If you live in an Islamic or communist society and you feel like somebody’s always watching you, you’re right because both systems demand it.
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 surveillance, informants, and social enforcement networks.
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both built what have, through the present, been permanent institutions for watching their own populations and enlisting ordinary members to report on one another. Neither could rely on voluntary conformity alone. Each system claims jurisdiction over belief and private conduct.
Ordinary law enforcement cannot reach that far into a household, so each ideology had to invent two further instruments: an office charged with monitoring public behavior and a wider practice of recruiting believers or citizens to inform on deviation among their neighbors, coworkers, and kin. This is not incidental to either project.
A system that claims comprehensive authority over conscience and conduct must continuously find out, at the level of the individual household, whether that authority is actually being honored. That requirement produces surveillance and informants as a matter of structural necessity, not administrative preference.
Writing in Abbasid Baghdad in the mid-eleventh century, the jurist Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi (974–1058), in his treatise al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya (The Ordinances of Government), set out the first systematic legal description of hisba, the caliphal office of commanding right and forbidding wrong, as a standing branch of government rather than a personal virtue.
Al-Mawardi’s muhtasib, the officer who carried out hisba, was unlike a judge: he could act on his own observation, without waiting for a plaintiff to bring a complaint, and could appoint assistants to extend his reach through the markets and public spaces of the city. This is the institutional core of the mechanism.
Because hisba authorized officials to investigate suspected wrongdoing before anyone had accused anyone of anything, it built continuous, proactive watching into the structure of Islamic governance. It did so with the explicit sanction of the Quranic duty known as al-amr bi-l-maʿruf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar, which scripture and prophetic practice had already established as an obligation on the community itself, not merely its rulers.