In the spring of 1983 a man in his late sixties sat in front of a camera on Iranian state television and confessed that he had been a spy for the Soviet Union.
His name was Nureddin Kianuri. He was the leader of Tudeh, Iran's communist party, and he had spent a couple of months in prison before they put him in that chair. His face told its own story about how the confession had been reached.
Four years earlier the same man, and the same party, had backed Ayatollah Khomeini without reservation.
I will come back to that story, because it is the whole case. But first a word the French have had for more than twenty years, and which the rest of us are only now picking up.
Islamo-gauchisme.
It looks like one of those words you need a very long university education to be allowed to use, and most eyes give up halfway through it. As usual, it is nothing of the kind.
"Gauche" is simply the French word for left, and the whole word means nothing more than Islam-left - Islamism and the left written as one word, because someone saw the two walking together out in Reality. Strange as that may sound.
It was the philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff who coined it in the early 2000s, because he saw something taking shape in front of him that had no name - the radical left and political Islam, side by side under one banner, even though the two movements agree on almost nothing.
You can follow it from city to city.
In London in 2004 the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party founded the Respect party, with the Muslim Association of Britain at its back.
In Paris in November 2019 Jean-Luc Mélenchon joined a march against "Islamophobia" - a constructed word that turns criticism of a religion into a diagnosis of the critic - and among those who called the march was an organisation the French state dissolved the following year as Islamist.
And since October 7 you have been able to see it on campus after campus across the West.
The root lies further back, though, and the first place anyone really notices it is Tehran. In 1978 Michel Foucault, the most influential thinker on the Western left, travelled to revolutionary Iran and wrote home in admiration of what he saw. He called it "a political spirituality", something the secular West had lost, and he was right that the West had lost something - he was simply wrong about what was standing in front of him. Either way, the sharpest mind on the left fell in love with the ayatollah's revolution.
Sixteen years later the love affair became a strategy. Chris Harman of the Socialist Workers Party wrote it down in 1994 in a pamphlet called "The Prophet and the Proletariat", and the formula read - "with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never". Harman did not himself think the Islamists were friends. He hoped to win their young over to socialism. But translated to street level the formula means one quite concrete thing - you use the Islamists to bring down the existing order, and you settle with them afterwards.
And in 2006 Judith Butler, the most cited - and some would say most confused - gender theorist in the world, said it to a hall full of students at Berkeley - that it is extremely important to understand Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.
She has since said it was meant descriptively and that she does not support the violence, and of course she must be allowed to say so.
But the words were said. Hamas. Progressive.
So what do the two share?
One enemy. The West - its capitalism, its America, its Israel, and very quickly its Jews. The radical left hates the West for being rich and powerful, the Islamist hates it for being free and unbelieving, and you are right that those are two entirely different reasons - but the arrow points the same way.
And where do they part?
That is the strangest thing. Almost everywhere else. On women, homosexuals, abortion, blasphemy, apostasy, alcohol, free speech, the separation of mosque and state - on every single point the two want more or less opposite societies, and opposite worlds to live in.
They agree only on what to tear down, and not on one single thing to build afterwards.
You can see it in one slogan. In 2016 Hamas executed one of its own commanders in Gaza, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, among other things after accusations of sex with a man. In Gaza that is a crime, and under Hamas it can cost you your life. "Queers for Palestine" is a slogan that can only be shouted in places where Hamas has no power.
So the interesting question is not what happens while they march together - as they do now - but what happens the day after victory, when the common enemy has fallen and only one question remains - whose order applies now?
The radical leftist arrives with a theory that dissolves everything, even language, where every word and reality itself can be redefined according to feelings and needs. The Islamist arrives with an order written out to the last detail, resting on a book in which not one word may be changed - and he is ready to die for it. A theory that dissolves everything does not beat an order that dissolves nothing.
We do not have to guess, because the experiment has been run. And the many Iranians living in exile among us have tried again and again to write about it and explain it to us.
The revolution against the Shah in 1978 was a coalition. There was Tudeh, the communists. There were the Marxist Fedayan. There was the People's Mujahedin, and there were liberals, students and women in their thousands. And then there were Ayatollah Khomeini's clerics. It was the left that delivered the strikes, the organisers and the crowds, and the calculation was Harman's long before Harman wrote it down - let the mullahs bring down the Shah, and History itself will hand power to the workers.
It took less than a month.
In March 1979 Khomeini said that women were to cover their hair at work, and on March 8 more than a hundred thousand women took to the streets of Tehran. The parties of the left left them standing alone. The revolution came first, they were told, and the headscarf was a detail that could wait.
In 1983 it was Tudeh's turn. The party was banned, more than a thousand members were arrested, and Kianuri was put in front of the camera. Which brings us back to where this began.
In the summer of 1988 Khomeini gave the order, and within a few weeks thousands of political prisoners were hanged - Amnesty International says at least 5,000, and that is probably low. The People's Mujahedin. Tudeh. The Fedayan. The same movements that ten years earlier had filled the streets of Tehran for him. The panels of believers who sent them to the rope were called death committees, and on the one in Tehran sat a young prosecutor named Ebrahim Raisi - who in 2021 became president of Iran.
Think about that for a moment.
So what did the country get, of all the things the left wanted and sacrificed itself for?
Compulsory headscarves. A marriage age for girls lowered to nine, and only raised to thirteen in 2002. The death penalty for homosexuality. Prison for a joke about God. And a ban on a woman singing alone in front of men, in force since 1979 and no dusty paragraph nobody uses - less than two weeks ago I wrote here about Parastoo Ahmadi, the singer who performed a concert without a headscarf and has now had 74 lashes upheld for it.
In 2022 Mahsa Amini died, 22 years old, in the custody of the morality police, because her headscarf sat wrong.
The women who marched in 1979 had seen it coming. They were the ones who were asked to wait.
And now the same bet is being placed on the streets of Europe. The Islamists bring the numbers and the conviction, the radical left brings the universities, the newsrooms and the vocabulary, and both sides are quite certain that they will be the ones in charge the day after they have taken over - which everything suggests they will, over the coming decades.
Notice, then, who is warning the loudest.
Many write as if it were the right. It is not.
It is Iranians who fled a system that hangs its critics. It is the women who burned their headscarves in 2022. It is gay men who got out of Gaza. Because the first people the Islamist order crushes are Muslims - only then does it come for the Saturday people, and after them the Sunday people - and that is why it is precisely those Muslims who now stand shouting at the Western left, asking whether it knows who it is marching in step with. Beside them stand all the other Iranians in exile.
Because they see the pattern repeating.
The thing you will see referred to as Islamo-gauchisme.
The left brought the crowds.
Khomeini brought the rope.
Iran learned the ending in 1988.
The left in Europe is still applauding the beginning.
What do you do?
❤️🔥🪽
