What killed the promise of Muslim communism?

A full century after the Russian Revolution, the failed alliance between Communism and Islam continues to shape the politics of the Muslim world.

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