In 1917, a series of popular upheavals occurred in the Russian lands that changed the course of modern history, ended the tsarist rule, and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union after the second stage of the revolution led by the Bolshevik Party and its leaders;

Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to establish a socialist state.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, it seemed for a while that revolution might break out in vast areas of the world under the common banner of communism and Islam, according to an article by author and political researcher John Seidel in The New York Times.

An Islamic revival movement emerged in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, thanks to the efforts of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who sought the title of Caliph of the Muslims.

New types of Islamic education and associations began to emerge in various parts of the Arab world and beyond, from Egypt and Iraq to India and Indonesia, and Islam became a mass call against European colonialism and imperialism, values ​​that resemble simultaneous leftist calls.

Islamic Bolshevik alliance

Islam's powerful ability to mobilize an audience attracted communist activists in the 1920s and 1920s;

The Bolsheviks - who did not have an organizational structure in the vast Islamic lands of the former Russian Empire - allied themselves with the Islamic reformers in those regions, and they established the "Commission for Islamic Affairs" led by the Bolshevik Tatar Mirsaid Sultan Galiyev (executed in 1940 after a dispute with the Soviet leader Stalin), They promised to establish a distinct "Islamic communism" across the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Bolshevik Tatar leader Mirsaid Sultan Galiyev (communication sites)

During a 1920 conference of "peoples of the East" in Baku (present-day capital of Azerbaijan), Grigory Zinoviev (a Ukrainian Jew) called for a "holy war" against Western imperialism.

But as we now know - according to the writer - communism and Islam failed to merge into a permanent alliance.

With the onset of the Cold War, communism and Islam seemed to be categorically opposed.

revolution in asia

Differing views of communism divided Muslims across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in their struggle for independence and liberation during the second half of the twentieth century.

However, at the time of the Russian Revolution the prospects for the union of communism and Islam seemed very bright, perhaps no brighter than what happened in the Indonesian archipelago, then under Dutch rule;

From 1918 to 1921, left-wing activists worked alongside Muslim scholars and merchants to build the largest mass movement in Southeast Asia.

Over the decade prior to the above date, Indonesian labor activists had already established a powerful union representing workers in the vast rail network serving the vast farm economy of Java and Sumatra.

By 1914, the Independent Social Democratic Federation, or Indian Social Democratic Federation, had expanded from an organization working among railway workers to broader forms of social activism and political action against colonial rule.

In particular, the members began to join the "Sayarkat Islam", an organization founded in 1912 as an association of Muslim batik merchants (batik is an artistic dyeing method for which Indonesia is famous), and later turned into a broader popular movement, organizing mass rallies and strikes across Java Province.

The socialist influence within "Syarakat Islam" was evident in the organization's conference in 1916, where the conferees declared that the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, is the "father of socialism and the pioneer of democracy" and the "socialist par excellence".

Author and academic John Seidel (London School of Economics)

Russian inspiration

The Russian Revolution inspired the "Cars of Islam" movement, and by late 1917 activists in the Indian Social Democratic Union began to instigate the revolution and gain loyalists to the organization in the lower ranks of the Dutch armed forces in the Indies, and they quoted the successful tactics pursued by the Bolsheviks in Russia, and they recruited hundreds of sailors and soldiers in the hope of rebellion and uprising.

But the Dutch colonial authorities immediately arrested and imprisoned the activists and ordered their expulsion from the Indies.

By 1920, the Social Democratic Union of the Indies had renamed itself the Communist Federation of the Indies, becoming the first communist party in Asia to join the Comintern.

New unions were formed in Java and Sumatra, peasants mobilized against the landlords, and a rail attack briefly paralyzed farms in East Sumatra.

Tan Malacca

In this context, the character of Tan Malaka (Indonesian patriot activist who fought against Dutch rule of his country) appeared for the first time.

Tan Malaka was the scion of an aristocratic family from West Sumatra, spent the years of the First World War as a student in the Netherlands, and was in contact with activists and socialist ideas, and witnessed a short-lived revolution in late 1918, during which the Dutch Social Democrats tried for a brief period to emulate the ongoing revolutionary uprising in Germany.

Indonesian activist Tan Malaka, whose real name is Datuk Ibrahim Sutan (communication sites)

At the beginning of 1919, Tan Malaka returned to Indonesia, and soon joined the local Communist Party, and quickly ascended to its leadership, before being exiled by the colonial government, returning to the Netherlands in early 1922.

Tan Malaka appeared at the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow and Petrograd in 1922, speaking about the possibility of a revolution combining communism and Islam.

There he gave an unforgettable speech on the similarities between Islamic nationalism and communism, stating that Islamic identity was not only religious, but was based on "brotherhood among all Muslim peoples, and the liberation struggle not only for Arabs but also for Indians, Javanese and all oppressed Muslim peoples".

"This brotherhood means the struggle for practical liberation not only against the Dutch but also against English, French and Italian capitalism, and therefore against world capitalism as a whole," he added.

Tan Malacca's Call

The official record of the proceedings indicates that Tan Malacca's impassioned plea for an alliance between communism and Islamic nationalism was met with "a loud applause" by the congressmen, but his diaries mention that after 3 days of heated debate that followed his speech, he was formally barred from contributing to the rest of the proceedings.

The official outcomes of the Fourth Comintern Conference - including "Theses on the Eastern Question" - were remarkably ambiguous on the question of Islamic nationalism and contained nothing about Indonesia, although the movement there was far more successful than any other communist mobilization in the so-called East in that time.

However, the writer says that there was no alliance between communism and Islam, neither in Indonesia nor anywhere else.

The strength of communism as a movement was its ability to mobilize workers to fight for better wages and working conditions through unions, whether in the oil-producing city of Baku or the plantations of Java and Sumatra.

But in terms of the form of government, communism meant one-party rule, a command economy with collective farming and the control of the party-state over all areas of social life, including religion.

In contrast, as the writer continues, the Islamic movement was a broader, more open, and ambiguous basis as a basis for political participation.

In Java and elsewhere, "Islam" was a banner for Muslim merchants to challenge economic grievances by non-Muslims and to build an organization structure in the countryside through Islamic schools.

In terms of politics, Islam was flexible;

Islamic scholars and activists can support colonialism, communism, or capitalism as well.

Tensions between communists and Islamic leaders in Indonesia began to divide the Syarikat Islam movement in the early 1920s;

The communists urged an escalation of strikes and protests, while Islamic leaders called for compromise with the Dutch colonial authorities, and the movement disappeared under Dutch repression after the failed revolutions of 1926-1972.

The book "Republic, Communism and Islam: Global Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia" published by John Seidel 2021 (websites)

In the late 1940s, Islamic parties opposed the Party Communes Indonesia, or the Indonesian Communist Party, during the independence struggle.

Islamic parties were uncomfortable with the Communists' insistence that independence from Dutch colonial rule would reverse aristocratic privileges and lead to the establishment of socialist forms of land ownership and industry.

At that time, the animosity between communism and Islam was entrenched throughout the Islamic world, and it continued during the Cold War, and the institutional and ideological boundaries that emphasize the separation between communism and Islamism became more prominent and stronger, which destroyed the prospects of attempts to build a political alliance between Islam and communism.

The communist party state suppressed institutions of worship, education, associations, and Islamic pilgrimage institutions in all Muslim regions of the Soviet Union, which the communists viewed as obstacles to ideological and social transformation in communist lands.

In Muslim countries, left-wing politics has often been associated with blasphemy and has been outlawed;

In countries such as Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran, communist and other leftist parties found themselves in a bitter competition with Islamists for power.

Among the repercussions of the failure of the revolutionary forces to mobilize under a common banner of communism and Islam together was the deep division of Muslims, weakening their ability first to fight colonialism during the first half of the twentieth century, and then resisting the rise of tyranny throughout the Islamic world, according to the author.

The writer concludes by saying that "the divisions between leftists and Islamists in Egypt - after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 - helped pave the way for the country's return to military rule in mid-2013. Similar tensions led to the division of forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, paving the way for The country has slipped into a civil war that has been raging for more than 6 years. A century after the Russian Revolution, the failure of the alliance between communism and Islam continues to cast a shadow over the politics of the Islamic world.