding the absolute uniqueness and autonomy of the Islamic Orient:
- Regard the Islamic Orient and the West as antithetic and unsuited to Western ideologies including Marxism.
- Refuse to measure the degree of emancipation of the Orient by Western standards such as democracy, secularism, and women's liberation.
- Assume the Islamic Orient cannot be grasped with epistemological tools of Western social sciences.
- Treat the primary factor setting Muslim masses in motion as cultural and religious rather than economic or class-based.
- Postulate that the only path of Muslim lands toward renaissance is through Islam.
- View movements returning to Islam as progressive responses prompted by Western cultural domination rather than regressive forces.
Michel Foucault famously supported the Iranian revolution out of a fascination with spiritual politics, confusing liberal clerical rhetoric with the reality of an Islamic government.
Foucault wrote articles and interviews collected in Dits et écrits, famously interviewing with Le Nouvel Observateur in October 1978 about what the Iranians were dreaming about.
The Paradigm of Reverse Orientalism
A new post-1968 crop of French researchers in Islamic studies shifted from traditional philology to political science, increasingly engaging with media and government consultancy.
Guy Hocquenghem published a 1986 pamphlet titled From the Mao Collar to the Rotary Club describing the generational political shift. French researchers avoided terms like fundamentalism, instead adopting the term Islamism, which inadvertently validated Islamist claims to hold exclusive rights to militant religious interpretation.
Habib Boularès used the term Islamism in 1979 in Le Nouvel Observateur, and Jean-François Clément first introduced it into French scholarly Orientalism in 1980. Olivier Carré and François Burgat championed the view that political Islam is a modernizing agent and an authentic expression of popular autochthonous culture.
François Burgat published his book on the Maghreb in 1988, presenting Islamism as a rocket of decolonization with political, economic, and cultural stages. Olivier Roy later declared the failure of political Islam and shifted his thesis toward post-Islamism and neo-fundamentalism.
Olivier Roy published The Failure of Political Islam in 1992, followed by Globalised Islam in 2004. While reverse orientalism represents a historical regression within Arab societies, in the West it often functions as a form of anti-imperialist resistance.
François Burgat courageously opposed French government policies regarding school veil bans and foreign interventions in Lebanon.
3. Marx and Engels on Orientalism and Colonialism
Marx and Engels broke radically with philosophical idealism and evolved from early Eurocentrism to a multilinear view of history.
Modern Orientalism is deeply rooted in philosophical idealism, particularly the historical idealism of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel depicted non-European civilizations as static and spiritual essences.
Hegel taught his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History between 1821 and 1831, depicting Islam through the dual poles of fanaticism and sensual apathy.
Critique of Philosophical Idealism
Through the creation of historical materialism, Marx and Engels made a radical epistemological break with philosophical idealism, completely rejecting the notion of a fixed cultural essence.
Marx and Engels wrote their joint manuscript The German Ideology between 1845 and 1846, where they formulated their materialist interpretation of history.
The Epistemological Evolution of Marxism
Although Marx and Engels broke with essentialism, their early writings exhibited epistemic Eurocentrism. They viewed European colonialism as a brutal but historically progressive tool that forced non-capitalist societies into modernization.
In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels celebrated how the bourgeoisie drags all nations into civilization and rescues populations from the idiocy of rural life.
In their later years, Marx and Engels radically shifted their stance on colonialism and non-European societies, developing a multilinear theory of history and condemning the destructive rapacity of colonial rule.
In 1882, Marx made his first and only trip out of Europe to visit Algeria, expressing compassion for the native population and contempt for European colonists during this journey.
4. Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism in Marxist Theory
Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism can be categorized into four primary historical conceptions:
- philosophical;
- institutional;
- rights-based;
- economic.
The philosophical variant dates back to pre-Socratics and Diogenes. Institutional cosmopolitanism advocates for world government, traced through Dante and Anacharsis Cloots. Rights-based cosmopolitanism finds its apex in Kant's concept of universal hospitality. Economic cosmopolitanism champions free trade and the mobility of capital as advocated by Adam Smith.
Diogenes of Sinope famously declared himself a citizen of the world when asked about his national affiliation. Friedrich List pioneered the pejorative use of cosmopolitanism, labeling it as rootless and unpatriotic to defend national protectionism.
List attacked the philanthropy of British liberal economists in his 1841 book The National System of Political Economy.
From Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism to Proletarian Internationalism
Marx and Engels viewed capitalist cosmopolitanism as brutal yet historically progressive because it lays the groundwork for universalism.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 describes how the bourgeoisie gave a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption by destroying old national industries and drawing raw materials from the remotest zones.
Capitalist cosmopolitanism lays the material groundwork for universalism, which proletarian internationalism transforms from below.
For Marx and Engels, the proletariat has no homeland, and true internationalism is rooted in working-class organization rather than moralistic phrases. They insisted that internationalism required practical organizational structures, such as the International Working Men's Association.
Marx criticized the Gotha Programme in 1875 for reducing internationalism to a vague moral phrase borrowed from the bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom. Under Stalinism, the concept of cosmopolitanism was perverted into an anti-Semitic and nationalist anathema targeting critics and Jews.
The campaign targeted theatre critics and writers, often systematically revealing their Jewish birth names behind Russian pseudonyms. Modern alter-globalization movements embody an insurgent cosmopolitanism that resists hegemonic neoliberal globalization from below.
The World Social Forum serves as the most accomplished manifestation of insurgent cosmopolitanism through transnational North-South and South-South coalitions.
10 Key Ideas
- Marx viewed religion as both the expression of real social misery and a protest against it, functioning as the inverted consciousness of an inverted world.
- Viewing Islamic fundamentalism as an ahistorical, natural inclination of Muslim peoples is false and overlooks concrete historical counter-examples where secular and communist forces dominated.
- Sadik Jalal al-'Azm identified an internal trend in Arab and Western thinking called Orientalism in reverse, where revisionist thinkers and Western scholars reacted by inverting the essentialist dichotomy.
- Reverse Orientalism operates on six defining postulates, including the absolute uniqueness of the Islamic Orient, the rejection of Western standards of emancipation, and the view that Islam is the only path toward renaissance.
- Michel Foucault famously supported the Iranian revolution out of a fascination with spiritual politics, confusing liberal clerical rhetoric with the reality of an Islamic government.
- A new post-1968 crop of French researchers in Islamic studies shifted from traditional philology to political science, increasingly engaging with media and government consultancy while inadvertently validating Islamist claims.
- Modern Orientalism is deeply rooted in philosophical idealism, particularly the historical idealism of G.W.F. Hegel, who depicted non-European civilizations as static and spiritual essences.
- In their later years, Marx and Engels radically shifted their stance on colonialism and non-European societies by developing a multilinear theory of history and condemning the destructive rapacity of colonial rule.
- Friedrich List pioneered the pejorative use of cosmopolitanism, labeling it as rootless and unpatriotic in his 1841 book The National System of Political Economy to defend national protectionism.
- Modern alter-globalization movements embody an insurgent cosmopolitanism that resists hegemonic neoliberal globalization from below, with the World Social Forum serving as its most accomplished manifestation.