SOAS Research Online

Abstract

“The Communist International and the Muslim Umma: Marxist Solidarities from Baku to Calcutta” University College London, Institute for Advanced Studies (Keynote lecture for “Communism in the vernacular: international imaginaries, local politics,” 8 June 2018). Abstract: The early years of the Soviet experiment generated new alliances between Marxist revolutionaries and Muslim activists, including the Tatar Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, executed in 1940 for his efforts to generate a revolutionary Marxist-Muslim praxis. This lecture explores the influence of Muslim Marxism on subsequent anticolonial Marxist movements across the global south, with particular reference to Sultan-Galiev’s influence on M.N. Roy and his thinking about the revolutionary aspects of Indian Islam. Alongside its anticapitalist agenda, Muslim Marxism envisioned an aesthetic transformation of revolutionary art forms that merged avant-garde modernism with classical Islamic aesthetics and Russian Orientalism. In realigning art and politics, Muslim revolutionary thinkers developed a form of Marxist heterodoxy that challenged the limitations in Soviet ideology, while activating its revolutionary potentialities for anticolonial ends.