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Special Reports
The Marxists' Islamic phobia
By Priyadarsi Dutta
Glenn Tucker, in his book Dawn like Thunder (based on America?s First Barbary War 1801-1805) has provided a socio-economic-religious explanation for Barbary Piracy??Piracy had come to be regarded along the Barbary Coast as almost an economic necessity. It was an easy, publicly acclaimed means of making a living, ratified enthusiastically by the Moslem faith as long as it was practiced against Christians (p. 45).?
"The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it reduce the geography and ethnography of the various people to the simple and convenient distinction of two nations and of two countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel is ?harby?, i.e. the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever. In that sense the corsair-ships of the Berber States were the holy fleet of Islam?.?
If you might be wondering about the identity of the European ?Orientalist? or ?Arabist? who wrote the above passage you?ll be pleasantly surprised. It came from the pen of Karl Marx (1818-1883), the grandfather ideologue of Communists worldwide. It?s excerpted from his article titled ?Declaration of War? On the History of the Eastern Question? published in the New York Tribune of April 15, 1854.
Marxists in India have acted as the biggest apologist of Islamic jehad. Their intellectual henchmen have wasted millions of pen-hours to prove how Islam is an egalitarian and tolerant religion; and what has come to pass as jehad is no more than reaction against American imperialism, Israeli occupation, and economic deprivation of Muslims in secular India. This doesn?t reply why Vietnam, China, North Korea, Cuba or Chile did not send any jehadis to America. Due to the Leftist ideological grip on the media and academia, plain speak on Islam has become a casualty. The threat of this plain speak is not from Islam per se, but from the peer pressure amongst Communists. Marxists need to know how Marx viewed Islam.
Marx, in the above passage, has refrained from applying any class-conflict theory to Islamic jehadis against infidels. Concentrate on the most important line of the passage notwithstanding its obscurity for today?s readers ?In that sense the corsair-ships of the Berber States were the holy fleet of Islam?.
The reference here is to the Arab pirate ships operating from the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean Sea from early 16th to early 19th centuries. These operated under the aegis of the potentates or Sultans of Triplotania (Libya), Tunisia, Algiers (Algeria) and Morocco. With a decade of the fall of the last Moorish kingdom in Spain viz. Granada in 1492 as part of Reconquista, the Muslim threat reinvented itself on the Mediterranean Sea in the form of pirate attacks. The pirates raided the European coasts, kidnapped men and women to press them into slavery and concubinage, and held the Christian maritime commerce in ransom. This was their biggest source of revenue. Their activities were not confined to Mediterranean Europe but astoundingly extended to as far as England and Iceland in 17th century. The subject merits an entire book like The Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean written by E. Hamilton Currey (1910).
Glenn Tucker, in his book Dawn like Thunder (based on America?s First Barbary War 1801-1805) has provided a socio-economic-religious explanation for Barbary Piracy: ?Piracy had come to be regarded along the Barbary Coast as almost an economic necessity. It was an easy, publicly acclaimed means of making a living, ratified enthusiastically by the Moslem faith as long as it was practiced against Christians (p.45).?
But what is pertinent here that Marx has refused to extend an economic justification to this three-century-long depredation? He could easily have resolved this jehadi enterprise in terms of North-South conflict. He could have possibly stated that countries to the north of the Mediterranean were prosperous and fertile whereas to the south of the Mediterranean were backward and arid. Marx could have overlooked that Barbary piracy from the very beginning was sanctioned by the Istanbul-based Ottoman Caliph as a war against Christendom.
In contrast M.N. Roy (1887-1954), has justified the depredations of Muslim invaders on Hindus in his book The Historical Role of Islam (1937) on economic ground. This book, an exercise in masochism, sets the pattern for Marxist historians. ?The phenomenal success of Islam?, Roy writes in preface, ?was primarily due to its revolutionary significance and its ability to lead the masses out of the hopeless situation created by the decay of antique civilizations not only of Greece and Rome but of Persia and China and of India.?
In Chapter VII (Islam and India) he flagrantly justifies the temple-destructions of Muslim iconoclast: ?For ages, millions had believed in the supernatural power of the gods worshipped at the famous temples of Thaneswar, Muttra, Somnath etc. The priests of those temples had amassed fabulous riches at the expense of the believing multitude by virtue of their pretensions to the ability of invoking the protection of the powerful divinities. Suddenly, the whole venerable structure of belief and tradition collapsed like a house of cards under the cruel blow of the invading infidel. When Mahmud?s hosts approached, the priests told the people that the invaders would be devoured by the fiery wrath of the gods. The people confidently expected a miracle which failed to happen. Indeed, it was performed by the God of the invader. Being based upon miracle, faith necessarily is transfer-ed to the most miraculous. Judged by all the traditional standards of religion, those who embraced Islam at that crisis were the most religious.?
Pity these words come from Roy (real name Narendra Nath Bhattacharya) who came from a family of priests in Bengal. He is brazenly silent on 50,000 Hindus who gave up their life on spot to save Somnath, and hundreds of thousands who fought and died as Hindus rather than embracing Islam over a period of seven centuries. If Islam would have solely been a matter of banditry on temples Mahumd Ghaznavi could have retired by taking all the wealth the priests were ready to surrender. But he declared that his mission was to uproot idolatry. Marx did not invent an economic justification for Barbary pirates, but irony his follower Ray justifies Mahumd Ghaznavi?s destruction of Somnath. One wonders why M.N. Ray, after independence, chose to remain in Dehradun rather than relocating to Pakistan created on basis of his ?revolutionary faith?. Marxists historians it seems follow Ray, more than Marx!
(The writer can be contacted at 145, Sunder Nagar, New Delhi-110 003.)
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