CIA's critical role in the revival of Islamic fundamentalism

globinfo freexchange

Historian, journalist and Marxist intellectual, Vijay Prashad, describes to Afshin Rattansi the growing relationship between the US, CIA and radical Islam.

As Prashad points out:

The Muslim intellectuals - of, firstly, the Tsarist Empire, but then, all the way out to Iran and to Indonesia - understood and recognized that the promise of equality and humanity was not going to be established merely spiritually. And so, you had an attempt by many scholars - again from Indonesia out to Iraq - trying to reconcile Islam and Marxism.

This was such an enormous threat that in the 1960s, the CIA colluded with the Saudis to create a group called the World Muslim League, whose express purpose was to break this link. And they forcibly pushed a kind of right-wing Islam to undercut it, whether it's up in Dagestan and Chechnya, or it's in Indonesia. And you see the fruits of it today.

Afghanistan was not a country of very conservative hyper-masculinist form of Islam. It was a very heterodox country where sections of the Imamate were very pro-Marxist, pro-Communist, pro-Socialist, pro-Republican, but they had all to be marginalized. And that's the role that the CIA played from the 1960s onward.

Recall that in early 2017, CIA has published online nearly 13 million pages of declassified records, including papers on the US role in overthrowing foreign governments and the secret ‘Star Gate’ telepathy project. The range of documents, known as the CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) database, covers an array of materials related to the Vietnam War, Korean War and Cold War.

In the archive we found a paper that verifies CIA's early attempts to revive Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the expansion of Communism. The paper under the title "Proposal to unite the democratic nations and the Islam world into an anti-Communist force with the aim to win the third world war", dates back in the early 50s.

A characteristic part of the paper describes briefly the whole procedure:

Notice particularly the third step of the procedure:

              Both the cultural society and the office issuing the pamphlets should be headed by Muslims either from China or any other Muslim countries. It is of the utmost importance that it should not be made known to outsiders that such services are backed by the United States.

It is doubtful whether the "glorious minds" behind those strategies back in the 50s could imagine the destructive forces that would had been unleashed, decades later. Or, that the US would use radical Islamist groups as proxy forces to conduct dirty wars in a post-Soviet era.