“Gramsci und der Islam”

L'articolo analizza per un pubblico accademico e colto gli scritti di Gramsci sull'Islam pòartendo dalla polemica giornalistica con i turattiani. Inquadra nel contesto del tempo gli articoli giornalistici e le note contenute nei Quaderni del carcere This article attempts to reconstruct Gramsci’s major writings on Islâm, as they appear in his Prison Notebooks and pre-prison journalism. It is here to be remembered that his sources of information in prison were scanty, but he naturally had experience of the subject as Italian representative at the Comintern. Gramsci pays tribute to the great amount that the now the industrialized societies owed in their initial stages of development to the medieval Arab philosophers and to Islâmic culture in general, but principally pays attention to the questions of his time. In the situation produced by the break-up of the Ottoman empire, he looks at the various forces on the scene, singling out for comment a number of leaders who were to play crucial roles in the formation of the “Middle East” as we now know it. Often they were representative of the tensions between pan-Arabism and the burgeoning nationalism of that period, which measured against theocratic cosmopolitanism, was in his view the great “heresy” on which all others were based. The division between Sunni and Sci’ite Islâm is mentioned only in passing; of greater concern to him was the role of religious intellectuals in Islâm. Here he deals not only with their religious, and at times judicial, function but also their political one, paying attention to the overlap between religion and politics and to how, analogous to the Catholic question in Italy, the Muslim masses may be shifted politically. A major problem as he saw it was that, starting from the economic and political reawakening around the year 1000, the industrial countries had had nine centuries to develop, but the often stagnant feudal societies of Islâm were faced with a headlong rush to complete the same inevitable process of modernization. This brings into play what had already been the subject of polemics in the pre-prison period between him and the reformists – and is still a current one – namely the role of the Muslim intellectuals as leaders in their countries of progress or of reaction, and as leaders for or against the forces of imperial occupation.