A few comments from the original Hexbear thread come to mind

1. "guy named Hakim from Iraq is Muslim, white people are shocked and appalled"

2. In speaking about religion in HAMAS and other resistance groups. "I for one am shocked that members of the Islamic Resistance Movement find value in an Islamic text."

Like seriously? We have people in this thread bringing into question The Deprogram crew for..... having a member be religious? Also because they interviewed people that aren't explicitly MLs? These guys that have done more to bring communist theory to more people than this entire instance. Lol stop acting like fucking ultras or whatever. I mean really? You all need to get a grip. Furthermore, expecting them to BE infallible while also complaining they act like the ARE infallible and the attacking them for that too? Please. Coming off like a bunch of wreckers. These guys have never claimed or acted like they are the gods of communism. They get on, discuss what they know, and give their opinions. Those opinions can be not always on point,and not always what you want to hear. It's your own deal if you expect them to be perfect then get pissed when they aren't.

A man can be both religious and a communist. He can also have a disagreeable point while having good intentions. And most importantly he can have flaws and still be an extremely important and beneficial person to the cause. The man is religious. He shares this religion with most of the people currently undergoing a fucking genocide. He probably feels more empathy towards them then most westerners do to their fucking next door neighbors. My heart burns for the Palestinians, I can only imagine how he must be feeling. Man probably understands the Palestinian culture and religions better than any of you. But please, tell me how you all, as non Muslims, probably white ass westerners, know so much better. I for one, am a white as westerner. Yet I am capable of at least understanding where he is coming from, even maybe disagreeing with him, without also attacking him as rabidly, and disgustingly, as some of you all have.

Honestly, after reading some of the gross over reactions and ridiculous attacks from this thread, I am legitimately ashamed of some of you. Like legitimately. Ashamed. Downvote me and attack me for saying so if it makes you feel better. That's fine. After some of the absurdity I have seen here I'll be happy to add some blocks to my list.

[Long post ahead]

Frankly, I was a bit confused at first at the responses to Hakim's supposed misdeed. I saw practically nothing wrong with his post.

This is speaking as someone who considers themself "ex-muslim" and rarely practices any of the daily rituals of being muslim.

I have read through both the Hexbear thread and this one here on Lemmygrad. Firstly, I would like to say I agree with Aru's comment on the other parallel thread running right now.

I'd like to address some of the contentions people have about the post. Hakim starts his post with this statement:

How do the Palestinian people persist? As muslims...

Not because they ARE muslims, as in, Islam was the only way in which they were able to carry out anti-colonial struggle, but rather they carry out the anti-colonial struggle through BEING muslim. Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education. It is the masjid that organizes the local community. It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

To say that if Palestine was fully christian or any other "religion", they would still reject colonization, misses the point. It doesn't matter about some hypotheticals that you concoct in your head. That's as useful as saying that if China was 100% Christian they would still be communist - what is the point in engaging in idealist hypotheticals? To simply compare it to Christianity, is idealism. Because you are not comparing the reality in which these cultural traditions, epistemologies, and beliefs operate. You are comparing one idea to another, utterly deaf to the material context behind it. The material reality of the ummah, the material reality of Palestine, means that Islam is the force in which anti-imperialist and anti-colonialism is carried out.

So yes, perhaps for many muslims, the Quran, the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) becomes the starting point of their political conciousness, and to somehow call it immature, backward, or a type of "false consciousness", is to fall into the orientalist idealist tropes of the days of direct colonization.

Throughout the entire Islamic world we have seen numerous secular and communist organizations that directly collaborated with the colonizer, that never gained support from the muslim masses and that also had to face a visceral reactionary force funded by the West. To say that secular movements only failed in the Islamic world because they were being pitted against reactionary Western-funded movements ignores the fact that if these secular movements truly had the mandate of the people - truly did listen to the working masses, they would have succeeded in maintaining power in the first place.

To act like this analysis is somehow "idealism", when it is actually idealism to ignore history and material conditions in favour of a dogmatic secular understanding of class warfare.

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR? Why doesn't anyone ever mention about the beacon of liberal modernity and secularism - France - in which if you ask anyone in the ummah what they think about it, they would vehemently reject associating with that Islamophobic "secular" state. Why is it immediately assumed that when someones says they want an Islamic country, it is immediately assumed they want a monoreligious populace with forced conversions on heretics and heathens? Why is it assumed when we say something is Islamic, it means that it cannot involve people of other faiths (or lack thereof)?

In my eyes, the answer is simple. It is because the Western left still carries the mental burden of colonization, of cultural genocide, and they project it onto the global south - onto the ummah.

Are we suppose to ignore the Islamic influence of for example Southeast Asian foreign policy, Arab nationalism, or North African decolonization? How about the Islamic Axis of Resistance pushing back against the Zionist Entity and other US imperial projects in West Asia? Islamic socialism and Islam has been, and continues to be, materially closer to anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and communism than Western Marxism could ever even dream about (that is - if they even recognize imperialism). Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

Is it the "muh slems" that are idealistic, or is it the Western's left misunderstanding of the "unity of opposites"? If you can only percieve reality in absolutes, in black-and-white, then "religion" is always "immaterial"; that means you will be unable to identify your friends from your enemies and it also means you will never understand Islam and the ummah.

I don't agree with what Hakim said but it's not like he's the grand Oracle of communist theory. He's a young guy who grew up in a war torn country in which more than a million of his fellow countrypeople have been massacred by the west. A country that is geographically much closer to an ongoing genocide than the western country I am in right now.

Of course religion isn't the main thing driving the Palestinians forward right now. But it probably plays an important role in a Muslim Majority country.

What bugs me, though, is that many western communist nearly start foaming at the mouth the moment religion gets brought up, especially in combination with communism. Meanwhile we have actual religious majority countries being AES or resisting imperialism and it feels highly chauvinistic to discredit their struggle purely because they are religious. Once the first perfect atheist western revolution without violence and possible reactionary takes happens, we'll see. But my money is that our own revolutions, of they ever happen, will be far from 'perfect' as well.

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.

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.

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).

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.

To attribute the enduring will of Palestinians to struggle for their freedom solely to their religion is reductive. Of course objective circumstances and material interests are major factors too. But at the same time we should not discount the role that faith and cultural values play in inspiring courage, resilience and faith in victory. Even though these are immaterial factors they are nonetheless real. Religion is of course not the only thing which can fulfil this role, and people can be motivated to endure great suffering and commit selfless acts of sacrifice for the struggle by many different things. Revolutionary fervor, the belief in fighting for a better future, plays a big role in every liberation movement. The impact of morale in a war should not be underestimated.

That being said, it's probably not a good idea to proselytize your own faith (or lack thereof) to others in the struggle, it creates needless friction when we should accept for now that we each have different reasons why we fight and what matters is that we fight for the same goal.

Have all the secular and Christian Palestinians given up on life?

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 recent content is pretty disappointing, instead of even reuploading his old videos which were pretty useful he's doing debunks of random wackjobs.

You know, for a man that's so well read I have a feeling he hasn't really touched much ex-muslim writings. That said I wouldn't have written a word had I not seen so many defending him.

I'm not being an edgy anti-theist. I know that any attempt to actively dissuade people of their religion is futile at best and often malicious. The issue is that he's precribing something that's not possible to reasonably back up.

If his analysis is that Islam is more conducive to a liberation struggle, he should say so. It'd be easy to debunk mind you; liberation struggles, marxist and non-marxist, happen all over the world. West Asia isn't close to being unique in this regard. Desire for liberty is quite inherent to all peoples of the world and fighting against subjugation doesn't become something else done for different reasons because the people doing the fighting are attributing their struggle to something else.

I feel this might not be quite clear, so I'll try to elaborate. A people may struggle and they may attribute their will to fight to their God, their patriotism, or something else they believe in. This doesn't make it true. If it were, we'd see a clear distinction between peoples of different religions or cultures, yet we don't. People struggle whether they believe in Allah, Buddha or Wakan Tanka. What we do see is that people in similar material conditions react in similar ways. A people under siege, kicked from their homes, treated with disdain and contempt will fight back. Many, of different cultures and religions have. From this it should be easy to conclude that the initial claim would be chauvinistic, even if one isn't impuning other beliefs.

I'm thinking how one would write that and make those recommendations without a hint of chauvinism, I can't really think of a way. He recommends books quite similar to books my haji grandfather gave me to read. He thought Islam was correct and that by reading, I'd come to the same conclusions and my faith would be stronger for it. It backfired spectacularly, but that's not my point. He wasn't trying to proselytise, in his mind he was doing no more than give a kid the tools he needed to find the truth. His best intentions didn't make him less chauvinistic, and they wouldn't Hakim. It doesn't make them bad people, but it means their approach doesn't have a sound material basis.

Edit: I deleted the last part because it wasn't helpful. I don't begrudge people fighting for their lives their religion, if that's what gets them through, all the power to them. All I'm saying is that these people aren't holding onto religion because it gives them their will, it gives them their will because they're believers holding onto it. Reading the life of the Prophet doesn't inform the readers as would the words of Ho Chi Minh or the history of Palestine, which is why I took issue with the post and its defenders.

I feel like an old man, I'm still having trouble with this website, pressing reply insread of edit.

In pretty much every post here and on hexbear that's defending Hakim's post I see at least one of a few assumptions taken as true which aren't.

Firstly, no one here is criticizing the Palestinian resistance and the forms it takes. We're criticizing Hakim's post. Hakim has positioned himself as a Marxist educator and taken on the role of spreading ML theory. With this come some responsibilities, namely to share actual Marxist analysis. When he departs from this, he'll get rightly criticized for it.

He can be religious and do what he wants. No one is criticizing the fact that he's religious. We're criticizing the fact that he brands himself a Marxist educator with Lenin as his picture and then shares idealist analysis like in this post.

Secondly, that his analysis is not idealist, when it really is. This has nothing to do with Islam specifically, it would be true of any religion, but stating that a religion is what's driving resistance is simply idealist. As Marxists we know that it's the material conditions that are the primary drivers of both the zionist settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance. We, of course, don't neglect the superstructural aspects, with ideology and religion among them, but we don't make them the primary drivers of resistance. We begin with the material.

There have been similar resistance movements throughout history, some religious and some not which have persisted just like the Palestinian movement. As Marxists we understand why that is, and that, while in each particular case the particular ideology had an impact, ideology as such is not the driving force behind revolution.

As Amílcar Cabral said

always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for things in anyone's head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better lives and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.

What we (Marxists-Leninists) should be spreading are works through which you can learn about settler-colonialism and resistance to it in general, and works about the specific conditions of Palestine. No one's even saying we should totally ignore religion, but it cannot form the basis of our analysis, and we cannot center it above the material.

An example of a better (in my opinion) post about Palestinian resistance right now is this thread by Roderic Day.

Also, as Marxists, critique is what we do. No one is beyond critique, and especially not our fellow comrades. Such critique and discussion is how we arrive at correct theory (and practice) and consolidate around it.

Anti-colonial struggle is universal. It has taken place all over the world and by no means limited to Islam or the Palestinians.

Islam does play a role in the formation of the political movement in Palestine. However, the idea that religion drives anti-colonial movement and infuses them with some “special” property is nonsense.

National liberation movement has always taken on a form that is deeply influenced by its local culture and shared values among its people. This is not unique to the struggle of the Palestinian people.

Plural thinking is not easy to do but Hakim is an intelligent person. That people are always looking to police each other over things like this is so tiring. If we can't stand with Muslims right now when it's basically 2001 all over again then we leave no choice but for people like Hakim to look at us and realize the truth, "they are who we thought they were."

He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second.

You're goddamn right. Islam is racialized. He has no choice, especially when Marxists won't even give him respectful breathing room.

lol u are late to the struggle session. Most of the discussion happened in a hexbear post.

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. I don’t mean to sound mean or anything, I mean this in a constructive manner, I don’t think anything good comes from criticizing Hakim for recommending reading related to his faith, if he had a post saying that non-muslims are bad people that’s another story. I can’t imagine why people are upset about this because I’ve seen a number of twitter posts about the “implications” of Hakim’s community post, as if it was meant to be confrontational when it was clearly intended to be informative to those who are curious. If you aren’t, then you can keep scrolling. I genuinely apologize if this came off as rude, but I quite enjoyed his recommendations

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?

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.

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.

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 have a very strong negative reaction to this, admittedly only some of which is due to its dissemination through a channel supposedly focused on Marxist analysis.

There's nothing in the screencapture that could be recognized as Marxist analysis. There's no science here, just idealism and essentialism (Islam is about not just the culture but the 'nature' of the Palestinian people, really?).

Even the book recommendations seem dubious to me. Is biography really central enough to history for Marxists for the biography of one man to be a 'great historical work'? The next title even sounds like it could have been AI-generated from a collection of apologetics tropes, from its fixation on the figure of the convert to the 'this was supposed to be an anti-religious book' move other grifters in the space use to enhance their credibility.

Yes, I think religious faith absolutely plays a role in organizations like Hamas (as well as in daily life, 'resistance by existence', for many) that is not reducible to material interests or other forces. Religion, like ideology, takes on a force of its own beyond the material conditions that shape both its initial formation and constrain its evolution. For that reason, superstructural forces like religion are worth analyzing in their own rights (alongside the material forces that are, as Marxism understands, 'determinative, in the final instance' in the unfolding of history). It can even be argued that particular religious institutions (as distinct from religious beliefs or doctrines) are material, are members of 'concrete social relations'.

But an analysis which asserts that Islam is the driving force of the resistance movement in Palestine without any account of things like the fact that secular forces' leadership were in exile, outside Palestine, when Hamas rose to prominence during the first intifada; or that there are nearby Islamist nation-states willing and able to smuggle arms to resistance groups in part to serve their own geopolitical interests, while there have not been any such Marxist-Leninist states for many decades... this is neither dialectical nor historical nor materialist.

Analysis of how religious institutions on the ground in Palestine organize, support or constitute anticolonial resistance is one thing. Exhortations to study the Quran are another: ordinary proselytizing.

Edit, a couple days later: I still think it's true that the post pictured in the OP isn't Marxist analysis. But I also think that my turning that observation into criticism was a mistake, and that my criticism was fundamentally misplaced.

Political education is a task, not an identity. It's no one's job to speak always and only in a Marxist idiom. Sometimes a reading recommendation is just a recommendation, not a thesis— and that's fine.

My hostile reading of the individual book recommendations was also reductive and uncharitable. I glossed over the analogy Hakim asserts between the broader social context of the emergence of Islam and present-day Palestine. Because other aspects of its premise remind me of hackish Christian apologetics books that have been pushed on me in the past, I also discounted one good faith reason Hakim had (and stated!) for recommending von Klaveren's book: namely that the author's conversion journey involved overcoming common Islamophobic myths and stereotypes. Even if that book absolutely sucks, that's a feature it couldn't have in common with Christian conversion narratives situated in cultures where Christianity is dominant.

It may be true that as a writer, Hakim could have done something to frame his post in Marxist terms, or to 'tag' it as not really directly concerned with Marxism. But as a reader, I think I failed to recognize a lot of implicit framing that was already there, in the form of the Deprogram catalog itself, by considering pretty much only what was excerpted in the OP when I started commenting here.

I will keep this short. Not an argument just observation. Those Capital M Marxists and others in the Left (globally not just the West) who continue to deny the self determination and validity of Islamic Resistance and hold patronizing views about the vanguard forces of anti-imperialist struggle will find themselves increasingly isolated and irrelevant in the multipolar world. Everyone outside of small insulated bubbles recognizes this sectarianism as a colonial mindset.