WASHINGTON TIMES
The forgotten history of Muslim socialism
Clifford D. May
July 7, 2026

Zohran Mamdani, Aber Kawas, Rashida Tlaib, Darializa Avila Chevalier. Those are just some of the Democratic politicians who self-identify as both socialists and Muslims. Which gives me an opportunity to acquaint you with a bit of little-known history. We’ll begin in 1904, in Baku, when a Muslim Social Democratic Party known as Hummet was organized to draw the city’s Muslim oil workers into Russia’s socialist movement. In 1920, Hummet merged with other leftist groups to form the Azerbaijan Communist Party. Meanwhile, by 1917, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Volga Tatar, had joined the Bolsheviks and was soon arguing that Muslim peoples, colonized by the Russian Empire, were a kind of proletariat. His ideology became known as Muslim National Communism. READ MORE