The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?
I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
OP is cringe. To all the crackers you can suck my brown, muslim, and communist balls. Have a nice day.
I like Hakim’s content, but
You know you can take this up with him directly, right? If you know his content well enough to first say that you like it, and second claim with confidence that he’s a “Muslim first and a Marxist second,” you must have heard more than once that his DMs are open.
Why here? He doesn’t even participate here. The !leftistinfighting@lemmygrad.ml community even states in its description that this place is for directly challenging one another, and yet this post is challenging a specific individual who isn’t present.
What purpose is served by posting this criticism here, that isn’t better served by posting it directly to the accused?
Because that’s the purpose of this sub? The side bar even explicitly mentions that hostility and criticism is accepted. Is Hakim not a leftist? Is this not “Leftist infighting”?
This could be a bot troll, but the post is completely within the limits of what’s allowed here.
OPs account is 8 months old and up until this post they had only 3 other posts and virtually no comments. For 8 months. Now all of a sudden 95% of their activity is to start a pretty controversial struggle session in two instances. I am always suspect of accounts like this an those that jump on board almost instantly.
What are you implying here? I barely had any posts because I don’t come on here very often and when I do, I mostly lurk. I merely wanted people’s opinions and I posted on the appropriate instance. What’s the problem?
Have all the secular and Christian Palestinians given up on life?
People are really taking his comment about Islam being a driving force in the Palestinian national liberation struggle to mean the main driving force or even worse, the only driving force are not reading the comment correctly. Every single national liberation struggle has an ideological component which drives the struggle alongside material conditions. Even something like “restoring our once glorious empire,” which various factions of the Chinese national liberation struggle embraced, counts as ideology. The material component of the Palestinian national liberation struggle should be a given and frankly deserves little mention for how obvious it is. The Palestinians are blowing up tanks and merking IOF goons because Palestinians don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. There, that’s your material analysis. It doesn’t need to be longer than a sentence. It’s the ideological motivation that’s far more interesting and that actually warrants paragraphs to outline, which Hakim did. The material motivations are obvious to all, even to people who refuse to accept Marxism, while the ideological motivations aren’t as obvious to an Anglophonic audience that isn’t predominately Muslim.
As for the recommendation of the Quran, well no shit, it turns out the Islamic Resistance Movement uses the Quran as its foundational text, and it would behoove anyone attempting to make a critical analysis of a political group or movement to read that groups’ foundational text. Imagine someone criticizing an ML party or even Marxism-Leninism in general without ever reading State and Revolution or criticizing Marxism without reading any text by Marx a la Jordan Peterson. The gigachad who planted the warhead on the tank did it while reciting a Quranic verse. I would think that it should inspire people to actually read the Quran to understand why he would recite it instead of going, “opium of the masses” like some Reddit atheist. And you can’t just wave around “material conditions” as if that would automatically lead people to perform acts of great courage. Material conditions might provide the clay, but it’s ideology that molds the clay.
At the end of the day, the community note isn’t an all-encompassing analysis. It’s, as Hakim himself stated, merely providing context to the Palestinians’ ideology (political Islam) for people who might not have pick up on it because they aren’t Muslim (his audience).
A comment to a general point made in several comments here…
Two things can be true, struggle inspired by material condition and personal held belief. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, the reductionist orthodoxy at work here is a bit aggrevating.
this was already posted before but i don’t think you can discount the role religion plays in giving people a source of hope and strength where there otherwise isn’t any. Maybe you could do the same thing another way, but I’m at a loss as to how. We all know that religion plays a large part in the lives of a large portion of the world population.
It’s obviously not the a ONLY reason they fight back but it doesn’t hurt the cause at all imo.
But isn’t religion a source of false consolation? The real consolation would of course be the improvement of material conditions.
It certainly helps people cope with day to day life under capitalism, but eventually it needs to go.
Isn’t hakim’s argument that religion helps people keep fighting for better material conditions because they can bare the struggle better?
That is still poor analysis. People can have religion, but to chalk up a people’s survival to it is absurd and horrifically bad material analysis.
It’s better analysis than dogmatically repeating “isn’t religion opium of the people? It dumbs them down, makes them complacent,” even when that’s clearly not what’s happening in this situation.
Where did I ever say it dumbs people down and makes them complacent. Especially not in this situation.
That’s what religion has historically been used for, making it a powder keg of a belief to rely on without any sort of critical analysis.
If you’re going to get hostile at least don’t shove words in my mouth.
I never said you said it, OP said it. You responded to my reply to OP.
No, you replied to me. As in directly to me.
I apologize if that’s an accident, but you did response directly to my comment.
I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn’t make much sense to call it false consolation.
Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it’s not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.
I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that’s just one factor among many in promoting religious adherence, and as a general tendency, it doesn’t necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.
Through a collection of a peoples wills and faith in their country, people, and survival? Literally what the Soviet Union did during WW2? Very few Soviets thought that God would save them. They knew that their own collective strength would save them.
This belief gave them hope.
but for every group that did it without religion, how many relied on religion, or worse didn’t come together to believe in themselves?
Can you give examples? That’s just an open ended hypothetical that no one can answer. I really don’t get what your argument is here.
Don’t forget that faith has been used as a tool of oppression and placed at the height of state, the entire “Opiod of the masses” spiel. Of course people will turn to it if that’s all they know… many wouldn’t if they knew the alternatives.
I can’t, I hoped there might be some well known examples that I overlooked. Maybe there aren’t many or even any, but over human history it’s probable that it has happened.
This is straight up proselitysm. From supposed ML to people he is trying to expose to ML. Wew.
He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second.
How do i put it… it cast shadow of doubt on his materialist analysis, since he clearly is not a consistent materialist.
Also his l recent content is pretty disappointing, instead of even reuploading his old videos he’s doing debunks of random wackjobs.
He’s good at reading books and sharing knowledge, idk about doing his own analysis.
Looking at the OP, he’s got kinda problem with that too, now. And even reading and sharing will necessarily be filtered through his brain.
Sure, but it looks like he is reading Islamic works and sharing information from them. I wonder how familiar he is with anti-theist arguments and works.
He would have to be, at least a little bit. He is extremely well read on Stalins early works and Lenin’s later works, both of which touch on the topic of secularism, atheism, and the role of religion and society.
So at least by proxy he must have some understanding.
lol u are late to the struggle session. Most of the discussion happened in a hexbear post.
Sorry, I don’t use Hexbear. Could you please give me a link to the post?
I don’t really either, I found out from the matrix group (genzedong.xyz, sadly currently down). https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2619156?scrollToComments=true
I’ve been reading all the replies in this thread and feel like I am missing something. As far as I can tell, the only thing Hakim is saying, is that it is important to consider Islamic influence on current Palestinian struggle. Not that the only reason the people are fighting is because of Islam, or that Islam is any way better for liberation of colonized people.
I wouldn’t be even surprised if Islam is actually more prone to anti-colonial struggle than other religions, but I don’t know enough about it to make such claims. But more importantly, I don’t see anything that says that struggle for Palestinian liberation is something that is possible only thanks to Islam.
Religious text can have huge influence even in completely irreligious populations (in this case, people who identify as atheist). For example, my country is one of the most irreligious in the world. But (in my opinion unfortunately) many of our customs, laws, world view, etc. are in some ways derived from the Bible. So it would be fair to say that to understand my country, it might be a good idea to read the Bible.
Which I would say is basically what Hakim is saying here. If you want to have better understanding of current Palestinian fight for liberation, it is useful to have knowledge of Islam. Which I would say is a completely fair statement. Especially considering how demonized Muslims are in western countries.
I am happy to be corrected, but I just cannot see what people are complaining about in this post.
As far as I can tell, the only thing Hakim is saying, is that it is important to consider Islamic influence on current Palestinian struggle.
But he isn’t saying this, he’s saying that it’s religion that’s driving the anti-colonial struggle.
their unshakable faith, which drives their anti-colonial struggle.
And then he proceeds to give a list of religious texts to read in order for us to learn about the persistence of Palestinian resistance.
This is a blatantly idealist analysis of the situation in Palestine. Again, no one is saying we need to ignore or even actively reject the influence of religion to the struggle, but it’s simply not correct that religion is driving the struggle. He offers no materialist analysis and no sources to learn about settler-colonialism or the history of Palestine and its resistance.
The problem with this is that he positions himself as a Marxist educator, but in this post he’s being an idealist.
He also says this is the “largest missing context” in regards to the Palestinian struggle, but that’s also not true. A lot more people are thinking about this in religious terms, than as an anti-colonial struggle against zionist settler-colonialism and the wider context of western imperialism - which it is in reality.
You claim he’s just trying to highlight Islamic influence on the current struggle, but his wording is not consistent with this. His post is idealist and not materialist.
For your take of the post to be true we would have to assume his intentions and say he didn’t communicate clearly enough. If we just read what he wrote, it cannot be considered something a Marxist-Leninist educator should be saying.
I agree that many western countries have a christian culture, but would reading the bible really help you understand our modern society, especially more than reading some Marxist theory?
It just feels like you and almost everyone else defending Hakim’s post are trying to find a meaning in his words that just isn’t there if you read them directly, a meaning that you find acceptable and compatible with Marxism, but not one that can be read from the actual words he used.
I agree he strays a bit into idealist territory, and dangerously towards saying that this is a mostly religious based conflict. However, it would be false to suggest he is ignoring other dimensions of it like material analysis of colonialism. Most people who would come upon his community post would likely be aware of his recent video entitled ‘everything you need to know about Palestine.’ If hakim things religion is primary, why does it not take up much of his video about ”everything you need to know?” It’s clear in his post that he has received many messages specifically about Islam, so he took the opportunity to share these books.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It certainly feels true that Palestinians are very pious, “religion is the opiate of the masses”, and if any people need an opiate like religion, it’s the Palestinians.
you have to understand that the average age of palestine is 18, so not many people get to compel in theory. religion plays a huge role in muslim populations, hakim is right here. it brings people together. of course the resistance is not just al qassam brigades, there’s pflp, dflp etc. but that is a luxury at this point.
on the other hand if you look at the demographic of the palestinian prisoners inside israeli prisons, the situation is complete reverse. there are people there for like 40 years. they did have the privelage to study theory.
I’m not criticising Palestinians for their religiosity. I’m criticising Hakim for his idealist assertions in the community post.
ok, that is valid. but still, in times like these, if you don’t have a guiding body, a stronghold, then people will eventually resort to means that they already have. i know you get this, but hakim lived through something similar, so it’s understandable that what got him through all this is very important to him while constructing his lens looking through this situation.
i live in a muslim country and anti-imperialism here -mainly- arises from infidelity of the us. if the us was a muslim country slaughtering non-muslims, the reaction would be different.
I feel like I’m either deluded or turning into a plain old Western atheist chauvinist scrolling through these comments.
But everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that Hamas was specifically propped up by the Israelis (multiple quotes from Israeli leadership attesting this) in their struggle against the secular PLO because the PLO was a bigger threat to Israeli plans for domination. Except in the past decade they’ve gone off the chain so to speak. Kind of like the mujahideen sponsored by the United States in e.g. Afghanistan to fight the Soviet friendly government, which also went off the chain and started attacking the US.
Israel wants palestine divided with a militant Hamas in the west that they can crush/conquer with impunity, and a weakened/coopted PLO in the east that cannot resist creeping colonization. But as far as I can tell the high point of hopes for a palestinian state were back in the 90s when there was a broad secular coalition under Arafat and a strong PLO.
i guess we’re going off the track here. hamas was propped up by israel because they were religious fanatics, that’s true. they never had the majority support, even now the popular support is for the resistance, whether it is saraya al quds or abu ali mustafa brigades, it doesn’t matter.
majority muslim population does not necessarily mean a sharia state. in fact most muslim countries are secular.
but islam always plays a big role in these situations, mostly because it gives people a sense of community. we can feel the same thing in demonstrations or civil disobediance. you trust your comrade. when i’m in a demonstration i always have a milk+anti-acid mixture to help people that are exposed to tear gas.
so hamas has a use for a limited time. when that time comes to an end, free people of palestine will decide their fate. and if you look at the historical thought leaders of palestine, they’re mostly left leaning, even a good portion is marxist leninist.
I wrote the comment thinking of the Iranian revolution which afaict ended with the clerics taking power and imprisoning/murdering all the atheist leftists they could find. But it’s a very different situation from Palestine desperately struggling to form any kind of state at all. My bad and thank you for responding patiently.
It was just weird seeing praise in the op and some comments (in a leftist/Marxist community) for the use of religion as an organizing principle, as smth good in itself instead of a necessary/temporary evil. Like, even our anthem has a line for “Ni dieu, ni césar, ni tribun!”
it’s simply one person’s thought. Hakim isn’t trying to convert anyone, he’s giving book recommendations for those who are interested in learning about Islam, which prompted his post, it’s not mandatory reading
One of the biggest flaws of failed socialisms were the strong antireligious undertones. As it stands now the Palestinians are facing a literal genocide, so coalescing around a shared identity (yes, even one you may not agree with) is going to be strong force of anti-imperialism.
You should analyze your own prospective and ask if your prejudices come from material reality, or just unchecked reactionary sentiment.
Anti-clerical (or outright suppressive policies) have been a real problem for some socialist regimes. But policies that suppress religious institutions or practices aren’t a matter of undertones.
The conspiracy nutter in me is starting to think that the boys on the Deprogram have had someone “persuade” them to be less openly Marxist. They really do seem to be going backwards in their analysis. I guess that’s kind of inevitable when something like this happens, a big financially successful socialist project under a capitalist system will challenge the creators in a lot of ways, and they wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, even if it is the hand of capital.
Along with them now accepting guests on the show that are explicitly liberal, duganist, or soccdem at best, things have been getting really fishy.
Sadly, I think they’re trying to be “more marketable” and that includes abandoning their original principles. This is something else entirely.
I think this is related though, as others have said, Hakim is a Muslim first and a socialist second, and I do think that would’ve played a role in him being ok with the podcast being less actively Marxist and more marketable.
Disappointing.
When i first saw this i instinctively sided Roderic Day (refer to hexbear struggle session), but increasingly I’ve come to the conclusion that Hakim is not in fact proselytizing, he is simply answering the questions of people who came to their Muslim comrade with questions about Islam.
Whenever I talk about Islam to Marxists or Marxism to Muslims, I get the exact same reaction from both sides, instantly shutting down the other by calling them “Idealist” or “Kaffir” and not take any time to understand each other, like at most they’ll read the Quran or they’ll read the communist manifesto, not take time to understand it and call it a day, which I understand because not everyone has the time to read a book so long and repetitive let alone understand every bit of it, that’s the point of having a conversation and asking questions, but you can’t write off everything in you way and label it as “big bad” for having a word that you don’t like, that’s just ignorance.
You are definitely correct that there is not much communication going on, let alone productive. But another reason for that this is an awkward and difficult conversation to be had as Marxism and Islam are ideologically contradictory is a very strong, formal sense. Obviously this is most immediately an abstract, theoretical point, though that is not irrelevant, as moving through differences and formal contradictions towards consistency is necessary for moving towards truth, and truth is not irrelevant to politics, especially Marxist politics. There is also the issue of the political history of Islam, which is not very progressive and has become less so in the modern era imo. The contradiction between them is also not only something perceived by Marxists, but is very much clear to Muslims as well. An issue that Marxist militants ALWAYS have in my experience in situations like this is that if you are talking politics, or trying to agitate or organize, and you are doing so with religious individuals, especially if they are radicalizing and becoming interested in Marxism, is the contradiction they clearly perceive between their religious convictions and their developing Marxist/Communist political beliefs. At a point if you are in a party you do have to have the conversation with potential militants or members that Marxism is not compatible with the liberal position on religion of pretending like it is politically irrelevant, simply to appeal to the insecurity or narcissism of particular individuals who want to have their cake and eat it too. It is completely incompatible with the Leninist conception of the party.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Marxists are not, in general, going to be attracted to a religion which not only explicitly states that they deserve to be and will be burned and unimaginably tortured in hell for eternity, whose metaphysics is clearly incompatible, but more importantly from it’s inception to the current day has proscribed very different political structures and relations than Marxism (again, not a surprise, given that it emerged in Arabia in the 7th century CE, and that it’s founder was not only a political and religious leader but a warlord who seems to have committed war crimes and whose values were profoundly different to those of modern socialism).
It’s not a coincidence that the modern radical and dynamic expressions of political energy in the Islamic world of the modern era have been Islamist, and that Islamists immediately crush any progressive forces when they come confidently into power. Every place they have come to power they have enacted absolutely depraved social policies. The success of Islamism in the modern era is not only an expression of the religiosity of these societies and the effects of Imperialism and Colonialism, but also an expression of the failures of progressive forces, i.e. communists and socialists in these societies.
Honestly a consequence of this is that individuals then often end up taking pretty simplistic or nationalist positions in relation to certain political struggles, because there is also a reticence among many people of the left to recognize out the self-evidently reactionary aspects of certain movements which stem directly from their religious, theocratic ideologies, as well as broader material conditions, due to the risk that that will be perceived as an attack of the downtrodden. It’s a bizarrely moralistic, un-Marxist, and frankly moronic position to take, because more fundamentally its a question of being realistic about the political possibilities available to movements which are not driven ideologically by socialist or communist ideology, which I think worsens alot of the analysis you see on these problems.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Marxists are not… modern socialism).
This right here is exactly what I’m talking about, If I went out to a Muslims right now and asked them about Marxism they’d talk about China torturing the Uyghurs or that Stalin killed one gazzilion people, you have not read about Islam and you’re perceiving it from whatever source you got it from, that’s why you said Muhammed was a warlord who committed warcrimes [search the Islamic laws of war] instead of commenting on something that can actually be criticized.
(It’s not a coincidence that… socialists in these societies.)
This is why it is important to understand Islam, there’s 1.6 billion Muslims, you can not fight against all of them and you can not magically convince all of them to pick a political side that was heavily red scared to them and that contradicts them, in fact they will declare Jihad on you and I think for being so ignorant you’d deserve it at that point.
(Honestly a consequence … you see on these problems.)
Once again what I said, I did not suggest that Hamas should rule the universe or that the next Caliphate be built in China, you just read Islam and thought of idk a communist caliphate or islamic socialism or some bullshit, you’ve proved yourself to be speaking out of Islamophobic propaganda just like Muslims speak out of red scare propaganda, I am telling you need to actually read and understand something to do an analysis on it, and this is also what Hakim was calling for in the first place.
explicitly states that they [presumably atheists since Marxism didn’t exist then] deserve to be and will be burned and unimaginably tortured in hell for eternity
where in the Muslim holy texts is this stated?
Every place they have come to power they have enacted absolutely depraved social policies
such as?
Where in the Muslim holy texts is this stated?
Quran [2:39], it also says it a few more times, but It’s about the afterlife, anyone who doesn’t believe in the afterlife and just believes a person lives in complete darkness also sees a shitty afterlife for believers of any religion, basically working your entire life just to be stuck in complete darkness and disappear, you can’t be neutral about the afterlife. it is something that shouldn’t matter for anyone who wants to stay out of idealism, what should matter to judge a religion or a school of thought is how it teaches to act towards anyone who’s not from it, and the Quran says in [60:7] [60:8] [60:9] what it says.
Can you give some examples that weren’t more or less created by the West? I’m not aware of Libya having depraved social policies before the coup.
Iran, the laws against women are real, but a lot of the laws were made up by the Iran, the example I can give instantly is that in Islam there is no law that punishes women for not wearing Hijab, while Iran law criminalizes it.
I wouldn’t describe atheist death as darkness and despair. It’s simply the absence of everything. There is nothing to perceive. As if you were never born. You’re right it doesn’t matter what religious people think happens to us after death.
On the bad laws in Iran or other countries, that is in the context of colonialism and the coups of progressive governments.
I wouldn’t describe atheist death as darkness and despair. It’s simply the absence of everything. There is nothing to perceive.
Sorry for my mistake.
thanks for the references; the first one is unfortunate, but you’re right that it’s ultimately inconsequential based on the latter three and similar surahs
the Hijab requirement is certainly restrictive and should be abolished (at least from my perspective), but I wouldn’t consider it a depraved policy
