Islamic socialism
Islamic socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates elements of Islam into a system of socialism. As a term, it was coined by various left-wing Muslim leaders to describe a more spiritual form of socialism. Islamic socialists believe that the teachings of the Qur'an and hadith, citing aspects of the religion like zakat, are not only compatible with principles of socialism, but also very supportive of them.
Some early figures in Islam, such as Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of Muhammad, and the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, are sometimes regarded as forerunners of Islamic socialism for their advocacy of wealth redistribution. Interest in fusing Islam and socialism emerged in the nineteenth century, with Islamic Reformist thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whose writings on the topic were published in the 1930s and influenced many later thinkers. Social movements such as the Wäisi movement in Tatarstan, in the Russian empire, similarly drew on Islamic and socialist thought. In the twentieth century, the Indian Deobandi scholar Ubaidullah Sindhi, the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists in Iran, the Muslim League in Pakistan, and the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati are among those to play a role in the history of the ideology.
History
Early Islam
, a companion of Muhammad, is credited by some twentieth century scholars, such as Egyptian Muhammad Sharqawi and Sami Ayad Hanna, as well as by Ali Shariati, as an early antecedent of Islamic socialism. He protested against the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class during Uthman's caliphate and urged the equitable redistribution of wealth.The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually—this was later increased to twenty dirhams.
Islamic Reformism
In the 1890s, the Islamic Reformist thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani discussed topics of “Socialism and Social Justice” during his stay in Paris. However, his thought was only published in a collection edited by Muḥammad al-Makhzūmi in 1931 due to censorship issues in the late Ottoman Empire. Al-Makhzumi notes that al-Afghani conversed with divergent schools of thought, among them sympathisers with European Socialism whom he saw as "extravagant" and "wasteful". He juxtaposed this with Islamic Socialism, which, he argued, was professed by the early caliphs and saḥāba, among them Abu Dharr.As a response to a question about European socialism by "a prominent Turkish man of letters" about the value of socialism in Europe, al-Afghani proclaimed that socialism had already been practiced by the Arabs even before the coming of Muhammad's revelation. He evokes the charitable Arab poet Hatim al-Ta'i as proof of the generosity during that time. This generosity, where the person retained their personal right to property, but saw it as their duty to provide for people in need, was retained and given divine ordinance in the Qur'an. Al-Afghani cites several Qur'anic verses to showcase the call for mutual responsibility, charity, and the opposition to improper profit or usury.
In al-Afghani's account of the formative period of Islam, he understands Abu Bakr and Umar to have successfully lived by the standards of Islamic Socialism. During the reign of Uthman, however, extravagance would have taken over the Muslim leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Abu Dharr, one of the first converts to Islam, confronted the governor of Syria, Mu'awiyya, with this fact, but, after an attempt to bribe Abu Dharr, Mu'awiyya sent him away to the Caliph. It was over this matter that Abu Dharr chose to resign to al-Rabadha away from the Muslim community. This historical narrative would be expanded and resuscitated by later advocates of Islamic Socialism.
Russia and the Soviet Union, 1890s-1920s
According to Sami A. Hanna and Hanif Ramay, one of the first expressions of Islamic socialism was the Wäisi movement in Tatarstan, Russia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement opposed the rule of the Russian Empire and was supported by Muslim farmers, peasants and petite bourgeoisie. It suffered repression by the Russian authorities and went underground in the early 20th century, when it started cooperating with communists, socialists and social democrats in anti-government activity, and started identifying itself as an Islamic socialist movement in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The movement aligned with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which the movement also established the first experimental Islamic commune. The Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan was also active at this time. After the death of Lenin in 1924, the Wäisi movement asserted its independence from the Communist Party; however, it was suppressed during the Great Purge in the 1930s.Soviet decision makers recognized that revolutionary activity along the Soviet Union's southern border would draw the attention of capitalist powers and invite them to intervene. It was this understanding which prompted the Russian representation at the Baku Congress in September 1920 to reject the arguments of the national communists as impractical and counterproductive to the revolution in general, without elaborating their fear that the safety of Russia lay in the balance. It was this understanding, coupled with the Russian Bolsheviks' displeasure at seeing another revolutionary center proposed in their own domain revolutionary, that galvanized them into action against the national communists.
Turkey, 1910s
According to Özgür Yılmaz, Hüseyin Hilmi, the founder of Turkish socialism, as well as his journal İştirak and party, the Ottoman Socialist Party, "attempted to reconcile socialism with Islam", although "their publications were also open to non-Muslim Ottoman citizens, reflecting a cosmopolitan outlook."British India, 1910s-1940s
In South Asia, the Deobandi scholar and Indian independence activist Ubaidullah Sindhi travelled to Russia via Afghanistan in the 1910s. He remained in post-revolution Russia until 1923, where he studied socialism and engaged in discussions with communist revolutionaries. From Russia he moved on to Turkey, where he developed his ideas on Islamic socialism, drawing parallels between Islam and communism in their emphasis on the fair distribution of wealth. Alongside Sindhi, during the 1920s and the 1930s another lesser known scholar, Hifzur Rahman Seoharwi, also found Islam and Marxism to be compatible, with multiple common ideas about social structure and economics.Pakistan, 1940s-1960s
Islamic socialism was also essential to the ideology of Pakistan, as its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to a crowd in Chittagong on 26 March 1948 declared that "you are only voicing my sentiments and the sentiments of millions of Musalmans when you say that Pakistan should be based on sure foundations of social justice and Islamic socialism which emphasizes equality and brotherhood of man", while Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, on 25 August 1949, said in the same vein that:Jinnah's Muslim League, which was the first ruling party in Pakistan, contained a number of Islamic socialists, although they were relatively marginal in the party. Also influential in Pakistan was Ghulam Ahmed Perwez, an Islamic scholar who advocated Qur'anism and a focus on the study of modern sciences. Although he was criticised by more conservative scholars, he became aligned with Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal, the former of whom appointed him as the editor of the magazine Talu-e-Islam, where he wrote and published articles espousing a socialistic interpretation of the Qur'an, arguing that "socialism best enforces Qur'anic dictums on property, justice and distribution of wealth", and advocating a progressive, non-theocratic government and the application of science and agrarian reform to further economic development. Perwez, as a part of his application of qur'anic thought to political ideology, stated that hell was a "... society in which men, dominated by its evil socio-economic system, struggle to accumulate wealth."
During the presidency of Muhammad Ayub Khan in Pakistan in the 1960s, Hanif Ramay led a group of intellectuals in Lahore in developing Islamic socialist ideas, drawing on the thought of Perwez and Khalifa Abdul Hakim, along with Ba'athist thinkers such as Michel Aflaq. Ramay and his co-thinkers influenced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he founded the Pakistan Peoples Party with Jalaludin Abdur Rahim, and they were the primary ideological influence on the party's manifesto. Ramay outlined the priorities for the PPP's brand of Islamic socialism as including elimination of feudalism and uncontrolled capitalism, greater state regulation of the economy, nationalisation of major banks, industries and schools, encouraging participatory management in factories and building democratic institutions. They contextualised these policies as a modern extension of principles of equality and justice contained in the Qur'an and practiced under the authority of Muhammad in Medina and Mecca. However, during Bhutto's time in power during the 1970s, he scaled back his reform programme and deepened Pakistan's ties with the conservative, oil-rich Gulf monarchies following the 1973 oil crisis, and purged the PPP's radical left and made concessions to Islamist parties in an effort to appease them. The party in 1967 adopted the slogan "Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people."
Iran, 1930s-1970s
The Iranian intellectual Muhammed Nakhshab is credited with the first synthesis between Shi'ism and European socialism. Nakhshab's movement was based on the tenet that Islam and socialism were not incompatible since both sought to accomplish social equality and justice. His theories had been expressed in his B.A. thesis on the laws of ethics. In 1943, Nakhshab founded the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists, one of six original member organizations of the National Front. The organization was founded through the merger of two groupings, Nakhshab's circle of high school students at Dar al-Fanoun and Jalaleddin Ashtiyani's circle of about 25 students at the Faculty of Engineering at Tehran University. The organization was initially known as League of Patriotic Muslims. It combined religious sentiments, nationalism and socialist thoughts. After the 1953 coup against the National Front-led government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, Islamic socialism in Iran took a more radical turn, with the Organization of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, using Marxist ideas under the influence of Ali Shariati and engaging in armed struggle against the government of the Shah of Iran, culminating in its participation in the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah in 1979. However, the movement fell foul of the Islamic Republic established after the Revolution.Influential figures such as Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Ali Shariati have also been described as Muslim socialists.