Religious transnationalism of Iranian communists in the late Qajar period (1920-1925)

From its very inception in 1920, the Iranian Communist Party (ICP) was much influenced by the transnational revolutionary networks seeking to undermine British hegemony in the Middle East and Asia (Dmitriev: 2002; Genis: 2000; Dailami: 1992, 2004). Initially tending toward pan-Islamism, these networks were finally overridden by the Soviet forces, which soon appeared hostile to any theoretical fusion of communism and Islam. The failure of the Gilan Soviet Republic, practically coinciding with the 2nd congress of the Comintern, marked the deradicalization of the Iranian communist movement and its subsequent turn to the united front strategy, less inimical toward clergy and Islam in general. In the early 1920s Iranian communists organized propaganda and public meetings under the guise of dervish sects and religious ceremonies. Despite the Comintern’s rigidity on the Marxist materialist paradigm, Islam was often at the core of the ideological foundations of some of the ICP’s branches. Notwithstanding the anti-Islamic stance of its Russian mentors (Demin: 2006), the ICP placed Iran in the center of the Islamic world and evaluated the Iranian anti-imperialist struggle in terms of its impact on the global Islamic community. The unity of the Islamic world together with the Soviet camp, declared by Mohammad Khalesizadeh – the son of a prominent Iraqi cleric exiled in Iran (Luizard: 2005; Yazdani: 2016), laid the basis for the further development of Islamic transnationalism but with the decrease of the Soviet interest in the Muslim world, the momentum was lost. Yet, the example of Khalisizadeh illustrates the proper multicultural environment of the Iranian left in the 1920s which still associated itself with the global anti-imperialist movement initiated by WWI. Drawing mainly on Russian (RGASPI) and British (TNA) archival sources, this paper aims at discerning the religious leitmotifs and transnational objectives of the early ICP. In the first part of the paper, the pan-Islamist legacy of the Iranian left will be discussed, while the second part is dedicated to the transnational aspects of the Iranian dissent in the late Qajar period.