As the Labour leadership contest enters its final leg, party members will be receiving their ballots in the post today. But while the national media is zooming in on a two-horse race between the two Milibands – one the candidate of continuity, the other of modest change – The Third Estate talks to Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, sofa star of This Week and the only contender for Brown’s vacant throne offering genuine left-wing reform.

“I am running for the leadership because I am the best candidate for the job,” Diane Abbott confidently declares. “The most immediate task is to rebuild and revitalise the party and no other candidate has my experience of the party.”

Drawing on her experience as a trade union official, a councillor, an MP, a member of the national executive and a veteran of many grassroots campaigns, Abbott believes she is better placed to engage with ordinary Labour party members than any of her rivals.

“I want to build on the best of the New Labour years, but I am the only candidate offering a fresh vision for the party,” Abbott says. It’s a vision that ranges from greater internal democracy to putting civil liberties back at the heart of its politics. At home, she wants to challenge, not just to the timing of government cuts but their scale, while abroad she wants to see new thinking about Britain’s place in the world by scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent and withdrawing British troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, advocating bringing the railways back into public ownership, Abbott seeks to address one of the core failures of New Labour. “We need to admit that the market is not the answer for everything,” she says.

Labour’s defeat in May’s election has ushered in a new period of reflection for the party. But while most of her rivals are seeking to trim around the edges, pushing for centrist reform, Abbot is clear about her party’s mistakes and how they must be addressed.

“Ordinary people thought that New Labour was not on their side,” Abbot says. “Increasingly it seemed like an elitist project trapped in a Westminster bubble. New Labour became increasingly undemocratic. The Prime Minister was not listening to his cabinet and the Parliamentary leadership was not listening to its own members and supporters or the general public.”

Abbott argues that if ordinary party members had had a real say, Labour could have avoided some of its most damaging mistakes.

“Scrapping the 10p tax rate, the introduction of tuition fees, the failure to regulate the banks properly, the attempt to introduce 90 days detention without trial, locking up children in immigration detention centres, the failure to bring the railways back into public ownership, creeping privatisation in the NHS, and, above all, the Iraq War. These are all things that contributed to our defeat at the last election.”

It has been fifteen years since Clause IV was famously re-written and Labour became New Labour. But after thirteen years of New Labour government, on the day that Tony Blair’s memoir hits the shelves defending his decision on Iraq and urging Labour not to return to the left, what would Abbott say to disaffected left-wingers who have abandoned a party they feel abandoned them long ago?

“I cannot defend the many right-wing decisions that were taken over the past thirteen years and I never have,” Abbot says. “But I can offer an alternative. Under my leadership we will get back to the business of being the Labour party that delivers for the people of this country. Being in opposition gives us a chance to have a real look at the state of the party, and get back to the principles we were built on.”

While a spell in opposition may well be what the party needs to reflect on its many mistakes in government, the conclusions it draws will depend largely on who it selects as its next leader. Abbott’s candidacy, like those of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, has been overshadowed somewhat by the Miliband brothers, and in particular the elder front-runner. But if David Miliband wins, will it prove the party has learnt nothing from the failings of New Labour?

“David Miliband is the New Labour continuity candidate, the heir to Blair,” Abbott says. “The majority of ordinary Labour party members were against many decisions of the New Labour project. However they see the desperate times we face under the coalition and some think that David Miliband is the quickest way out of it and back to power.”

Abbott believes voters will naturally return to Labour, but the sell will be a hard one. “My view is that the general public are not fools,” she says. “When the Lib-Cons have finished destroying our country we will certainly have voters that will naturally come back, but the rest will take convincing. There is nothing convincing about the same old, New Labour rhetoric, which offers no real alternative to the status quo.”

As a left-winger, and as the country’s first female black MP, Abbott neither sounds nor looks like the status quo of British politics. Her place on the ballot paper was far from secure, however, until fellow Socialist Campaign Group MP, John McDonnell, withdrew his leadership candidacy. By doing so, he said he hoped he could help ensure that a woman got onto the ballot paper of an otherwise testosterone dominated contest. But should politics be about gender, or race, or should it be about having the right ideas and the right policies?

“I am most grateful to John McDonnell, because his withdrawing did ensure that a woman made it on to the ballot,” Abbott says. “However he is a staunch socialist and would not have withdrawn for another principled progressive.”

Abbott agrees that politics is all about policies, but argues that in the 21st century, a winning progressive movement in any country has to reflect the views and concerns of women and minorities. “If we do not have a political leadership which looks like the community around us then it will lack the legitimacy we want to represent,” she says. “Politics should be about representing the needs of people and people come in many different forms. A lack of diversity and a lack of representation in any institution are instantly reflected in debate, policies and implementation.”

One policy that Abbott keenly supports is electoral reform which, more than any other, threatens to split the coalition government. A referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote (AV) system was, albeit rather too little rather too late, included in Labour’s manifesto and Abbott has pledged to back the key coalition proposal.

“It may not be the ultimate solution, but will certainly be fairer than the first past the post system we currently use,” she says. “It is more proportional, reduces the need for tactical voting and will help to reflect true public opinion of fascist parties. Groups like the BNP are very unlikely to get 2nd or even 3rd preferences.”

Like many of her fellow party members, however, she is somewhat less keen on the government’s decision to link the referendum on voting reform with boundary changes.

“I am appalled at the Lib-Cons attempts to use voting reform to bring about boundary changes,” Abbott says. “These are clearly designed to ensure that they maintain and gain more seats in further elections. Tainting the reforms with trying to maintain power is highly inappropriate and may mean that people will not vote for AV reform despite believing this is the best system. This in effect defeats the point of the entire reform.”

This last comment perhaps best reflects Abbott’s philosophy. A socialist, a democrat, a thorn in the side of the Blairite establishment, but Labour through and through.

“We have difficult times ahead,” Abbott says. “I love my party and believe that we will rise to this challenge. But to do this we need every disaffected activist in the Labour movement behind us. They are a group of people who understand solidarity and I am certain they see the importance of uniting against the Lib-Cons.”

The task ahead for Abbott, and for her party, will not be an easy one. In less than a month it will choose which direction it will take. And contrary to the retired rhetoric of the Mandelsons of this world, that choice is not between backwards and forwards, but between left and right. If, after thirteen years of Blair and Brown, after Iraq and Afghanistan, after the systematic rollback of civil liberties and human rights and the stark betrayal of its socialist roots for a market-orientated philosophy, Labour elects David Miliband, it will have learnt nothing from the failings of a leadership that sacrificed genuine progressive principles for power for power’s sake. If, on the other hand, it chooses Diane Abbott, reported to be the favoured candidate of Miliband’s Marxist mother, voters may once again find themselves faced with a genuine choice at the next election and the Labour Party may find itself saying out with the New and in with the old.

As you probably already know, voting for this year’s Total Politics Top Blog Awards is well under way. Naturally, I hope all our readers will vote for The Third Estate again this year. However there are some other really great left-wing blogs out there. With the Conservatives in government again and David Milliband likely to be the hugely disappointing voice of official opposition, it’s good to know that there are many voices of unofficial, but much more substantive opposition out there. Here are a few of my personal favourites.

The Daily Maybe – I had the pleasure of writing with Jim Jepps back in the old days of the Socialist Unity Network. He’s since gone off to found his own project, but his thoughts are as incisive and spot on as ever. It’s rare that I come across a writer who can say almost anything and my natural instinct is to agree with them entirely. Charlie Brooker is one. Jim Jepps is another.

Liberal Conspiracy & Pickled Politics: Two great projects run by Sunny Hundal. A constant source of inspiration for the blogger seeking to find a space between journalism and the blogosphere.

Socialist Unity – The blog Reuben and I helped to found long before The Third Estate. It’s where I cut my blogging teeth and it’s still as sharp as ever.

Though Cowards Flinch – Although I often find myself disagreeing with their support for Labour, if anyone could convince me, they could.

A Very Public Sociologist – It was socialism which got me into sociology. I’m very glad to see the two married so well in this blog.

Counterfire - A new kid on the block this year, and a very welcome one.

Left Outside – Left outside, but not left out. This blog is required reading for all intelligent lefties.

Our Kingdom – Excellent blog from the Open Democracy people.

Harpy Marx, Madam Miow, McUaid and Bob From Brockley are all also high up on my reading list.

I was very sorry to see the demise of The Daily Quail this year. Richard Littlejohn will be sleeping sounder in his bed at night now. Unless he’s worrying about disabled lesbian asylum seekers devaluing middle England’s house prices.

The Third Estate golden rasberry goes to Harry’s Place for being utterly shit, completely wrong about everything and just a little bit racist. For a blog that still masquerades as being on the left, it’s amazing that you can pick almost any cause at random and find Harry’s rancid faeces on the wrong side of it.

An interesting discussion has been taking place about the routes of New Labour’s illiberalism. In a piece limited by an evident lack of understanding about the history of the Labour movement or of British marxism, Francesca Klug argued that traditional Marxist influences in the party were to blame. (Francesca says that Marxists were uninterested “in the state as a potentially oppressive force” until Ralph Miliband in 1969. LOL.”  Lenin’s tomb hit back  with a well worth reading piece arguing that the strong state ironically  is routed in Neo-Liberalism. Meanwhile Guy Aitchison at our kingdom has written a thoughtful piece once again emphasising the significance of Marxism in stimulating New Labour’s disregard for liberty.

Where Guy is correct is in identifying a tendency within old labour which emphasises ends over means and which justifies restrictions on liberty on the basis of social welfare. An ex -ide to Gordon Brown once said that the best way to convince him of anything was to put up an oOHP  with a graph showing the worst off in society getting better off. There is most certainly a tendency with old labour which says that “real freedom is bread on the dinner table” – a tendency which at its worst treats the working class as though they want nothing more than to be fed and watered.

But  the analyses of Guy Aitchison and Francesca Clug are undermined by their unnuanced perception of old Labour and the labour left.  It is worth remembering sometimes that Bevan – the ex miner, the radical, and the father of the welfare state – was fiercely anti-communist. At its inception the labour party was characterised by a struggle between ideological socialists – many of them Marxists – and trade unionsts who were concerned, sometimes exclusively, with pay and conditions and living standards and who regarded the first group as dangerously ideological. It was a tension that continued right through the history of old Labour. And it is these bean counting social democrats – not the Marxian influence within the Labour party – whose tradition has shaped the authoritarianism New Labour. It is in this tradition that the Labour Party lined up behind the smoking ban, on the grounds that any level of intrusion and interference could be justified on the basis of improved life expectancy.

What New Labour also draws upon is a tradition of well meaning technocracy. 21st century policy wonkery is in many ways infused with the spirit of 1920s bloomsbury. It is infused with the spirit of those like the Webbs who seemed to believe that the masses could effectively be bypassed and that a few clever people – equipped with powerful state machinery – could put right societies moral and material failings. Equally their good friend Keynes – hero of the old Labour soft left and an anchor point of post war social democracy – was sometimes forthright on the need to insulate the management of the economy, and other aspects of policy, from democratic pressure.

Clugg and Aitchison, meanwhile, offer no explanation as to why those members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who appear closest to Marxists traditions and politics – such as Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell – have been amongst those most opposed to New Labour’s attacks on civil liberties.  Klug argues that there was an “intellectual tradition which never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands” – yet Marxists more than anyone have understood that gaining elected office does not in itself alter fundamental aspects of the state and the way it operates. As did my comrade Tony Benn who entitled one of his memoirs “Office Without Power”.

Drawing a straight line between a caricatured vision of Marxism, and the policies of a decidedly non-Marxist new labour government illminates little. But Klug nonetheless has done us a service by raising important questions about the relationship between socialism and liberty.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Writing in today’s Guardian, the last standard bearer of the dead dream that is a socialist Labour Party hit out at critics by saying that if necessary, he would stand aside to secure Diane Abbot’s nomination for Labour leader. In fact, John McDonnell went further to say that “if my standing down would mean securing any woman on this ballot paper, or any black person, of course I will do so.”

That’s very noble of him. I’m sure he’d hold the door open for them too, unless he had to run off to help an old lady cross the street. McDonnell is right to say that principles must come before career. But giving a leg up to female and ethnic minority candidates, regardless of their policies, is not a principled position in and of itself. Would his offer extend to Thatcher? Or Mugabe? Clearly he felt saddened by the decisions of such shining leftwing beacons as Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper not to stand. Why? Because there aren’t enough vaginas on the ballot paper. Diane Abbot adds one, and can at least be said to have mildly progressive views.

But the point is, politics should not be about the colour of your skin, or the contents of your underpants, but the content of your character. It should not even be – and this will be a controversial point amongst socialists – about class. The defining point has to be policy. It doesn’t matter that John McDonnell is a middle-aged white male. It wouldn’t matter if he were Oxbridge educated like the New Labourite clones leading the race. All that matters is that he has the right policies, the right ideas, the right values. Of course more needs to be done to remove barriers to women and ethnic minorities succeeding across society and parliamentary politics is not exempt from this. But this cannot come at the expense of ideology.

Like most of the world, I cheered when Barack Obama won the US election. Not because he was black, but because he wasn’t a right-wing nutjob like the opposition. If the situation had been reversed, if McCain had been on the left and Obama the right, I would have forgone the opportunity to celebrate America’s first black president and cheered the man with the better politics regardless of his skin colour. To pretend otherwise is, well, slightly racist. It’s in this sense that I find McDonnell’s arguments, sincere and noble as they are, somewhat patronising. Yes, John, principles must come before career. But they must also come before colour, creed or sex. So go out and fight for them. And then maybe you’ll be in a position to genuinely help build a society that is free from all forms of discrimination.

It’s Sunday afternoon. I’ve just completed my first week in paid employment as a fully-fledged journalist and, having begun to appreciate the true value of weekends, I am determined to spend them doing something thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive. Thus, after a deeply thought-provoking, engaging, cultural and generally productive night on the town (well The Hobgoblin in Angel), I’ve woken up late and gone for a fry-up with my hungover girlfriend.

That still leaves the best part of a very warm and sunny afternoon left to burn. But where should the sensitive socialist take his hippy better-half for a romantic day out? Half-way through following a north London nature trail we’ve discovered, I realise we’re near Highgate and decide to take her to the cemetery to see Karl Marx. What, you might think, could possibly be better than that?

Well, for one, not paying the £3 entry fee. I was half-tempted to try to convince them that my great great uncle Karl was buried there and that they should let me enter for free, but I wasn’t sure they’d buy that tactic. After flashing my student card in front of the official’s face fast enough for him not to spot that it is two years out of date, we get into Highgate Cemetery East for £2. Not much to moan about, one might imagine, it’s hardly going to break the bank – even if I do have a girlfriend who insists on ordering the most expensive item on the menu when I take her out to dinner – but it’s the principle!

Highgate Cemetery is a museum of the dead, replete with famous figures, splendid architecture and stunning surroundings and it’s worth the entrance fee. But I object to paying any amount of money (unless it is going to help the world’s poor) to see the founding father of communism. It’s one of the ironies of modern society, like the image Che Guevara, slapped on t-shirts and posters and sold mass-market to thousands of teenagers around the world who haven’t the faintest idea of what he was rebelling against, just that he was a symbol of rebellion. Kind of like the kids who stick photographs of Charles Manson on their walls just to be cool. I digress. If things like religion and the afterlife weren’t just opiates of the masses, Marx would be spinning in his grave.

I’d never seen Marx’s grave before. As a socialist and social sciences graduate, it felt like a kind of pilgrimage to me. When I got there, I was surprised to find there were still fresh flowers at the base of the headstone. I should have expected it really. Family members will often bring flowers to the graves of their loved ones, and among communists, everyone’s a brother or a sister! Pinned down by stones, I found messages written by the people from all over the world who had taken the pilgrimage before me. Skipping past the one written in Chinese that I couldn’t understand, I found one in English that read: “The struggle carries on, comrade!”

The struggle carries on. So long as there is injustice in the world, so long as there is poverty and inequality and starvation and war and oppression, the struggle carries on. Because it has to.

In 1967, a young sergeant named Mario Terán entered the schoolhouse in the tiny Bolivian village of La Higuera to execute the world’s most famous revolutionary. Upon seeing him, Che Guevara uttered his famous last words:

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

Because men are mortal. But ideas like justice, equality, freedom and peace never die.

Several decades later, Mario Terán received free eye surgery from Cuban doctors.

Ok, perhaps he’s not wrong about everything, but Reuben wrote an article yesterday with which I have several significant disagreements. My main problem with his assertions stem from this cringe-worthy little paragraph:

In places like Cambridge – where they grabbed a seat last time – they seemed to get the vote of those who treated voting as an exercize [sic] in political self expression, or a parade of their moral conscience, rather than a practical attempt to determine the future. You know, those self indulgent tossers opine, with great moral gravity, “I couldn’t possible vote labour”. With a change of government on the cards – and at a time when politics will really save people of [sic] fuck people – I expect people to really, actually vote for who might form the next government – i.e. Labour or the Tories.

Whilst Reuben is right to say that the Lib Dems, perhaps unfairly, capitalised on an anti-war vote which will be far less pronounced in this election, I believe he is gravely wrong to characterise people who refuse to vote Labour for moral reasons as “self indulgent tossers”. Aside from being patronising, he is missing out on the bigger picture. Firstly, if we ever want the political system to change, and for long-term progressive reform to take place, we cannot afford to blindly follow a system which forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Politics should not be about who we don’t want to run the country, but about who we do. It is not, in my view, wrong to vote Labour in all cases. There are some very good Labour MPs and candidates out there who, despite the transgressions of their party, despite the wars, the privatisations and the systematic crackdown on civil liberties, deserve the support of left-wing activists. Nor, in all cases, is tactical voting a bad move. However, by telling people that they must vote Labour simply to keep the Tories out, we blunt a powerful tool for reforming the political system. Moreover, we reinforce the sense of disenfranchisement that is precisely the problem with politics at the moment – a sense of alientation in which people perceive they have very little choice in who runs the country and that their views are not being represented in a so-called representative democracy – a disenchantment which, far more than immigration figures and tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers eating our hamsters, has led to the rise of the BNP. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year: “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Secondly, Reuben’s thinking relies on a similar faith to Tony Benn’s, that New Labour is a transient thorn that can be plucked if socialists re-join the party and work for change from within. I respect this view, but in translating this to a call to back Labour in an election regardless of circumstance, I think it only exacerbates the problem. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very middle class architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes, whilst internationally it will continue to follow a line that is dangerously neo-conservative confident that as long as they remain moderately better than the Tories domestically, their left-wing supporters, who turned up on every demonstration opposing invasions and ID cards, will continue to put their cross in the right box come election time. Yes, you heard it here first folks, the Iraq war was Reuben’s fault! This is precisely why moral decisions must play a part in deciding who to vote for. This is why cold pragmatism gives everything we have struggled to resist in the last decade an easy ride. It’s not self-righteous to say I can’t, in good conscience, vote Labour. It’s just self-aware. Nor is it a matter of placing my own morality above the good of the many. There are a great many Iraqi orphans who would agree with me. By voting for who I want to run the country, rather than who is most likely to run the country, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

So you see, this is why Reuben is wrong about everything. Also, and this is perhaps the most fundamental point of all, whilst kids up and down the country were running round the playground playing ‘It’, Reuben was playing a game called ‘Had.’ I rest my case…

Hat tip to Derek Wall for this report from an attendee of the Green Party conference. Encouraging signs for those of us on the left who see the Green Party as the most promising vehicle for progressive change in British politics and for those who see the party as much more than a single-issue environmental pressure group. My one disagreement with the author is that I would actually go so far as to say, from their manifesto, the Greens are quite explicitly socialist.

At its conference in London over the past weekend, the Green Party provided more evidence of its gradual evolution from a narrow environmentalist sect into a left social democratic party with a strong emphasis on ecological issues.

First, the conference passed with large majorities two resolutions drafted by members of Green Left, the Party’s ecosocialist tendency; one pledging support for the National Pensioners’ Convention and its election manifesto, and the other calling for the imposition of a top limit to the pay and bonus differentials in all organisations, so the maximum wage that any organisation could pay would be ten times that of the lowest paid worker.

Second, in its revue of the Party’s health policy, conference removed all the egregious anti- science references in it that had previously been such an embarrassment, and reversed its previous opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

Third, the make-up of the membership is clearly starting to change. Over the past year, party membership has increased by around two and a half thousand and is now hovering close to ten thousand (and rising). The number of young faces at the conference has clearly grown over the last year or so, as has the number of new members coming from the ranks of the ex-Labour diaspora. As one member, attending her first conference, remarked “I used to think of the Greens as single issue obsessives, but now I believe the Party represents the principles I spent thirty years fighting for in the Labour Party, informed by a realisation of the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis we face.”

Some charming, handsome, intelligent fellow has written a column on the First International for this weeks Socialist Worker. Read it here.

"You can't stay neutral on a moving train" - Howard Zinn

The radical historian, author of A People’s History of the United States, and documenter of some of the most important radical struggles in American history died yesterday aged 87. Zinn was active in the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement and organising amongst academic staff. He was responsible for upholding the memory of a hidden history of American radicalism, and will be missed by generations of students and activists.

An interview with Zinn in Socialist Review here.

A narrated version of his People’s Historyof the US Empire:

Guest post by Carl Packman

Islam is enemy No. 1 of much contemporary criticism, either by the angry EDL men on the street, to new atheists asserting that Islam is incompatible with Enlightenment societies, to critics such as Nick Cohen and David Aaranovitch’s’ with their claims to present Islamic bad boys (and girls) as the real threat to leftist sentimentalities.

But many of the targets taken by the above miss the mark, leaving the perception that Islam itself is the enemy. But this shortfall does not render left wing opposition to Islamism impossible.

It seems at first an odd place to start but our solution here can be found with Freud. At a time of massive vulnerability for European Jews, it would have been easy for many to resign themselves to victimhood and group together under the pretext of their hitherto shared history. However in 1939, between being robbed and forced to emigrate from occupied Vienna by the Nazi’s for being Jewish and partaking in one of the disciplines they referred to as ‘Jewish science’ (psychoanalysis), Freud decided to pursue the subject of the historical arrival of monotheism (which he attributes to Moses’ being an Egyptian priest of Akhenaten, and not, as is commonly assumed, his being originally Hebrew). As such, in a letter he told Arnold Zweig “Moses created the Jews” and, in his last substantial book Moses and Monotheism stated that “it was not God who chose the Jews … but Moses”. Matthew Sharpe, author of the book Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real noted that ‘Freud did not attempt to restore or reassert the ‘purity’ of Judaism against its detractors. He offered a demonstration that Moses, Judaism’s law-giving Father, was already impure: an Egyptian stranger’ (p. 246). By doing this, Freud observed that everything we thought we knew about Jewish history grounded inaccurately. Freud enjoyed the benefit of achieving two things, firstly producing a philosophically adept justification for the mental utility and historical genesis of monotheism (for Freud, monotheism revealed the end of object worship, and the beginning in belief in the absent, an astonishing mental accomplishment), and secondly undercutting everything the Nazi’s thought they knew about Judaism, even if this was to undercut the knowledge of the Jews themselves. And after all there is no better tool for defeating critics than to show that everything they know is wrong.

The way in which to utilise this tool for Islam is clear. In order to undercut criticism of Islam from the unpalatable voices, while maintaining an opposition to Islamic fascism, one must champion Islam’s alternative, forgotten or disavowed history, and then ask questions as to why this has been disavowed, and by whom.

Professor Ali A. Allawi in his LSE seminar In Search of Islam’s Civilisation noted that political Islam post-1976 (a time of relative freedom in Iraq he states) disavowed its ethical dimension, preferring to appease the status-quo by being rules based and not ethics based. A compulsion for corruption soon crept in to fill the gap, attempting to predicate itself on purely Islamic measures. The relationship between Islam and capitalism, for example, had to overcome some treacherous boundaries with regards to what was ethically sound in the religious system. The result being that Islam dressed elements usually frowned upon – the banking system for example – into palatable products (halal banking). Ironic, really, that what Allawi situates as the genesis of Islamism – rules based Islam and not an ethics based Islam – was the attempt to forge an Islamic version of a model many would attribute to US-styled capitalism. Strange to think that the Middle Eastern anti-Imperialist movement might have been grounded by a sly attempt to create capitalism with an Islamic face.

The events of the 1970’s in the Middle East changed Islam in a way that has not been significantly altered ever since (which is rather hard to accept given the severity of events that have since taken place, but what I mean is simply Islam has continuously been on the defensive since the seventies – after Iraq/Afghanistan nothing has changed, only maintained), and it is worth remembering this point when promoting a counter-hegemonic version of Islam, though this merely satisfies the political body of Islam. Where are we to address Koranic issues? Crucial information should be sought from Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Sudanese liberal reform figure and believer in a version of progressive Islam, expressed in his book “The Second Message of Islam”. For Taha, we should be reminded that the Koran had been revealed in two locations, firstly in Mecca where Muhammad and his followers were minorities, and in Medina where the city was brimming with Jews and Pagans. During his verses in Mecca, Muhammad promulgated a “peaceful persuasion,” whereas in Medina the verses are filled with rules and intimidations. The Medinan verses, the first message(s) of Islam, were directed to a whole community of early believers and not Muhammad alone, according to Taha. These messages were a sort of ‘historical postponement’ as George Packer puts it in his New Yorker article on Taha. It was the Meccan verses, the second message of Islam that would represent, for Taha in his revisionism, the perfect religion, an acceptance of equality and freedom that, in seventh-century Arabia, Muslims were ready for. This provided his grounds for a progressive Islam, or at least a return to Islam in its truest form, since disavowed in its Medinian emphasis on rules based Islam.

Examples of Taha’s revisionist spirit can be found in today’s Iran; one particular person held in high regard is Grand Ayatollah Sanei who recently called Ahmadinejad’s presidency ‘illegitimate’ and ‘against Islam’. He is outspoken on matters such as the prohibition of nuclear weaponry in Islam, equal status for women (which, surely, must include not banning them for being too good at motor car racing), equality for non-Muslims and well known for issuing a fatwa against suicide bombing. Another well known example is Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montarezi, recently described in the New York Times as ‘an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.’ He too questions use of the term Islamic government when it is referred to the one in his homeland.

What might initially be problematic about this counter-hegemonic revision is that it seeks to find the best in Islam and disavow the bad bits. The question remains; are the bad bits Islam’s problem? The answer is of course yes, but the way around it is not to simply bracket what is good and bad Islam, but, rather, what is and is not Islam. What has been said about Freud’s work on Moses is that it is largely speculative. Where the Islamic counter-hegemonic history does not fall short to this problem is that it has legitimacy both in its textual revision, and in its ethical methodology (that is to say both historically and practically).

Why might this be helpful for critics of Islamism? Simple, what Freud did show with his work on Moses is that the enemy cannot have reasonable grounds of criticism without a reasonable understanding of their enemy. By restoring a lost history for the Jews, Freud was able to throw off course Nazi criticism of Judaism. Equally, the way in which we are legitimately allowed to criticise Islamism is by taking a fuller understanding of what Islam actually is. This is where cohorts of New Atheism, particularly Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith, fall short. His arguments tend to perceive the true expression of Islam to be in Islamism, and very often purposefully conflates the two, describing good Muslims as not practising their religion to its proper end. Another example in Michel Onfray’s book The Atheist Manifesto, he waxes that ‘Islam is fundamentally incompatible with societies that arose from the Enlightenment’. How do these criticisms stand up with the ideas printed above? They describe an Islam that is rules based, which itself has erroneous groundwork, and so are by no means prepared for the counter-hegemonic history of Islam, which is not merely equal in its legitimacy to fundamentalist Islam, but rather destroys any legitimacy fundamentalist Islam claims to hold.

Carefully applied, the counter-hegemonic history of Islam may well be the vital tool needed for the left to maintain their opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, enemies of Islam who conflate Islam with Islamism, and portions of the left who sing about moral relativism with their fingers in their ears.