How does a political movement that claims to champion women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and secularism end up defending an ideology that rejects all of them? The answer is philosophy. The left and Islam make strange bedfellows, but they share a common enemy, and in the logic of the left, that is enough.
To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.
The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.
From this perspective, Islamic violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.
Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.
As a result, if material conditions produce ideas rather than the reverse, then people do not kill because of what they believe. They kill because of their circumstances. Theology is not a cause; it is a symptom, a rationalization of underlying grievance. When someone commits violence in the name of a religious doctrine, the materialist does not ask “what does this doctrine say?” He asks “what economic or political condition made this person feel desperate enough to act?”
The Logic of the Alliance
The leftists looks at the Muslim world and sees a region that whose people occupy the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. He then looks at jihadist movements, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and applies his analytical framework. These movements arise from oppressed populations. They direct their violence against Western power and its regional allies. Therefore, whatever their stated ideology, their functional role is resistance. They are the proletariat with weapons. They are the global South striking back at the imperial North.
The ideological content of Islam is therefore irrelevant to this analysis. The left does not ignore the fact that Islam subordinates women, criminalizes homosexuality, executes apostates, and rejects democratic governance because it approves of these things. It ignores them because its framework does not process ideological content as a causal factor. To the materialist, the question “what does Islam believe about women?” is the wrong question. The right question is “whose interests does this movement serve?” And since the movement is fighting Western power, it serves the interests of the oppressed, which is the only moral category that matters.
This is why Western feminists who march for abortion rights will march alongside Muslims who would criminalize abortion entirely. This is why LGBT activists who would be executed in Gaza will express solidarity with Hamas. This is why secular academics who have spent careers arguing for the separation of church and state will defend the most theocratic regime on earth.
The Enemy of My Enemy
If human behavior is entirely the product of material conditions, if people kill because of economic despair, colonial humiliation, or structural oppression rather than because of what they believe, then no individual or culture is genuinely responsible for what they do. The suicide bomber is a mechanism produced by poverty and geopolitics, not a moral agent who made choices. The society that produces him is a mechanism produced by history, not a community with a culture that might be better or worse than another.
This is the worldview that cannot say some ideas are better than others. It cannot say that a civilization that protects individual dignity is superior to one that celebrates its destruction. It cannot say that freedom of conscience is genuinely more valuable than submission to divine authority. It can only say: whose side are you on?
And the answer is always: whoever is fighting the West.
The supreme irony is that this position, presented as anti-imperialism, is blind to the one imperialism that most deserves the name. Islam is an imperial ideology, one that spent its first century conquering from Spain to the borders of China, that developed a comprehensive legal framework for the subordination of conquered peoples, that has never produced a doctrine of genuine religious equality or political pluralism from within its own foundational texts. The left sees imperialism in a McDonald’s opening in a third world country. It does not see it in the fourteen-century history of conquest, dhimmitude, and forced conversion that built the Muslim world.
The movements the left defends are not the oppressed striking back. They are the representatives of a totalizing system that would, given sufficient power, impose on the left’s own constituents, women, gay people, atheists, political dissidents, a form of subjugation that makes Western capitalism look like a liberation movement.
Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute
How many on the Left I wonder, are, in large part, ignorant of, and completely incurious about, Islam? Muslims are, in the West, a minority. As such, 'minority status' is enough for the Left, especially when a "phobia" can be attached to the minority. For younger 'passionate' Leftists maybe it's this simple? They don't need / want to know / think any more about it.
Hm, this is an interesting idea but contains some pretty big generalisations, e.g. the idea that “the left” shows solidarity with Hamas. That would surely be an extreme minority, not “the left”. Solidarity with Palestinians ≠ solidarity with Hamas.