John Clayden

As the late great Duke Ellington once said ” It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it….that’s what gets results ”  so what was it that made the Iranian Islamist Shia Revolution successful and how has Iran Hezbollah and Hamas and Yemen survived against all the odds. The explanation provided by Alistair Crooke is not what you might think. No it is not due to ruthless religious fanaticism, arresting women as inferior, stoning  gays and adulterers and a fanatical belief in a mythical God.
Those Islamic Shia scholars who did the research and providing the theoretical framework for action surprisingly  were inspired by and were in communication with a black  West Indian anti colonial philosopher Franz Fanon who had written   The Wretched of the Earth and other influential books along with his French  admirer some may have heard of namely the existentialist philosopher J P Sartre who wrote the foreword of the former work and said were he to be religious he would be Shia .It was a powerful work. Incidentally in the seventies I gave my copy to Mr Agoukououkou a Biafran ex soldier who was on the same Plumbing course at Perivale Government Training Centre. When we parted, he said “I thank God the day you gave me that book.” But I digress.

The central theme of Fanon’s work was for an anti-colonial movement to be successful, the oppressed had to divest themselves of dependency of any remnant of the way their colonialists thought.
The writings of Fanon was an inspiration to Islamic thinkers who were trying to create a revolution against the Shah in Iran. They made contact with both Fanon and Sartre who had written the foreword to Wretched of the Earth. They were thus inspired to look deep into the original teaching of the Prophet.
In his book Crooke references p58
“The historian of Islam Karen Armstrong summarised the essence of the Prophet Mohammad’s vision of the future to being the building of a just community in which all of its members even the most weak and vulnerable , were to be treated with absolute respect.  The experience of building it, and living in it , would be a reminder of truths that everyone knew, and would give its members an intimation of the divine – because they would be living in the way   God intended for human beings.”
Crooke also points out that Islam acknowledges that there will always be greedy ruthless people and society must keep in place measures to control such anti-social characters and  hinder them.
I do not intend to follow the author into the disputes between Sunni and Shia or the differences with Christianity or the activities of the Young Turks. Suffice to say that by embedding themselves in the beliefs of their populations both in Palestine Lebanon Yemen and Iran the various resistance movements have established a remarkable determination and resilience in the population. This has been demonstrated by the failure of decapitation strikes in Iran and elsewhere. The lesson to be learned for the left is that any movement in the years ahead will have to be embedded in the beliefs and culture of the working population and not as so often is the case in the practice of virtue signalling.
John Clayden