This presentation explores the fraught and generative encounters between Islam and socialism in modern Iran, from the early days of the Cold War through the post-1979 revolutionary order. It identifies three analytically distinct yet historically overlapping political-theological orientations – Muslim socialism, Muslim Marxism, and Islamic populism – each of which confronted the structural contradictions of capitalism and the hierarchies of inequality embedded in the modern world system. Through detailed engagement with figures and movements such as the God-Worshipping Socialists, Mahmud Taliqani, the People’s Mujahidin of Iran, and the populist-Islamist leadership of the Islamic Republic, the presentation traces how Iranian Muslim intellectuals appropriated and reworked categories of historical materialism, class struggle, ownership, and political agency in pursuit of a revolutionary Islamic politics of social justice.

Rather than viewing these engagements as syncretic borrowings or ideological compromises, the article situates them within the longue durée of anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial state formation. It draws on Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” to frame these Islamic leftist and populist projects as counter-movements against the commodification of land, labour, and life under capitalist modernity. In this light, the various Islamic responses to socialism can be understood as attempts to construct alternative moral economies – anchored in Islamic ethical and legal traditions – while navigating the global ideological currents of the global Cold War and Third Worldism. The chapter upon which this presentation is based contributes to broader debates on religion and the left, the afterlives of Marxism in the postcolonial world, and the political economy of Islamic movements in the modern Middle East.

Speaker:

Dr. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a Senior Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at the University of York, is an interdisciplinary scholar of the Middle East, working at the intersections of intellectual and political history, postcolonial theory, and international relations. Before joining York, he was a Lecturer in the Contemporary Politics and Modern History of the Middle East at Goldsmiths, University of London. Eskandar was also a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2019, where he received his doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies in 2014. His research explores the global entanglements of revolutionary movements, with a particular focus on the modern history of Iran and the broader Middle East. He is deeply engaged in theories and practices of decolonisation, examining how anti-colonial and postcolonial thought has shaped political ideologies, movements, and state practices across the Global South.

His book Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines the political and ideological genealogies of Iran’s post-revolutionary reform movement, and he has co-edited Political Parties in the Middle East (2019) and an expanded edition of Fred Halliday’s Iran: Dictatorship and Development (2024). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is also a series editor for Radical Histories of the Middle East and contributes to publications such as Jadaliyya, The Guardian, New Left Review, Jacobin, and Al Jazeera.

Crescent Moon, Hammer, and Sickle: Muslim Socialists, Marxist Muslims, and Islamic Populists in Modern Iran

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