Between Critique and Acquiescence: Marxism, Islam, and the Ambivalent Secularism of the Tudeh Party

The Tudeh Party was founded in October 1941 by the remnants of the Group of Fifty-Three and Taqi Erani’s Donya circle. The latter had, in the early and mid-1930s, assumed the mantle of advocating scientific socialism and a Marxian-inspired dialectical materialist critique of religion. Yet, had Erani himself been alive in 1979, he would have doubtless been startled by the Tudeh Party’s acquiescence to Islamism and the party’s emphatic support for Ruhollah Khomeini. The Tudeh Party’s turn away from the Donay circle’s unabashed secularism has been noted by a number of scholars (Dabashi 1993; Chaqueri 1999; Hunter 2004; Matin-Asgari 2018). What remain uncharted, however, are the theoretical origins of the oscillation between critique and embrace of religion within the Tudeh Party, as well as the broader context within which this oscillation occurred. Building on the existing scholarship and drawing on primary sources, including archival materials, writings of leading Tudeh Party intellectuals, and memoirs of Tudeh Party members, this paper traces the intellectual foundations of the Tudeh Party’s ambivalent secularism. It proposes that from its very founding, the Tudeh Party took an equivocal stance on religion; while party organs such as Rahbar and Zafar declared adherence to Islam and Shi’ism, the writings of such Tudeh-affiliated literati as Sadeq Hedayat and Sadeq Chubak were stacked with conspicuously anti-religious themes. Similarly, while some local party chapters took to commemorating major Islamic and Shi’i occasions, other chapters opted to deemphasize these occasions. The paper further identifies Ehsan Tabari as the archetypal theorist of Tudeh Party’s ambivalent secularism in the decade leading to the 1979 revolution. Tabari’s 1969 book, Essays on Worldviews and Social Movements in Iran, contained the most detailed accounts of Islamic and Shi’i history, jurisprudence, and Sufism hitherto written by an Iranian Marxist. While espousing an unmistakably secular worldview, Tabari nevertheless distinguished his view from atheistic rejections of religion and called for “social and political collaboration” between Iranian communists and Shi’i clergy. The final section of the paper considers some of the contextual factors accounting for the Tudeh Party’s ambivalent approach to religion: the supposition that critique of religion by Marxists would have an alienating effect on the masses; the appropriation of secular motifs by the Pahlavi state with the inadvertent consequence of the rise of religiously-mediated opposition discourses; and the increasing momentum after 1963 of the Khomeini-led clerical opposition movement.