For all that I had spent years studying Marxism, both in theory and in application, it was not until recently that I was struck by the phenomenon which is the subject of the present chapter.  A few months ago, I was invited to deliver a series of lectures on Marxism at a Saudi university.  During one of these lectures, a student asked how widespread communism was in Western Europe.  It was while I was replying to his question that the first glimmerings of an idea flashed through my mind.  Back in my room, I decided to test my idea against a map of Europe.  There it was: my theory was confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The student's question had provided the key: as I visualized the map of Europe in preparation for my reply, it suddenly came to me that in the catholic,  or predominantly catholic, countries of Western Europe, the communist parties were strong, politically influential and enjoyed broad support at the grass-roots level,  while in the protestant, or predominantly protestant, countries, they were nowhere near as strong or as popular.  A look at the map later confirmed that the four biggest communist parties in Western Europe are to be found in France, Italy, Spain and Por­tugal, where the catholic faith is predominant.  These parties exert a marked political influence and enjoy undeniable public acceptance.  In protestant countries like Britain, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, on the other hand, communist parties are marginal and political life is dominated by right-wing parties.  Even the social-democratic parties in those countries, which are more to the left of the right than to the right of the left, have lost the momentum they had in the sixties and their  fortunes are presently at low ebb.   Today, the conservatives are in power in Britain, Canada (which is an extension of Western Europe) and Sweden, and are expected to be swept into power in West Germany very shortly.  In fact, the case of West Germany offers the best proof of this theory, for, in this predominantly protestant country, the only communist presence to contend with is found in the catholic province of Bavaria.

To further test my theory, I made a survey of how the com­munists had fared at the polls in parliamentary and other elec­tions held in Western Europe over the last few years.   Figures indicate that their influence is relatively strong in catholic countries and practically non-existent in protestant countries.  I say relatively because I am comparing their influence now with what it used to be. In the main catholic countries of Western Europe, namely, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, communist in­ fluence rose steadily after World War II and peaked out in the early seventies.  Since then, it has been on the decline.  In Italy, where power seemed to be within the grasp of the com­munist party, the 1979 elections came as a rude shock.  They got only 31% of the vote and lost tens of parliamentary seats.  In France the communists suffered massive defeats in the latest par­liamentary elections (1978) and presidential elections (1981). In Spain, they gained only 10% of the vote in the 1979 elections.  In Portugal too the story is the same.  But despite this recent drop in their track record, the communists still enjoy a far stronger presence in the catholic countries of Western Europe than they do in the protestant. 

Having proved the existence of this phenomenon, I now set myself the more difficult task of analyzing the reasons behind it.  If we look to the history of Western Europe, we find that it suffered for centuries from the tyranny of the catholic church and from the inacceptable expansion of its authority, power and privileges in the Middle Ages.  The church imposed a harsh dis­cipline on its followers, going so far as to decide which of them would go to heaven and which to hell!  The Catholic Church had become synonymous with feudalism, tyranny and oppression, and it was only a question of time before its stranglehold would be challenged.  The first challenge came in the sixteenth century, from Martin Luther, founder of protestantism.   The Reformation split Europe into two: those countries which chose to remain in the fold of the catholic church on one side and those which embraced the new, moderate, creed on the other.  Luther preached a tolerant religion, in which the church did not set itself up as a mediator between man and God and where man's salvation depended upon his own actions rather than on the observance of certain rituals.  Tolerance breeds tolerance, and so the climate in the countries which embraced protestantism was not favourable to the emergence of extremism.

By the same token, intolerance breeds intolerance, and those countries which remained within the catholic fold answered ex­tremism with counter-extremism in the opposite direction.  Thus Marx's call fell on deaf ears in his homeland, Germany, the cradle of protestantism.  Where it did find a favourable response was in catholic France, the fertile soil where the seed of socialist ideas in general, and Marxist ideology in particular, took root and flourished.

Thus Marxism is not, as its founders claimed and its adherents affirm, a comprehensive and integrated scientific theory encompassing all aspects of life, but a direct reaction to a specific feature of Europe's past, namely, the excessive power wielded by the catholic church.

This simple truth carries within it the negation of the universal significance of the Marxist world outlook. Marxism is the product of a given age and specific circumstances and when these circumstances disappear, Marxism becomes nothing more than an ideology that should not be given more importance than it deserves.

Al Aqad was right when he affirmed more than once in his book, "Communism and Humanism", that, had it not been for the nineteenth century tendency to take any idea seriously, Marxism would not have warranted more than a few, fleeting hours of research as a reaction to particular circumstances which no longer exist.  And, had it not been for the organized activities of world communism since the establishment of the first socialist state in 1917, the majority of the inhabitants of our planet today would never have heard of Marx and his doctrine.  It is an irony of fate that Marx should have provoked so much more debate than the intellectual giants in comparison with whom he is a dwarf!