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The answer to the second question is, then, that purity politics
is alive and well in todays political life. The Esposito-Tamimi
book is a collection of essays largely defending political islamism
in the Middle East - hardly a dead story. But the issue is not just
one of the politics of islamic countries. Muslim sexual purity rules,
in the form of dress-codes for women as they affect schools, have
become controversial in France, Germany and Britain. Christian sexual
purity rules, in the form of the question of gay marriage, are expected
to play an important role in the coming US presidential election;
anti-gay extremists in the House of Lords succeeded in sabotaging
the governments Civil Partnerships Bill, and in France gay
marriage has produced a confrontation between the Chirac government
and some local mayors. The abortion question - another outgrowth
of christian purity politics - has been a running sore in US politics
for 30 years, and the anti-abortionists are trying to revive the
issue in this country. Prostitution, pornography, sex education,
teenage pregnancy, abstinence and Aids, faith
schools, drink, drugs ... the list of live political issues
taken up by purity campaigners is too long for a full catalogue.
But understanding the histories of variants of purity politics can
help us grasp their modern dynamics.
Catholic anti-semitism
Kertzers book is a critique of the fake history of anti-semitism
propagated by the Vatican in recent years. According to this Vatican
story, modern political anti-semitism must be sharply distinguished
from the christian anti-judaism of the middle ages and
early modern period. Anti-judaism is an error of which
christians have also been guilty; anti-semitism is contrary
to the constant teachings of the church (quoted by Kertzer,
p4).
The Vatican storys immediate role is to downplay the role
of catholic politics in preparing the way for the holocaust. It
is also part of a larger ideological offensive of counter-enlightenment
catholic and postmodernist thought, beginning in the
1980s, which has claimed successively that the ideas of the enlightenment
led to the holocaust and the Soviet Gulag and - since the 1990s
- that the ideas of protestantism prepared the holocaust. We will
see echoes of these ideas in the islamist writings against secularism
collected by Esposito and Tamimi.
Against this fake history Kertzer demonstrates in detail, from the
Vaticans own records and other historical sources, the role
of the papacy in supporting and promoting anti-semitism. The papal
state maintained an elaborate apparatus of control over Jews, down
to its reduction in 1870 to the micro-enclave of Vatican City. This
apparatus included confinement to the ghetto, restrictions on Jewish
businesses, requirements to wear distinctive clothing, and the abduction
of Jewish children to be baptised and brought up as christians.
It was backed by the papal inquisition. The immediate reaction of
the then pope to the overthrow of the papal state was ... to blame
the emancipation of the Jews in the kingdom of Italy. Thereafter,
newspapers and organisations sponsored by the papacy played a leading
role in promoting anti-semitic myths and ideas: especially the blood
libel, the myth that the Jews sacrificed christian children,
and the image of Jews as vampires.
A particularly clear example of anti-semitic argument is provided
by an 1893 article by Jesuit Saverio Rondina (Kertzer, p145): the
Jewish nation does not work, but traffics in the property
and work of others; it does not produce, but lives and grows fat
with the products of the arts and industry of the nations that give
it refuge. It is the giant octopus that with its oversized tentacles
envelops everything ... It represents the kingdom of capital ...
the aristocracy of gold. The Jew, and especially the emancipated
Jew, thus becomes a rhetorical figure at once representing big capital
and rendering it alien - and so diverting attention from the real
dynamics of the market economy which produce big capital. The nation-state
is to be purified from the Jewish cancer.
It is plain enough from Kertzers account why the papacy and
the catholic church promoted anti-semitism. The rise of more or
less secular capitalist states in the 19th century removed or reduced
the power and privilege of the clerisy as an exploiting caste (caste,
not class, because the clergy did not, except in exceptional cases,
inherit their social position). The actor which overthrew the clerical
power was the capitalist state. The clerisys aspiration to
the restoration of the old order could thus be expressed in the
trope, Jew equals capital.
What Kertzers account does not give us is any explanation
of why the anti-semitic rhetoric expressing the reactionary aspirations
of the clerisy acquired mass support. One essential element of an
answer was identified by Frederick Engels in The peasant question
in France and Germany (1894): We have no more use for the
peasant as a Party member, if he expects us to perpetuate his property
in his smallholding, than for the small handicraftsman who would
fain be perpetuated as a master. These people belong to the anti-semites.
Let them go to the anti-semites and obtain from the latter the promise
to salvage their small enterprises (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/peasant-question/ch02.htm).
Engels point is that the anti-semites assertion that
the Jew equals capital can express not only the reactionary interests
of the clerisy, but also the reactionary interests of small proprietors
who imagine that by overthrowing capital an old and natural
order would return in which their small businesses would be protected
from competition from large-scale production.
There was, however, also another element: charity. The protestant
reformation and the secularism of the French revolution both directly
attacked clerical property. The developing semi-secular states of
the 19th century, in contrast, left church assets and funds largely
untouched. The resources of these funds enabled the catholic church
in the later 19th century to develop well-funded schools, charitable
and welfare organisations and, in some countries, catholic trade
unions and political parties. Meanwhile, laisser-faire liberalism
in the mid- and later 19th century opposed state welfare provision
for the poor. Catholic institutions and catholic politics could
thus reach well beyond the clerisy and their petty-proprietor cadre
to compete with the workers movement for mass support among
the working poor and unemployed.
In the 1870s the new German imperial state launched the Kulturkampf
(cultural struggle) against the influence of the catholic church,
especially in education and, through the catholic Centre Party,
in politics. Lassallean socialists gave critical support to the
secular states struggle against the church. Marx
and Engels were much more cagey, insisting that the workers
movement must oppose both church-controlled and state-controlled
education. Healeys history of Stalinism and sexuality indicates
that they were right: secular states can turn out to
be as violent purity campaigners as churches.
Stalinist sex police
Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia is the first full-length
treatment in English of the regulation of deviant sexual
behaviour in the Soviet Union. Its ambition in fact extends further:
the first part of the book (chapters one and two) sets the stage
for what follows by studying forms of homosexual behaviour in modernising
Russia: ie, the late tsarist period. Part two (chapters three
to seven) studies tsarist law enforcement and the initial movement
for reform of the law before the revolution, and the period between
1917 and the recriminalisation of consensual male homosexual relations
in 1933-34, and part three (chapters eight to nine) the regulation
of homosexuality between recriminalisation and decriminalisation
by Yeltsin in 1993.
Part one displays for us Russian variants on the transition in homosexual
relations identified for 14th to 15th century Venice by Guido Ruggieros
The boundaries of Eros (1985) and for 16th to 18th century England
by Alan Brays Homosexuality in renaissance England (1982),
and since then in variant forms for several other countries in a
large body of books and articles.
In pre-capitalist societies the immediate reproduction of labour-power
(eating, housing, etc) is conducted through the family and to a
lesser extent through corporate religious forms (monasteries, etc).
As a result, homosexual behaviour certainly exists, but there is
no economic space for a homosexual subculture and therefore for
the identification of individuals as homosexuals (gay
men/lesbians). The transition to capitalist urbanisation, through
employment opportunities, lodging houses and market food provision,
creates economic space for the emergence of sexual subcultures,
and, ideologically, deepened individualism. The conflict between
emergent subcultures (like molly houses in early 18th
century England) and purity campaigners (like the Societies for
the Reformation of Manners in the same period) produces labelling
and self-labelling of subculture participants as members of a distinct
social group: mollies and other labels in the 18th century,
homosexuals from the later 19th.
In late 19th and early 20th century Russia, pre-capitalist forms
(centred for men on bath-house culture) were interpenetrated with
an early development of capitalist forms of subculture. Like early
subcultures in the west, spaces for cruising (looking
for casual sex), and forms of prostitution, were prominent elements
of the subculture. Tsarist law prohibited sodomy from
1835, but until 1905 policing and prosecution was episodic. However,
the defeat of the 1905 revolution was followed by more vigorous
morality campaigning by lower-level state officials,
and convictions doubled, though they fell overwhelmingly on the
lower classes and on non-Russians. The result was increased self-identification
as homosexual and the beginning of campaigns for reform.
The Bolshevik government in 1922 issued a penal code which did not
include the prohibition of consensual same-sex relations, though
it (quite properly) retained prohibitions on sexual coercion and
sex acts with people who had not attained sexual maturity.
Healeys discussion of the textual history of the draft penal
codes shows that this was not accidental: the strategic decision
went back to the first draft code, produced in 1918 by a Commissariat
of Justice still headed by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries before
they broke with the government.
However, the language of the 1922 code referred to the satisfaction
of sexual lust in perverted forms with sexually immature persons
(Healey, p123). Thus, like the English decriminalisation of 1967,
the 1922 code used continuing and proper prohibitions of the abuse
of power to assert also legal rhetorical condemnation of deviant
forms of sexual behaviour.
Healeys account shows two elements of the background to this.
The first is that the Bolsheviks shared with the German socialists
a tension between libertarian perspectives on sex and
rationalising scientistic and state-building ones. In
fact, these tensions map very roughly onto Marxism (anti-statist,
hence libertarian) and Lassalleanism (pro-statist, pro-family).
On this front Lenins writings from 1915 to 1921 show him to
be clearly a rationaliser (Lassallean), not a libertarian
(Marxist).
The second element is the trial in October 1919 of Bishop Palladii
of Zvenigorod for corruption of a boy and unnatural vice (pederasty)
(pp118-119). The context of this trial was the Bolsheviks
struggle with the Russian Orthodox Church: Palladii was an associate
of Patriarch Tikhon, active in the defence of the assets of the
New Jerusalem Monastery against nationalisation. The trial was clearly
intended, Healey argues, to smear Tikhon through his associates.
There is also a marked resemblance backwards to the governments
of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, which used homosexual
smears (and passing statutes against buggery in 1533, 1547 and 1563)
as part of their attacks on monasteries and catholics. (Enter
Sodomy, dressed as a monk is a stage direction from a government-sponsored
play of the 1560s.) If it can be linked backwards, it also links
forwards to Bolshevik uses of sex crimes against the
church in the 1920s (pp154-58), and against traditional forms of
male prostitution in Transcaucasia and Central Asia in the same
period, which Great-Russian chauvinism linked to islam (pp97-98,
158-59). In other words, in competing with traditional religious
elites for the allegiance of the peasants and other petty proprietors,
the Bolsheviks from 1919 on made increasing use of the language
of sexual purity to smear their opponents.
Obviously, the ideology used to back this use could not be traditional-religious.
Instead it was first scientistic and then directly political. Healey
gives us a fascinating account of the competing scientific
empire-builders working within the Soviet state, penal and medical
establishments through the 1920s: at first there was an attempt
to medicalise homosexuality; then the influence of the struggle
against backward pederasty - ie, against
the church and non-Russian cultural practices - increasingly painted
the homosexual as politically disloyal.
The shift accelerated with the Russian and German communists
use of Ernst Rohms homosexuality to smear the Nazis. By 1933
Yagoda of the GPU secret police complained that in Moscow and Leningrad
homosexuals had been establishing networks of salons, centres,
dens, groups and other organised formations of pederasts, with the
eventual transformation of these organisations into outright espionage
cells. He proposed a draft law prohibiting consensual sodomy,
which was eventually adopted in a revised form in 1934 (pp185-86).
The old non-party socialist writer, Maxim Gorky, wrote an article
defending the decision. Gorky, Healey comments, deployed the
myth of elemental Russias purity to set up a familiar contrast
with an over-civilised west. The homosexual thus becomes,
like the Jew, a rhetorical figure of alien impurity. Gorky concludes,
bizarrely: Destroy the homosexuals - fascism will disappear
(pp189-90).
This Stalinist pattern in which ideas of sexual purity are associated
with national regeneration had predecessors, as we have already
seen, in the England of the 16th and 17th to 18th centuries. As
Healey points out in his conclusion, it has been followed not only
by other Stalinist regimes but also by numerous state-building nationalists
in the neo-colonial third world, as in the sodomy trials of Canaan
Banana in Zimbabwe and Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia. It can be added
that the McCarthy era in the United States saw the same combination
of ideologies of the homosexual as a medical problem and as disloyal
to the nation: this time, instead of being fascist infiltrators,
they were communists ...
Islamist anti-secularism
Islam and secularism in the Middle East is a collection of essays
which claims, according to its blurb, to contribute to the
debate in which western-inspired secularism ... is increasingly
cited by islamist intellectuals as the source of the regions
social dislocation and political instability. There are 11
essays in total. Three, the least interesting, are by non-muslim
academics: John L Esposito, John Keane and Peter L Berger offer
descriptive essays which represent mainstream academic sociologists
and political scientists trying in an impressionistic way to approach
the (alleged) failure of secularism. The remainder are
by muslim academics, journalists and political activists from Britain,
Egypt, Pakistan. Tunisia, Palestine and Turkey.
It should be emphasised that these essays are not attempts to derive
political models or lines directly from the Koran and the sharia.
For that one needs to look elsewhere. Rather, they are islamist
critiques of secularism addressed to western or westernised
audiences. They draw significantly on postmodernist critiques of
liberalism and on Edward Saids Orientalism (1978), and in
some ways markedly resemble catholic and other religious-conservative
uses of postmodernism to criticise liberalism. To discuss the individual
essays in detail would be tedious; but there are some recurring
themes which are worth examining.
Falsifying history
The first is that, like catholics who argue that the enlightenment
led to the holocaust, the islamists habitually falsify history.
At one level this is present in the recurring claim of the essays
that the separation of church and state is actually a christian
idea. In the first place this ignores the fact that both Confucian
and pre-colonial Indian thought give tasks to the state which are
radically separate from religion. In the second place it falsifies
the nature of the medieval doctrine of the two swords
(canon law and royal law). This doctrine in no way involved medieval
christian thinkers giving up the claim that religion and canon law
was, like sharia in islam, the only source of legitimacy. On the
contrary, like the doctrines of both sunni and shia thought of the
period about the believers duties under unjust rule, it was
a means by which the christian clerisy accommodated itself to the
actual political relation of forces. Muslims had to put up with
a corrupted caliphate and various forms of sultanate
and emirate: christians had to put up with semi-secular and usually
unjust kingship.
Conversely, the essays repeatedly claim that the muslim ulama is
not a clerical caste, because its claim to authority is grounded
merely on learning. But this is equally true of the protestant clergy
- and, at the end of the day, of the catholic clergy. The difference
is merely in the mechanisms by which one comes to be identified
as an alim or as a priest. Outside shiism, the ulama do not
have a direct claim to tax, unlike tithe in medieval christendom.
But they subsist on waqf (trusts) and other charitable donations
which are provided because the religion claims that there is a duty
of charitable giving. These are directly parallel to the charitable
foundations of medieval christendom. They are as much an exploiting
caste as priests.
Colonialism and secularism
At a level closer to practical politics, the islamists claim that
secularism was imposed on the Middle East by the colonial powers.
It is, however, pretty clear in the first place that British colonialism
actually promoted pseudo-traditional islamic forms of
government: it was Britain that gave the world the Hashemite kingdoms
in Iraq and Jordan, the Saudi kingdom and its peripheral emirates,
and the regime of Reza Shah in Iran; it was Britain that funded
armed resistance to the modernising policies of King Amanullah in
Afghanistan; it was Britain that fostered the peculiar confederation
of Sultanates in Malaya and promoted religious-ethnic communalism
in that country between muslims, hindus, animists, Chinese, etc,
as a means of defeating the Malayan Communist Party and carrying
out a cold decolonisation.
Secondly and on the other hand, the attraction of later nationalists
to secularist politics emerged from the Turkish revolution led by
Mustapha Kemal Atatürk. But Atatürk merely carried further
into a full-blown secularism policies already developed by the Young
Turks and, before them, the later Ottoman empire. Where did these
policies come from? The answer is that after the European military
revolution of the 17th century the Ottomans suffered a series of
military defeats at European hands. The more far-sighted members
of the regime drew an accurate balance sheet of these defeats. This
had two elements. First, the traditional self-identification of
Ottoman armed forces as mujahedin fostered levels of individual
indiscipline which made their armed forces ineffective against the
more coherent and disciplined European armies and navies. Second,
the creation of military forces capable of defeating the Europeans
was blocked by the repeated opposition of the ulama both to technical
education and to legal changes, which would allow the development
of national arms manufacture and transportation and logistical development.
Atatürks response was to crush the political pretensions
of the ulama and of military jihadism under the banner of secularism.
In the result he created what is still in many respects the most
powerful state in the muslim world, capable of inflicting direct
military defeat on the Anglo-French imperialists and their Greek
allies in the Turkish war of independence (1919-22) and an unambiguous
defeat on its fellow Nato member, Greece, in 1974 - incidentally
leading to the overthrow of the USs favoured military regime
in that country. This is not to prettify Atatürk or the Turkish
state regime. It is to recognise that secularism appeared after
the 1920s as an option which would strengthen the ability to resist
the colonisers.
Crime, family, sex
A third element of historical falsification is critical to the
islamists broader appeal. This is the claim that secularism
leads to social breakdown, to the breakdown of the family
and morality, and consequently to crime and disorder. This is a
familiar conservative christian counter-enlightenment argument which
has been around in England since the late 17th century and was most
recently repeated in Tony Blairs July 19 attack on the
60s consensus. Supporters of nostalgia for past Edens of social
order and freedom from crime never bother to offer real evidence
that the situation has actually got worse. In fact, the historical
evidence suggests that both crime and human sexual behaviour
and the use of intoxicants are singularly resistant to moralising
state control, and that there is no evidence of an exceptional modern
deterioration. Blair, indeed, launches his new five-year plan
for crime control by rejecting the liberal consensus
under conditions where recorded crime has been declining over the
last 10 years.
The islamists are exceptionally vulnerable on this front, since
the rightly-guided Caliphs of the 1st century of islam,
to whom islamists look back as exemplars of the true religious social
order, presided over a campaign of Arab conquest of neighbouring
peoples involving organised armed robbery and rape on a very large
scale, sanctified as jihad. If islamic civilisation
is to be taken in a broader sense as including the experience of
pre-colonial muslim countries, the historical evidence indicates
that, like pre-modern European states and their laws, neither state
or ulama had effective capacity to enforce the prescriptions of
sharia; and crime, deviant sexual behaviour, drug use,
etc were as commonplace in the cities as in those of medieval christendom.
The complaint about social breakdown which is common
to islamists and other counter-enlightenment conservatives has an
underlying element. It is the breakdown of the family
that is said to be to blame for what is wrong with society. We thus
confront ... another purity politics. Islamism, like catholic anti-semitism
which it in many ways resembles, appeals to the restoration of an
imagined old order. It is similarly produced in the interests of
a clerical caste, the ulama, which has been deprived of power by
modern capitalist states. It is similarly socially based in part
on the exasperated petty (male) proprietors threatened by competition
and by the emancipation, by capitalist urbanisation, of women and
youth; and in part on the ability of the ulama to deploy charitable
resources to provide for the poor social services which states have
failed to provide.
Secular-statist tyranny
And yet there is another side of the coin, brought out in all the
essays in Islam and secularism in the Middle East. This is the practically
tyrannical character of the capitalist (Turkey) and neo-colonial
capitalist (other Middle Eastern) secularist states. These states
- as in the case of Stalinism documented by Healey - have been as
prone as the islamists themselves to forms of purity politics. The
islamists explain this character by the secularism of these states;
in most of these essays with an overlay either of the states
are tyrannical because secularism is foreign to muslims or
the states are tyrannical because enlightenment ideas lead
to tyranny. But how are they to explain the tyrannical character
of the Iranian Islamic Republic, which has the shia ulama at its
core, or of the Saudi monarchy, which has always been based on an
edgy alliance between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi ulama?
The underlying reality is that secularist statist nationalism was
not a direct inheritor of enlightenment secular republicanism. What
it endeavoured to do was to respond to the global domination of
capital. In the Middle East, this global domination was in the period
before the fall of British world hegemony expressed in the form
of British, French, Spanish and Italian colonial rule. The nationalists,
like the Stalinists and influenced by them, sought a form of national
purity politics as an alternative to global capital in the
form of colonialism. The result was a variety of forms of dictatorial
regimes.
During the first period of the US world hegemony (late 1940s to
early 1970s) this approach could, like Stalinism, deliver real improvements
to the conditions of life of broad masses. Economic development
brought with it a growth of the proletariat. As a result, in spite
of the tyrannical character of the regimes, opposition was weak
and islamists remained marginal.
A complex shift in US strategy around the mid-1970s weakened the
economic position of the nationalist (and Stalinist) regimes, undermining
their political legitimacy. In the case of the colonial nationalist
regimes, it produced mass unemployment and deproletarianisation.
It also, in the Middle East, delivered large amounts of oil money
to the Saudis and the Gulf emirates. The Saudis and Gulf states
in turn recycled substantial parts of it in charity
which supported a growth of islamist organisation in muslim countries
- just as the catholic charitable funds had supported
catholic-political and anti-semite organisation in late 19th century
Europe. From the middle 1970s US imperialism did not support secularist
regimes. It supported, indirectly, islamist opposition movements
to them. In Afghanistan from the 1978 revolution this policy became
transparent.
This history indicates that political islamism is, in fact, not
an alternative to the domination of imperialist capital. It is merely
another face of that domination. However, it also indicates that
statist nationalism is also no alternative to the domination of
imperialist capital. It remains tyrannical; and its limited gains
have been all too easily undone by shifts in imperialist strategy.
The extreme case, of course, is the fall of the Soviet Union. After
this statist nationalist projects should be seen for the stupidity
they are.
Purity and tyranny
Purity politics is reactionary-utopian. It sets out to make the
capitalist omelette back into eggs, or to restore the virginity
of the nation ravished by enlightenment ideas. It this context,
clericalist versions and statist versions of purity politics mirror
one another with different formal ideologies. Set fully free, as
in Cambodia under Pol Pot or Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal,
purity politics produces human catastrophe. At best, as in Iran
and as in the Stalinist and nationalist regimes, it produces tyranny.
These are inherent consequences of the underlying nature of the
interests of the clerisy and state bureaucrats as castes and of
the petty proprietors as a class.
It is tempting to suppose that capitalist class rule is preferable
to these consequences. This is the line of approach which has been
taken by left supporters of the USAs war
on terror. It has a certain Marxist basis in the arguments
of Marx and Engels in the 1840s for the workers movement to
act as the left wing of the democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie.
The trouble is that the capitalist class is more frightened of the
working class than it is of the reactionary-utopians. This was dramatised
on the largest possible scale in Europe in 1933-45. It is visible
in the role of reactionary-utopian religious politics in todays
USA and in the USs indirect support for islamists in the Middle
East from the 1970s. It should be made absolutely obvious by the
role of the imperialists in Afghanistan and Iraq: far from promoting
political democracy, these interventions have promoted communalism,
reactionary-utopian politics and warlordism. Supporting the capitalists
thus does not represent an alternative to reactionary-utopian purity
politics, but only another route to more of the same.
At the end of the day the only real basis for liberty and democracy,
as opposed to purity-politics tyranny, is the class movement - and
ultimately the class rule over both state and petty proprietors
- of the working class. The policy of Marx and Engels in the Kulturkampf
- no support for the clerisy, but also no support for the states
fake secular campaign - should provide a guiding thread. The problem
is not to choose between clericalist Tweedledum and statist (or
imperialist) Tweedledee. It is to build the independent movement
of the working class and formulate policy based on the interests
of the working class as a class: ie, the interests of class unity,
including women and young workers, the employees of small businesses,
and so on.
It is only in this context that the question of drawing (some) petty
proprietors into an alliance with the working class can be posed
without abandoning the objectives of the working class. As Engels
commented in The peasant question, Of course a workers
party has to fight, in the first place on behalf of the wage-workers
- that is, for the male and female servantry and the day labourers.
It is unquestionably forbidden [for socialists] to make any promises
to the peasants which include the continuance of the wage slavery
of the workers.
It must be equally impermissible to promise to the small proprietors
their right to exploit their wives and children or support for the
purity rules which are the ideological expression of this right.
Mike Macnair
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