Recent events in Egypt remind me of some of the reading I have been doing as I begin work on the new book on assumptions.  Daily we have been captivated by the violent protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo.  While the cries for democracy resonate with our American sensibilities, the possibility of Islamic tyranny and Sharia law are terrifying.  What will this public rebellion produce?  Where will it go?

I have been reading about an important past revolution, looking for parallels to current times and connections to academia.  Harvard historian Richard Pipes wrote an exhaustive work in 1990 called The Russian Revolution.  In chapter four, Pipes makes a crucial distinction where he states that “Rebellions happen; revolutions are made.”

Jacques Ellul in Autopsy of the Revolution (p. 56) says that “Initially, a rebellion is without thought: it is visceral, immediate.  A revolution implies a doctrine, a project, a program …. A revolution under one aspect or other has intellectual lines of force which rebellions lack.  Moreover, a revolution seeks to institutionalize itself …. That which characterizes the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution is the effort to initiate a new organization (in the absence of society!) and this … implies the existence … of “managers” of the revolution.”

Who are these “managers” of the revolution?  Pipes’ contends that they are the intelligentsia.  The Russian revolution was not the proletariat rising up against the bourgeois.  What was billed as a peasant revolt was really an upper-middle class coup d’état orchestrated by disaffected intelligentsia.

The remarkable parallel to today is that with the fall of the Soviet empire, Marxism seems to have gone underground.  Where is it still a powerful ideology?  Universities and the media – our intelligentsia.  The same class of people that devised the revolution in Russia still embrace the same ideology of that uprising.

Other revolutions since 1917 have had Marxist origins headquartered in universities.  What about the rebellion in Cairo?  Who and what is driving it?  University educated Wael Ghonim, marketing director for Google in the Middle East, is a leader of the revolt.  Mohamed El Baradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, likewise is another university educated figure in the protests.  Both men attended the University of Cairo, and El Baradei earned a doctorate in International Law at New York University.  These universities harbor Marxist/socialist ideology.  This has been true at NYU since the early 20^th century, and interestingly it is equally true at the University of Cairo since at least the 1950’s.

Francois Burgat in his book Face to Face with Political Islam describes how while he was at the University of Cairo he was the head of the Socialist Youth and then, after the 1952 revolution, defected to the communist party.

Yassir Arafat, the notorious leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, entered the University of Cairo in 1951.  By 1956 he was the president of the Palestinian Student Union, a leftist student group, and was its delegate to the Communist World Festival of Youth in Prague.

Hassan Hanafi, a current professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo was once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Muslim Brotherhood is thoroughly steeped in Marxism.  Hanafi edited the journal al-Yasar al-Islami (The Islamic Left).

The American University in Cairo just weeks ago (December 13, 2010) held a public lecture on “The Marxist Movement in Egypt.”  Much of the Egyptian intelligentsia, dissatisfied with the secular outlook of communism, has infused Islam into Marxist ideology to create a new religious radicalism.

Tanveer Ahmed, writing in 2006 in On-Line Opinion, describes Why Islam is the New Marxism.

“The similarities of communism and Islam are considerable. Both are egalitarian and advocate radical and economic change. They both demand a domination of the public space and share a dogmatic, ideological view of the world.

Political Islam is also supplying the social services in a collective context that communism promised, and the prestige of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah depend upon this. Their facilities are often described by locals as superior to those provided by the ruling governments.

It also promises to deliver the poor masses from oppression, except instead of the working class rising up against the bourgeoisie, the uprising to be encouraged is by hapless, impoverished Muslims against their oppressive Western masters, or puppet Arab leaders.”

The phenomenon of revolutionary Islam has significant Marxist roots and is something to watch closely.  Yet, the same faulty assumptions that prompted the marriage of these two totalitarian ideologies are also dominant in our American education system.  The new book that I am writing exposes the flawed assumptions that can generate Marxism and many other toxic ideologies that poison our culture and destroy the spiritual lives of students and professors in the university and beyond.