What killed the promise of Muslim communism?

For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the joint banner of Communism and Islam.

Pan-Islam had emerged in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, with the efforts of Sultan Abdulhamid II to lay claim to the title of caliph among Muslims. New forms of Islamic schooling and associations began to emerge across the Arab world and beyond. From Egypt and Iraq to India and the Indonesian archipelago, Islam became a rallying call against European colonialism and imperialism.

Islam’s mobilizing power attracted Communist activists in the 1910s and 1920s. The Bolsheviks, who lacked organizational infrastructure in the vast Muslim lands of the former Russian empire, allied with Islamic reformers in those areas. They created a special Commissariat for Muslim Affairs under the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, promising to establish a distinctive “Muslim Communism” across the Caucasus and Central Asia. During the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, in what is today Azerbaijan, the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, a Ukrainian Jew, called for waging a “holy war” against Western imperialism.

But as we now know, Communism and Islam failed to coalesce into a lasting alliance. By the onset of the Cold War, they seemed irrevocably opposed. Differing views about Communism divided Muslims across Asia, Africa and the Middle East in their struggles for independence and emancipation during the second half of the 20th century. An anti-Communist jihad fundamentally remade Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped set the stage for the rise of Al Qaeda and the emergence of a new form of Islamist terrorism.
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Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and being a man during the Cold War

As news broke today that Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, had died aged 91, many were quick to point to the complicated legacy of both the magazine and the man behind it. Now popularly associated with his bevy of young lovers and infamous parties at the Playboy mansion, it would be easy to dismiss Hefner as merely an enduring barrier to the fight for gender equality. Yet to do so would to overlook the significant cultural impact of both Hefner and Playboy, particularly during the 1950s under the shroud of Cold War anxieties.

Born April 9, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, Hefner’s entry into the world of journalism came as a teenager writing for a military magazine during World War II. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he began working as a copy-editor for men’s magazine Esquire, before a pay dispute motivated him to leave the magazine in 1952.

He took out a mortgage and borrowed money from his mother to launch Playboy in 1953. The first issue, which famously featured Marilyn Monroe in the centrefold, indicated the magazine’s explicit engagement with matters of sex, fun, and consumerism. In doing so, it challenged the idea of masculinity that had evolved around the nuclear family, and that held particular purchase in the early years of Cold War America.
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