Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Doug-

las, Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Cul-

ture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); “It’s 

a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s . . . Nabil Fawzi!” Saudi Aramco

21 (March/April 1970): 18–25; Frances Prichett, “The 

World of Amar Chitra Katha.” In Media and the Trans-

formation of Religion in South Asia, edited by Lawrence 

A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley, 76–106 (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

communism

One of the most important expressions of political 

ideology, social organization, revolutionary action, 

and economic development to appear in the 19th 

and 20th centuries was communism. Its founding 

figure was Karl Marx (d. 1883), a German intel-

lectual and journalist, who argued that history 

was an ongoing struggle between the haves and 

the have-nots (the rich and the poor) over control 

of wealth. He believed that history would end with 

the triumph of the working class over the exploit-

ative holders of capital, bringing about a peaceful, 

classless society in which wealth was shared com-

munally. Communism, also known as Marxism, 

inspired social and revolutionary movements in 

e

Urope

, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Several of 

these movements were able to establish central-

ized dictatorial regimes run by communist parties 

in Russia (known as the Soviet Union from 1917 

to 1991), Yugoslavia, c

hina

, North Korea, Viet-

nam, and most of the countries in Eastern Europe. 

These governments were strongly opposed to 

organized religion, because they believed that reli-

gion represented the established interests of the 

old order and that it perpetuated false ideas about 

human nature, economy, and society. By the end 

of the 20th century, the majority of governments 

under communist control had fallen except those 

of China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. The 

decline of communism at the end of the century 

coincided with the resurgence of political Islam, 

and some scholars have seen a causal relationship 

between the two phenomena.

During the 20th century, Islam encountered 

communism in three ways: 1) intermittent sub-

jugation of Muslim populations by communist 

governments in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, 

China, y

emen

, and a

Fghanistan

; 2) overt opposi-

tion by conservative Islamic states such as Saudi 

Arabia to communist governments and parties; 

and 3) competition among rival Islamic and com-

munist party organizations in their opposition to 

undemocratic and authoritarian right-wing gov-

ernments and occupying powers. Many Muslims 

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