LeVine and Salvatore 73that the proletariat could succeed in becoming the hegemonic class by
creating a system of alliances with other classes, especially the peasants.
The “Catholic question” was ultimately a “peasant/rural/farmer question”
[questione contadina], since in Italy one could not reach the peasants
without dealing with the church, which traditionally asserted hegemony
over them.^23
s alliance was made possible by the fact that the church as a com-Thi
munity of believers had developed over the centuries in almost constant
political-moral opposition to the church as a clerical organization.^24 Most
important, religion to Gramsci was the “creative spirit of the people”—
which we will shortly relate to Foucault’s political spirituality—and the
source of this oppositional, though mostly amorphous politics.^25 Basically,
the merit of Gramsci’s approach consisted in his ability to astutely pen-
etrate religion’s basis in practice and common sense.^26
or Gramsci, “every religionF ... is in reality a multiplicity of dis-
tinct and often contradictory religions.”^27 Gramsci’s examinations of
religion reflect both a richness of themes and a complexity and multi-
plicity of levels: epistemological, ideological, historical, social and politi-
cal.^28 Indeed, there is in Gramsci a fair degree of ambivalence not just
vis-à-vis the Catholic church, but also towards Islam, about which he
wrote several entries in his Prison Notebooks. From these passages we
can determine that he believed that Islam could be examined in compari-
son to Christianity only if one had the “courage” to question the ubiqui-
tous equation of Christianity with “modern civilization.” To the specific
question of why Islam failed to follow in the modernizing footsteps of
Christianity, Gramsci felt that however “torpid from centuries of isolation
and a putrified feudal regime,” it was “absurd” to assume that Islam was
not evolving. A major hindrance was the lack of a large-scale ecclesiastical
structure that, by acting as a “collective intellectual,” could facilitate the
“adaptation” to modernity.^29
Equally important to note is that Gramsci believed that Muslims saw
the “great hypocrisy” in Europe of the church’s adaptation to modernity,
which provided them with less incentive to pursue their own moderniza-
tion. And even if Islam was compelled to “run dizzily” toward modernity,
“in reality it is the same with Christianity,” with both involving “grand her-
esies” that promoted “national sentiments” tied to a supposed return to a