Both Muslims and communists abide by Lenin’s famous dictum: “Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life, and he will be mine forever.”
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. (See the full list of essays exposing these commonalities at the end of this article.) Here we explore the control of education and the formation of the young.
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both treat the education and formation of the young as a central political instrument, not a neutral transmission of skills. Both claim the authority, and the practical necessity, to shape the beliefs, loyalties, and habits of the next generation according to the doctrine, and both built dedicated institutions to guarantee it—the Bolsheviks from the founding moment of their state, and Islamic rulers the moment a doctrinal threat demanded it.
In 1065, the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk opened the first of a network of state-funded madrasas in Baghdad, standardizing Shafi’i law and Ash’ari theology across the curriculum. He explained his own reasoning in his political testament, the Siyasatnama. Ismaili Shia da’wa was a doctrinal infiltration eroding loyalty to legitimate rulers, and education was the countermeasure.
The network extended within decades to Nishapur, Herat, and Isfahan, training the scholars and officials of the Seljuk state. The Baghdad madrasa alone enrolled some three thousand students by the 1090s and drew Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, later Islam’s most influential theologian, onto its faculty. Classical jurisprudence had already established the parental and communal duty to raise children in correct belief. Nizam al-Mulk’s contribution was to make that duty an instrument of state policy, not a matter left to families and mosques.
Marxist-Leninist communism reached the identical position by different means, less than two years after seizing power. Lenin, in his 1920 address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, insisted that education under the dictatorship of the proletariat must break entirely with bourgeois content and method. The Decree on the Unified Labor School, issued October 16, 1918, nationalized and secularized Russian schooling.
The Komsomol, founded two weeks later, extended party formation into organized youth life beyond the classroom. Both were built before the Civil War had even been won, on the premise that a socialist state could not wait for a settled peace to begin forming its children.
The parallel is that both treated the education of children as too consequential to leave to families, markets, or rival authorities, and both built state or party institutions specifically to close that gap. Nizam al-Mulk and the Bolsheviks were separated by eight and a half centuries and were answering different threats—Ismaili da’wa in one case, bourgeois pedagogy in the other—but they reached for the same instrument: a curriculum the state itself controlled, extended by an organized youth structure operating outside the classroom entirely.