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CASSIEM KHAN reflects on the Conference of the Left through an Islamic revolutionary lens, exploring justice, coalition-building and political integrity.
The Conference of the Left, convened at Birchwood, Boksburg, from May 29 to 31, 2026, produced an ambitious declaration that deserves a response.
Its diagnosis of South Africa’s structural crisis – the unresolved questions of land restoration, labour and colonial ownership – resonates with the Islamic revolutionary tradition’s own indictment of systems built on the exploitation of the mustadafin, the oppressed.
The gathering also drew principled criticism from the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), among others, who asked the question that every serious political formation must ask of itself: do we mean what we say, or do principles dissolve in the warmth of political convenience?
This response is written from an Islamic revolutionary perspective that seeks to reflect on the Conference of the Left not merely as a tactical question, but also as an opportunity to reflect on coalition-building in the interests of the mustadafin.
The Conference Declaration contains much that is admirable in the Islamic revolutionary register.
Its rejection of imperialism, its solidarity with Palestine, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, and its insistence that South Africa’s mineral wealth must serve the people and not imperialist supply chains are noteworthy.
The Declaration’s demand that ‘humanitarian values’ anchor economic life rather than private profit echoes what Shaheed Sayed Ali Khamenei describes as the deepest indictment of the Western capitalist order: that it has ‘decimated and trampled upon’ the moral foundations of human society while dressing imperialist violence in the language of freedom, progress and development.
But the Islamic revolutionary tradition also demands something the Conference Declaration does not sufficiently address: the question of the moral integrity of those who lead.
Ali Shariati, the sociologist and revolutionary philosopher whose thought helped shape the intellectual terrain of the 1979 Revolution in Iran, drew a crucial distinction between what he called deen (religion) used as liberation – as the force that liberates the mustadafin – and deen used as legitimation for maintaining the power of the status quo.
Applied beyond its original Iranian context, Shariati’s distinction describes a universal danger: that the language of justice, socialism and the oppressed can be commandeered by forces whose practice is the opposite of their rhetoric.
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This is precisely what Saftu identifies.
When formations that once condemned corruption now share platforms with figures facing serious corruption allegations – when the red flag is draped around those whose record is anti-worker – the language of revolution becomes what Shariati called religion-as-opium: not the religion that awakens and liberates the oppressed, but the one that lulls the masses into accepting their oppressors in a new costume.
The Islamic revolutionary tradition is unequivocal on this.
Shaheed Sayed Ali Khamenei warns repeatedly that ‘the most dangerous incident that can occur is sedition’ – and sedition’s most powerful tool is precisely the confusion of friend and foe, the blurring of the line between those who genuinely serve the people and those who merely pretend to perform that service.
The Declaration’s Programme of Action is comprehensive and, in many respects, sound.
But a programme without principled actors is hollow and bound to collapse.
The left in South Africa faces the perennial danger of unity purchased at the cost of integrity – a coalition broad enough to include those who will, at the first opportunity, pivot to serve capital, colonial interests or personal accumulation.
Shariati understood this deeply.
His reading of Islamic history emphasised that the tragedy of the Muslim world was not the absence of revolutionary energy, but its repeated betrayal by those entrusted with its leadership.
Imam Husayn ibn Ali chose martyrdom over a compromised allegiance – and the lesson Shariati drew was not fatalism, but the imperative of choosing principle over political survival.
For South African Muslims, the Conference of the Left presents a specific challenge and a specific opportunity.
The challenge is to robustly and consistently engage the issues raised by the Conference of the Left without being co-opted: to bring to this coalition not merely numerical solidarity, but the distinctive moral tradition of an Islam that refuses separation between the spiritual and the political, between personal ethics and public accountability.
Shaheed Sayed Ali Khamenei writes that the Western project has long sought to convince Muslims that ‘Islam has nothing to do with social or political issues, matters concerning life and fundamental issues regarding humanity’ – to reduce Islam to private piety.
The Muslim presence in left formations must assert the opposite: that Islam’s engagement with questions of justice, ownership, land and the dignity of the poor is not incidental but foundational.
The opportunity is equally real.
The Conference Declaration explicitly names faith and religious formations as constituent participants in the Council of the Left.
This is not tokenism to be accepted passively – it is a recognition, however incomplete, that the struggle for economic justice cannot be waged on a purely secular-materialist basis if it is to reach the majority of South Africans whose moral and social lives are shaped by religious conviction.
The Islamic revolutionary tradition, and the broader tradition of liberation theology across faiths, offers something that secular leftism often cannot: a language of sacrifice, of the ultimate accountability of all power before something greater than the state or the party.
Saftu’s critique – that principled politics demands explanation when you change your mind, and consistency when you do not – is fully consistent with the tabyeen framework that Shaheed Sayed Ali Khamenei identifies and advances as not merely the obligation to speak truth to the enemy.
It is also the obligation to speak truth within coalitions, even when inconvenient.
‘If we taught workers that socialism means democracy, accountability, honesty and service to the people,’ Saftu writes, ‘then we cannot defend authoritarianism, corruption, intimidation or political gangsterism simply because it comes from those calling themselves “revolutionary”.’
The Islamic revolutionary response to the Conference of the Left is therefore neither an uncritical embrace nor an outright rejection.
It should be engaged, principled and vigilant – prepared to build wherever the people’s genuine interests are served, and prepared to name betrayal wherever it occurs.
Cassiem Khan is spokesperson for the newly established Inqilab Collective. The collective comprises a group of individuals who organise around shared goals and beliefs, prioritising non-hierarchical, consensus-based decision-making and grassroots action.
