The Communist Manifesto and Islam: A Comparative Reflection

I was looking through my bookshelves the other day and my eye caught this very interesting cover of this book, The Communist Manifesto, a modern edition by Carl Marx and Frederick Engles with a very interesting and helpful introduction by the British historian Eric Hobsbomb. This book had a big impact on me as a teenager really. I was very keen on the Marxist analysis of economics and capitalism and history and I was very keen on authors like EP Thompson and others. Um but that's not what I'm going into now. I just want to read to you a few literally three sentences from the Communist Manifesto and um and offer some Muslim uh reflections. On the back cover of the book, by the way, there's a very short review by the Guardian newspaper and it says, "As a force for change, its influence has been surpassed only by the Bible. As a piece of writing, it is a masterpiece." This is what the Guardian says. And I think this is massively overstated. I hardly think it's a masterpiece. Um, and I don't think it's more influence influential than the Bible, let alone the Quran. I think this is extreme hyperbole, but nevertheless, it does tell us what some people do think about it. Some people do think of it as an extraordinary influential work and we'll come to that its enduring influence today in a minute. But I just want to I mean before I read it, I just want to say that KL Marx is known as a great philosopher and a Marxist obviously propounding an historical materialist understanding of history. But his main job really was as a journalist. He was a very good journalist. He had a great way with words and um some of what he said in his understanding of capitalism was very insightful. But in terms of his ability to predict the future, to understand what will happen, he was dreadful. He got everything wrong, I think. Um and he's had arguably an extremely negative influence on the history of humanity, particularly in the 20th century. Um, but I'm going to read a couple of his uh sentences, as I say, full of rhetorical force and color. And there you can see why a lot of people really like them. Now, this was published originally in 1848 here in London, and it's had a huge influence on large segments of humanity. He writes, "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism." Now, what do you mean by spectre? or a spectre is literally a ghost.