Peter Tatchell has some peculiar ideas. In detailing Ken Livingstone’s habitual smear tactics, Tatchell recalls the leftist mayor’s public endorsement of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and says,
Because I criticised Ken on one issue (Qaradawi), he has slurred me as an Islamophobe. It all began when Ken invited the right-wing Muslim cleric to City Hall in 2004 and saluted him as an “honoured guest”. I found his embrace of Qaradawi very odd and quite appalling, given that the sheikh is indisputably anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist… The mayor condemned me as anti-Muslim, and even suggested I was a pawn of the Israeli secret service and US NeoCons.
Qaradawi is indeed a monster of no small magnitude – much worse than Mr Livingstone, who’s merely a vain and spiteful opportunist. In his fatwas and al Jazeera broadcasts, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “esteemed spiritual leader” endorses acts of terrorism against civilians, including suicide bombing, along with the murder of gay people and apostates and the beating of “disobedient” women. (None of which was sufficient to prevent the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting praising the cleric’s “horror of immorality and materialism” and his mastery of the internet.)
But what catches the eye is Tatchell’s description of Qaradawi as “right-wing”. Is this bearded little sadist also in favour of free markets, a small state, low taxation and individual freedom? If so, this is news. It seems to me Qaradawi is in fact a totalitarian collectivist par excellence – a man who, like his stated inspiration, Syed Abul A’ala Mawdudi, dreams of a world in which a person’s most intimate affairs are governed by the state, in this case an Islamic one. Mawdudi’s Islamic Law & Constitution, published in 1960, includes dozens of passages like the following:
An Islamic state is all embracing… [it] cannot restrict the scope of its activities… It seeks to mould every aspect of life… In such a state no-one can regard any field of his affairs as personal and private.
In April 1939, Mawdudi told his followers,
In reality, Islam is a revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals… Islam requires the earth – not just a portion, but the whole planet.
Like a low-rent supervillain, Qaradawi has echoed Mawdudi’s sentiments and declared the revolutionary destiny of Islam to conquer first Europe and America, then eventually the world:
The patch of the Muslim state will expand to cover the whole Earth and that the strength of this state will grow and become obvious to all. This also denotes good news for the long-cherished hope of revival of Muslim unity and rebirth of [the] Islamic Caliphate.
A Caliphate under which the individual must conform to intimate and exhaustive proscriptions of what is forbidden by Allah – proscriptions listed in ludicrous detail on Qaradawi’s own website. To describe Qaradawi, and Islamists generally, as “right-wing” stretches that favoured pejorative to an absurd and perverse degree. Unless, of course, sacralised bigotry, dreams of world domination and absolute state control are now considered proprietary markers of anyone who isn’t sufficiently leftwing.
Help fund my glorious revolution. Trust me, you’ll love the results.
“Unless, of course, sacralised bigotry, dreams of world domination and absolute state control are now considered proprietary markers of anyone who isn’t sufficiently leftwing.”
‘Now’? Haven’t they always been…?
“Is this bearded little sadist also in favour of free markets, a small state, low taxation and individual freedom?”
Probably not. But then a lot of conservatives aren’t either.
Qaradawi is certainly no libertarian, but he’s definitely a traditionalist and that’s a position that’s generally been ascribed to the right of the political spectrum.
Islamists are “right-wing” because liberals are incapable of admitting the truth: that just about all the most monstrous political movements of the past century were left-wing. Liberals have to lie, so they have adopted the tactic of calling Islamists “right-wing” — as a propaganda tool which simultaneously makes Muslim barbarians seem all moderate and respectable, and which can be used to equate Muslim terrorism with Republicans at home.
Matt,
“Qaradawi is certainly no libertarian, but he’s definitely a traditionalist and that’s a position that’s generally been ascribed to the right of the political spectrum.”
Like many of his peers, Qaradawi is a revolutionary totalitarian collectivist – which is surely a more significant feature with regard to his political outlook – and which places him more comfortably on the left. But, yes, the old left/right labels aren’t exactly adequate in terms of Islamist politics and how one might deal with it. Mary Jackson and Hugh Fitzgerald have noted how readily critics of Islam, from Caroline Fourest to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are denounced as “rightwing”, very often on the basis that they, er, criticise Islam:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/14134
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/13102
In many cases, the stereotypical left/right positions have actually been reversed. When I see people defending, say, individual freedom and the rights of women and gay people, at least those with brown skin, they’re now most often conservatives or people hostile to the left. And when I encounter overt and self-righteous racism, it’s now very often among lefties, academic lefties in particular.
See this piece by A Millar for more:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3155/print
“But, yes, the old left/right labels aren’t exactly adequate in terms of Islamist politics and how one might deal with it.”
I’m not sure that the old left/right labels are adequate in terms of any politics at the end of the day. I’m all in favour of free markets, a small state, low taxation and individual freedom, but I think that certain publicly-funded services are necessary to off-set certain disadvantages outside the individual’s control – so where does that put me? I think that most people draw their politics from across the political spectrum in this way. Lumping them into one group or the other just seems lazy.
For me, individual freedom is one of my most important political values – If someone’s authoritarian and wants to impose their will on others then I really don’t care whether they’re left- or right-wing.
I think we can all agree that Qaradawi is a total f*ckwit.
I find it hard to agree that Qaradawi is adequately described as a traditionalist. Muslims extremists reject modernity but they do not desire a return to the immediate past. They explicitly demand a return to the idealised past exemplified by the Mohamed and the first four (Rightly Guided) Caliphs. The assumption being that the relative decline of the Islamic world was caused by a forsaking of the true religion. This is utopianism.
I don’t see any practical difference between a utopianism based upon a mythical vision of the past and a utopianism based upon a mythical vision of our supposedly inevitable future. Calling it traditionalist or conservative doesn’t capture the radically transformative nature of their proposals.
From bra burning to supporting the hiijab the left has taken a long strange trip in two generations.
We live in strange times. I suppose the instance above is rather like how the BNP is generally described as a “far right” organisation, despite it having policies (such as they are) more akin to those of the far left and green movements – nationalised industries, big welfare state, heavy regulation, authoritarianism, anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism, etc. I tend to think of the BNP as a racist, reactionary, far left organisation. The embarrassing cousin of Guardian readers.
http://www.bnp.org.uk/pdf_files/minimanifesto2007.pdf
For the parochial Amuricans (such as myself) Wikipedia has a useful primer on the BNP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
David. Can I just stand up for Peter Tatchell. I’m sure, like you, I don’t agree with everything he says. I don’t share his enthusiasm for the Green party, for instance. But I still find him one of the most decent and morally consistent of political campaigners. He is a British national treasure, even if he is Australian by birth.
As for who is “left wing” or “right wing”. These terms derive from where people sat in the States General in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. Back then the market economy vs state intervention issue wasn’t yet the divider between left and right. The French Revolutionary left were fiercely anti-clerical, rationalist, and suspicious of anything which took its justification from tradition – rather like this blog! But they did also unleash the terror.
Even then, left-right divisions were complicated. We think of Tom Paine as a left wing poster child. But he didn’t get on very well with the French radicals. My guess is that Anglophone thinkers all remembered the example of Cromwell and saw the danger. Edmund Burke (right wing?) correctly predicted the Revolution would lead to Bonaparte and military dictatorship.
Was Fascism left-wing or right-wing? In Spain and Portugal it was definitely right wing: pro-Catholic, pro-Colonial, socially conservative. The German version is more complicated. Hitler was discontented with pretty much everything, and wanted to create a totally new society, a “new order”. You could argue that he was, therefore, “left wing”. But he also hated the left.
Georges,
“He is a British national treasure.”
I find Tatchell a very hard character to like, even when he’s on the right side of an argument. It’s a sort of anti-charisma.
“Even then, left-right divisions were complicated.”
As has been suggested, the familiar categories aren’t entirely helpful, at least in this regard, and they’ve always been fluid. Though I would suggest that some Guardian regulars and groups like the SWP have an ideological erection for Islamist indecency precisely because it’s a proxy revolution for their own miserable pretensions. It’s a vicarious tease. Maybe it’s worth noting how closely the Islamist definition of peace – the submission of all to Islam – mirrors the definition offered by Karl Marx: “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism.”
If you want a binary shorthand other than left/right, how about authoritarian versus free, or anti-West versus pro-West, or intellectual suicide and cultural self-abasement versus not being quite so ready to throw oneself in the sea? (That last one’s a little clunky, I grant you, but there is something to it.)
Hmm. I think you’re right about Tatchell’s “anti-charisma”. I guess he seems priggish, sanctimonious, and he doesn’t have a sense of humour. Kind of like Churchill’s comment about Stafford Cripps. But it still took guts to try and citizen’s arrest Mugabe. Remember there are still many on the left who argue the legacy of Cecil Rhodes gives Mugabe a free pass to despoil the country and massacre the Ndebele. Tatchell is one of the few on the left who never accepts those kinds of dangerous arguments.
Life’s unfair when it comes to handing out the charm. The late Alan Clark held some barmy political opinions, was famously drunk at the dispatch box and a notorious philanderer to boot. But I’d much rather be sat next to him than Tatchell at the dinner table. When he died, many left-wing MPs admitted they liked him personally.
“Hmm. I think you’re right about Tatchell’s “anti-charisma”. I guess he seems priggish, sanctimonious, and he doesn’t have a sense of humour.”
Didn’t he also join the ‘Truther’ crowd in a CiF column about 9/11 a while ago?
Julia,
I vaguely remember it as being along similar lines to Robert “punch me, I deserve it” Fisk’s approach, i.e., “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” Incidentally, I wonder if Mr Tatchell’s joyless, monotonous demeanour is related to his joyless, monotonous politics? If so, which came first?
Not Left, Thus Evil…
David Thompson has a worthy read on the tendency of lefties to denounce anything they don’t like as “rightwing,” in which he refers to Peter Tatchell’s detailing of Ken Livingstone’s (London’s leftist mayor) habitual smear tactics (Tatchell recalls the…