Summary
A century-long current of “Islamic socialism” blends Islamic identity with socialist revolutionary politics. It began in the early Soviet era, spread through post-colonial Marxism, and reappeared in the West as “Islamic liberation theology,” which frames Muslim identity as a racialized, oppressed category within progressive coalitions.
The tradition is described as embracing a Marcuse-style logic of tearing down liberal democracy without a clear, predictable replacement, with historical examples—especially Iran 1979—used to argue this fusion often yields authoritarian outcomes and poses an ongoing challenge to liberal democratic norms.
When New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met President Trump at the White House in November, the cordial encounter between the self-described Muslim socialist and the former president puzzled many observers. How should Americans understand Mamdani’s blend of Islamic identity and Democratic Socialist activism? Is he, as Congresswoman Elise Stefanik claimed, a “jihadist,” or as Trump suggested, “rational”?
The answer lies in understanding a century-old ideological tradition that melds Islamic theology with socialist revolutionary theory in ways that produce unpredictable and often dangerous outcomes. This fusion operates according to a logic articulated by neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who argued for destroying the liberal democratic order by creating a “new sensibility”—one that would demolish existing social structures to create something unprecedented, unpredictable, and radically different from Western civilization’s foundations.
Islamic socialism is not merely an intellectual curiosity. It represents a systematic challenge to Western democratic values, one that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution and continues to shape American politics today.
The Origins: Soviet Islamic Communism
Islamic socialism was born in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin successfully courted Muslim constituents of the Russian empire. Though their alliance may have been a marriage of convenience, both groups saw symmetry between their ideologies. For socialists, philosophy ruled, and the end goal was societal transformation. Muslims saw their faith similarly—as a comprehensive system for remaking society.
The Marxist dialectic promised that contradictions between Islam and socialism would resolve themselves over time through social discourse. Opposing ideas would clash, then synthesize into something new and unpredictable. This was not a bug but a feature of the ideology.
Two foundational theorists exemplified this synthesis: Azerbaijani Misaid Sultan Galiev and Muslim reformist Nariman Narimanov, both Shia Muslims. Narimanov depicted Lenin as a prophet and defender of the oppressed. In Soviet propaganda posters, the Muslim revolutionary communist appeared as an Orientalist hero wielding a sword and straddling a horse, combining spiritual and communist themes under slogans like “Gather in love! Under the light of the Red star!”
This Soviet Islamic communism became foundational for Third World Marxism and postcolonial thought, including the theoretical framework behind the Palestinian cause. Years before Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, Soviet Muslim socialists were theorizing about the psychology of the oppressed and the necessity of revolutionary violence.
The Iranian Revolution: When Theology Triumphed
The most dramatic demonstration of Islamic socialism’s unpredictability came with Iran’s 1979 revolution. Iranian Marxists and students joined forces with Ayatollah Khomeini to topple the Shah’s Western-aligned monarchy, viewing the ayatollah’s crusade as genuinely anti-imperialist. They believed they were creating a new revolutionary society that would synthesize Islamic authenticity with socialist equality.
Ali Shariati, the revolution’s most influential theorist, fused Shia martyrology with anti-imperialist and quasi-Marxist social critique. Reminiscent of Mamdani, Shariati identified as a Twelver Shia; his wife and daughters appeared modern and did not wear hijab. For Shariati, Islam functioned primarily as a revolutionary ideology rather than a fixed set of cultural practices. Khomeini, who used Shariati’s writings as the ideology of the Revolution, declared that its goal was “dissolving all ideologies in Islam.”
Western intellectuals enthusiastically supported this revolutionary experiment. French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault, along with Americans Edward Said and Richard Falk, applauded the Islamic Revolution. Foucault, who was gay, even excused Khomeini’s death sentences for homosexual men, accepting the regime’s explanation that they were Shah supporters. Covering the revolution as a journalist, Foucault welcomed the Islamic government’s “political spirituality” and called Khomeini “a kind of mystic saint.”
The outcome, however, proved disastrous for those who believed the dialectic would synthesize their contradictory goals. Khomeini murdered and exiled secular dissidents along with Islamic leftist parties, executing more than 2,600 members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) alone. The revolution did not create a new synthesis—it simply replaced one authoritarian system with another, more theologically rigid one.
Yet this catastrophic outcome did not discredit the Islamic socialist project. Instead, its proponents argued that the wrong faction had prevailed, not that the underlying synthesis was flawed.
The Saidist Turn: Islam as Racialized Oppression
The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 reenergized Islamic socialism by recasting it through the lens of postcolonial racial theory. Said, a Christian Palestinian American, argued that Western imperial culture constructed Islam and Arabs as inferior “Others” to justify domination. This transformed Islam from a religious tradition into a racialized political category of structural oppression.
Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, extended Said’s analysis in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, arguing that Western power redefined Islam through a colonial lens that racializes Muslims as either submissive or violent. In the spirit of Fanon, Mahmood wrote that “suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism. We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”
This framework allows Islamic identity to be folded into the broader progressive coalition of the oppressed. As scholar Hussein Aboubakr Mansour documents, prominent Arab Marxists like Abdul Wahab Al-Missiri synthesized Marxist-Islamic critical theory specifically targeting Zionism and Judaism, “revealing its inherently colonialist, imperialist, and dehumanizing nature.” When asked what remained of his youthful Marxism, Missiri answered: “Nothing and everything… my Marxism dissolved into Islamic humanism.”
Islamic Liberation Theology: The American Expression
In contemporary America, Islamic socialism manifests as Islamic Liberation Theology, which frames Muslim identity as a racialized category of oppression comparable to other minorities. This allows figures like Zohran Mamdani to seamlessly blend socialist economics with identity politics.
Consider Mamdani’s rhetoric: “As a Muslim-American, I’ve seen ‘terrorism’ used as an excuse for the state to terrorize our communities. Let’s not enable them to continue going after Black & Brown people.” Here, “Muslim” functions not as a religious identifier but as a synonym for racialized victims of “state violence”—a concept pioneered by Michel Foucault, Said’s inspiration.
Similarly, media pundit Mehdi Hasan tweeted that one-third of Black slaves who arrived in North America were Muslims, implying that America was built on Islamic suffering and that Muslims had an early foundational role in establishing the United States. This mirrors the New York Times‘ “1619 Project” in casting American history as fundamentally rooted in oppression.
This network extends throughout American progressive politics. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib share this rhetorical framework, as do activists like Linda Sarsour and academics like Columbia’s Hamid Dabashi, who directs the university’s Center for Palestine Studies and advocates Islamic Liberation Theology as resistance to empire. Significantly, Mamdani is reportedly supporting Aber Kawas for New York State Assembly—a recent Master’s graduate whose thesis examined Islamic Liberation Theology and who has described 9/11 as something “a couple of people did.”
The Marcusean Logic: Destroying to Create the Unknowable
Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School philosopher, provides the theoretical key to understanding Islamic socialism’s internal logic. Marcuse argued that genuine liberation required creating a “new sensibility”—destroying the liberal democratic order to create something unprecedented and unpredictable.
For Marcuse, the existing liberal system was so thoroughly corrupt that it could not be reformed, only demolished. The revolutionary’s task was not to envision what would replace it but simply to tear it down, trusting that something better would emerge from the ruins. The content of the future society could not and should not be predicted using categories from the oppressive present.
Islamic socialism operates according to this exact logic. It does not promise a coherent synthesis of Islamic theology and socialist economics. Instead, it mobilizes religious identity and revolutionary fervor to destroy existing structures—whether the Shah’s monarchy, American “imperialism,” or Israeli “settler-colonialism”—without knowing or particularly caring what will emerge.
This explains why progressive activists support Hamas despite its execution of gay men and rigid patriarchal control, or why feminists allied with Islamic conservatives in Hamtramck, Michigan, only to watch the newly elected Muslim mayor ban Pride flags. What matters is not internal consistency but opposition to the liberal democratic order itself.
The Iranian Revolution demonstrates this principle perfectly. The synthesis that emerged was neither the socialist egalitarianism desired by leftists nor the pluralistic democracy imagined by liberals, but rather an authoritarian theocracy. Yet Islamic socialist ideology simply moved on to the next revolutionary project, undeterred by the catastrophic outcome.
Conclusion: The Threat to Liberal Democracy
The Islamic socialist tradition represents a systematic challenge to Western democratic civilization. By racializing Muslim identity as inherently oppressed and framing any criticism as “Islamophobia,” it immunizes itself from empirical critique. By combining religious practice with revolutionary praxis, it transforms faith into political instrumentality. By embracing Marcuse’s logic of creative destruction, it explicitly rejects the need to justify what will replace the liberal order it seeks to demolish.
Americans must understand that when figures like Zohran Mamdani blend Islamic identity with socialist politics, they are not simply expressing a benign preference for economic redistribution. They are participating in a century-old tradition of revolutionary ideology that has repeatedly produced authoritarian outcomes—from Stalin’s Soviet empire to Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.
The question is not whether Mamdani is “rational” or a “jihadist.” The question is whether Americans will recognize that Islamic socialism, like all Marxist projects of creative destruction, represents a fundamental threat to the liberal democratic values that undergird Western civilization. History suggests that when theology and revolutionary ideology merge without concern for predictable outcomes, the result is rarely freedom—it is typically just a new form of tyranny.
Sources:
Feldman, L. (2016). Red Jihad: Translating communism in the Muslim Caucasus. boundary 2, 43(3), 221-249. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3572490
Lindsay, J. (2021, August 18). Herbert Marcuse’s “new sensibility.” New Discourses. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/07/herbert-marcuses-new-sensibility/
Mansour, H. A. (2022, July 11). The liberation of the Arabs from the global left. Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/liberation-arabs-global-left
Shorr, T. (2024). From the Iranian mullah state to American campuses: The woke’s failed history lesson. Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. https://jcfa.org/article/from-the-iranian-mullah-state-to-american-campuses-the-wokes-failed-history-lesson/
