Garbage Packaged in Garbage: How Islam Rents the Left's Vocabulary

In 1962, an Iranian sociologist named Ali Shariati sat in Paris translating Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” into Persian. He made one deliberate mistranslation: where Fanon wrote of the “damnés”, the damned, the wretched, Shariati rendered it ‘“mostazafin”, a Quranic term for the downtrodden whom God promises to make inheritors of the earth (28:5). With one word choice, the entire apparatus of Third-World Marxist liberation theory was grafted onto Shi’a eschatology. Sixteen years later, Khomeini, a jurist who despised Marxism as atheist filth, built his revolutionary rhetoric on “mostazafin versus mostakbarin”, the oppressed versus the arrogant.

Michel Foucault went to Tehran in 1978 and described the revolution as “political spirituality,” the first great insurrection against the global order. The Iranian left, the Tudeh communists, the Fedayan, the secular nationalists, supplied the street muscle that brought Khomeini to power, confident that the mullahs were a phase, a vehicle, a temporary ally against the Shah and the Americans. Between 1981 and 1988 the Islamic Republic hanged, shot, and tortured them nearly out of existence, culminating in the 1988 prison massacres. The useful idiots were exterminated by the movement they had translated into respectability.