Marxism Will Attract Moslem Intellectuals, Russian Expert Says

"Marxism is a force which may replace Islam as a totalitarian philosophy, uniting life and belief," Serge A. Zenkovsky, research fellow in the Russian Research Center, said last night.

Zenkovsky spoke to the Slavic Club on "Islam and the Soviet Union." There is a great danger, he asserted, that Marxism will fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the Islamic religion as a social force.

Marxism appeals to some Moslem intellectuals, Zenkovsky declared, not because they believe in it, but because it offers them a force and dynamism to take revenge on the West for centuries of humiliations. Despite its atheism, Marxism's cosmopolitan outlook and social element make it in many respects similar in structure to the philosophy of Islam, Zenkovsky said.