Because the political Islamists cry "death to America", articulate popular grievances against Israel and decry "imperialism", many on the left identify them as either wholly progressive, sometimes progressive, or "at heart" progressive. Or, condescendingly, they see the "Islamic" element in their politics as only superficial.
Modern "Islamic fundamentalism" ("political Islam" or "Islamism") is essentially a political, not a religious current. It denotes not especial devoutness, but political movements aiming to reshape societies on the model of "Islamic states" which allegedly existed 1,200 years ago.
Modern Islamism attempts to master the contradictions of partly-secularised, partly-industrialised, partly-cosmopolitan societies by inventing a past and seeking to use modern military means to return society to it.
Modern Islamism originates in the cities, not the tradition-bound countryside. Its activists are the educated middle class (often young men who are frustrated, jobless university graduates), not those remote from scientific and modern culture.
Although some Islamist currents were assisted by the USA and pro-US governments which saw them as a safer channel for protest than the secular left, Islamism is not simply the creation of such aid. It has its own roots. And while some Islamist currents have fought pro-US regimes, there is much more to political Islam than a "spontaneous" expression of "despair and rage" against US imperialism.
Political Islam is not an outgrowth of a national liberation struggle against imperialism. In the era when mainly-Muslim countries were struggling for freedom from colonial domination, secular politics dominated. Secularists appealed to "the nation". Islamists usually do not.
In the countries where Islamism has grown, capitalist development has ravaged old social relationships without creating stable new relationships. Pre-capitalist society has largely been eliminated.
Fortunes have been made out of oil. Universities, TVs, radios, CD players, cars, bureaucracies, airports, skyscrapers have mushroomed while millions have been thrown to the margins of society. A class of "new petty bourgeois" is tantalised, then frustrated, by the chaotic, lopsided development.
The old exploiting classes - bazaar merchants, religious leaders and landlords - remain and are jostled and embittered by change. While in advanced capitalist countries, most of the population is working class, in these societies the working class is a minority. The marginalised semi-proletarian poor and disoriented petty bourgeois make up the majority.
Growing in these social conditions, political Islam combines some of the features of the "reactionary anti-capitalism" Marx described in the Communist Manifesto - a reaction by displaced elements of the relatively well-off to the disruptions of early industrial-capitalist development - with some of the features of fascism.
Political Islam is violently opposed to the (relative) women's emancipation and secularism they see in the USA, and usually to any form of democracy. It has no problem with capitalism, profit, inequality, or dealing with the IMF.
