Abstract
Lionel Remy-Hendrick interrogates the continuities and tensions between Islam and Marxism in Europe through an ethnographic study of Nasser and his double affiliation: member of a Belgian Marxist Party on the one hand, religious Muslim on the other. Considering Islam and Marxism as identity markers, as discursive traditions and as subjectivations of the subaltern status of the European Muslim, Remy-Hendrick proposes that a series of traditional oppositions – Materialism and Idealism, religious faith and political activism, Muslim and European – should be understood as spaces of negotiation allowing for new political actors to emerge.
(…) A dramatic work shows the succession of the act’s exteriors without any of the moments retaining any reality and, in the end, nothing happens.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1945, 296)
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Notes
- 1.
This research focuses on the main people involved, following a strict protocol. Firstly, long-term ethnography enables us to meet these activists and observe the diversity of profiles brought together under the two markers of “Islam” and “Marxism”. Secondly, life stories are collected in the manner of Bertaux (2016), with an initial question, deliberately broad, constituting the framework of the entire narrative and engaging the individual surveyed in a narrative perspective: “Tell me how you became a Marxist activist?”. Based on the transcribed document, we then code it in a spreadsheet according to a triple division: sequences (Sn), actors (An) and argument classes (Pn), in the manner of Demazières and Dubar (1997). The episodes, classified chronologically (Sn, sequences), and the characters (An, actors) identified in the narrative will constitute the material from which cognitive maps will be elaborated. Once the maps have been created, a second interview with the subject of these maps enables the graphic representation of the discursive representations thus constructed to be corrected, completed or refined. Finally, the part of the document coded under the heading “argument classes” or “propositions” (Pn), which includes beliefs, value judgments, representations of the world held to be true, etc., will constitute the main material for structural content analysis (Hiernaux 1977). In this article, however, we will stop short of the last stage, to focus on the description and analysis of the cognitive maps co-created by Nasser and myself.
- 2.
In Islamic sources, dunya refers to the world of earthly existence. In interpersonal terms, “too great” an interest in dunya can be reproached, because it is interpreted as a turning away from Allah.
- 3.
To keep the text as short as possible, we have included the graph legend here; arrows mean “which implies/which leads to”, dashed lines mean “links up with” (without this implying that), solid circles indicate decisive situations for Nasser, that can be situated in time and space, dashed circles refer to situations that are just as decisive but more difficult to mark out insofar as they deal with feelings, perceptions, vignettes constitute events (punctual or not) leading to bifurcations in the narrative and accompanying the leap to another segment. The graph is divided into eight segments, running from “before” to “now”, and shares this segmented structure with the actant map (see Fig. 6.2).
- 4.
A quote from the song “Alger pleure” by French rapper Médine (Don’t Panik, 2012).
- 5.
Nasser refers to his choice of school as his mother’s decision not to “favour” him over his sisters, whose wearing of the hijab had greatly limited their enrollment opportunities.
- 6.
“Only people ‘of misery’, I had no pals from the upper classes, my most well-off pal had a house in the Fifth and that was it”.
- 7.
As an anecdote, Gilbert Achcar (2018) reminds us that while they rigorously opposed reactionary uses of religion, Marx and Engels mocked Blanqui, Bakunin and their followers for an atheism erected as an “obligatory article of faith”.
- 8.
When I first contacted him for an interview, he emailed me the preface written by Alain Gresh for the reissue of Maxime Rodinson’s Islam et Capitalisme (2014).
- 9.
The higher the sacrifices made, the higher the cost of leaving the group. To see this, we need only consider the potential “rewards” of commitment, which are small or non-existent outside the group. To put it more simply, the fruits of one’s Marxist militant investment – with the exception of the occasional magazine hiring a freelancer here and there – from internal recognition and valorization to being engaged as a parliamentary assistant after graduation, require that “room be made” to continue to enjoy them.
- 10.
This is only half true when we consider the list of Marxist thinkers engaged in this debate, which includes Ajjaz Ahmad, Maxime Rodinson, Sadik Jalal al-'Azm, Samir Amin and others. According to Achcar (2013), Said found it more comfortable to debate with “bellicose pro-imperialists” like Bernard Lewis or Kanan Makiya.
- 11.
To find out more, from Maghreb Islam, Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978) by Bryan Turner.
- 12.
In particular, we must stress the absurdity of considering Marxism solely as a “discursive tradition”.
- 13.
To offer another example, let’s take the practice of “democratic centralism”: this is a practice with a long history, preserved by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and abandoned by the Trotskyist faction, in a chronology that it is possible to date and that still structures today the relations between these groups, but also the relations of these same groups to the Marxist tradition in general and to political struggle in particular.
- 14.
Whose effectiveness in political communication was demonstrated during the last French presidential elections.
- 15.
For more information on this subject, cf. Haoues Seniguer (2016).
- 16.
Talal Asad (2018) argues that the “political metaphysics of secular states” is constituted by a political violence at the very heart of liberal doctrine.
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Remy-Hendrick, L. (2024). Being a Marxist and a Muslim in Belgium: A Case Study. In: de Nanteuil, M., Fjeld, A. (eds) Marx and Europe. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53736-3_6
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