The question of the attitude that communists should adopt towards religion is by no means a new one, on the contrary it goes back to the beginnings of the workers' movement. In more recent times, the question of resurgent Islam has been posed since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. In these two articles, we examine the attitude of marxists to religion, and more specifically the way in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks approached the question at the time of the Russian Revolution. They then go on to study the resurgence of islamist movements since the 1980s