OT: What We Are Up Against: The Ideology of Those Who Threaten Us

[Guest guest]

*Sayyid Qutb*

 

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian philosopher who was active in Egypt's Islamic

fundamentalist movement, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, until his

execution by Egypt in 1966. His ideology continues to serve as an

inspiration to the radical Muslims of our time, especially members of Al

Qaeda. Those who desire to understand the threat to Western civilization

posed by Al Qaeda and other Islamic radicals need to be familiar with Qutb's

ideology.

 

During 1949, he spent time in Greely, Colorado studying curriculum at

Colorado State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Colorado).

Based on his time in Greely, he wrote " The America I Have Seen " , giving his

view that America is a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should

desire to live in. The following quote is from this book: " The American

girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it

lies in the face, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs – she shows all this

and does not hide it. "

 

Many journalists have read Qutb's book called " Milestones " in an attempt to

understand the basis for the radical movement. One of these is Paul Berman

of the New York Times. Berman, however, went on to other books by Qutb,

especially the book entitled " In the Shadow of the Qur'an. " The following

article, written by Berman for the New York Times Magazine in 2003, is a

must read.

 

*The Philosopher of Islamic Terror - Paul Berman, NY Times*

 

(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html)

 

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and

satisfying American victory over Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to

be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant police forces of the

entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark

maneuvers. Al Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and

maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring. Just this month, one of

Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police agents, as

I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin Laden himself, or so

reports suggest.

 

Yet Al Qaeda has seemed unfazed. Its popularity, which was hard to imagine

at first, has turned out to be large and genuine in more than a few

countries. Al Qaeda upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic world view, according

to which ''Crusaders and Zionists'' have been conspiring for centuries to

destroy Islam. And this world view turns out to be widely accepted in many

places -- a world view that allowed many millions of people to regard the

Sept. 11 attacks as an Israeli conspiracy, or perhaps a C.I.A. conspiracy,

to undo Islam. Bin Laden's soulful, bearded face peers out from T-shirts and

posters in a number of countries, quite as if he were the new Che Guevara,

the mythic righter of cosmic wrongs.

 

The vigilant police in many countries, applying themselves at last, have

raided a number of Muslim charities and Islamic banks, which stand accused

of subsidizing the terrorists. These raids have advanced the war on still

another front, which has been good to see. But the raids have also shown

that Al Qaeda is not only popular; it is also institutionally solid, with a

worldwide network of clandestine resources. This is not the Symbionese

Liberation Army. This is an organization with ties to the ruling elites in a

number of countries; an organization that, were it given the chance to

strike up an alliance with Saddam Hussein's Baath movement, would be doubly

terrifying; an organization that, in any case, will surely survive the

outcome in Iraq.

 

To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister

organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest

strength of all, something truly imposing -- though in the Western press

this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi

plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept.

11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused

everyone's attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader

roots. The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of

three armed factions -- bin Laden's circle of ''Afghan'' Arabs, together

with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad,

the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The

Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from

within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the

1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood,

until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the

intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al

Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.

 

Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called ''Milestones,'' and that book

was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after

its author was hanged. ''Milestones'' became a classic manifesto of the

terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. A number of journalists have

dutifully turned the pages of ''Milestones,'' trying to decipher the

otherwise inscrutable terrorist point of view.

 

I have been reading some of Qutb's other books, and I think that

''Milestones'' may have misled the journalists. ''Milestones'' is a fairly

shallow book, judged in isolation. But ''Milestones'' was drawn from his

vast commentary on the Koran called ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.'' One of

the many volumes of this giant work was translated into English in the

1970's and published by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, an organization

later widely suspected of participation in terrorist attacks -- and an

organization whose Washington office was run by a brother of bin Laden's. In

the last four years a big effort has been mounted by another organization,

the Islamic Foundation in England, to bring out the rest, in what will

eventually be an edition of 15 fat English-language volumes, handsomely

ornamented with Arabic script from the Koran. Just in these past few weeks a

number of new volumes in this edition have made their way into the Arab

bookshops of Brooklyn, and I have gobbled them up. By now I have made my way

through a little less than half of ''In the Shade of the Qur'an,'' which I

think is all that exists so far in English, together with three other books

by Qutb. And I have something to report.

 

Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its

fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely

popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated.

These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be

pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the

ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have

known many things.

 

Qutb's special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy,

he received a traditional Muslim education -- he committed the Koran to

memory by the age of 10 -- yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive

a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920's and 30's

he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that

is still said to be well regarded called ''Literary Criticism: Its

Principles and Methodology.'' His writings reflected -- here I quote one of

his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at

Berkeley -- a ''Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.''

Qutb displayed ''traces of individualism and existentialism.'' He even

traveled to the United States n the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado

State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the

accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly

trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling

back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.

 

I am skeptical of that interpretation, though. His book from the 1940's,

''Social Justice and Islam,'' shows that, even before his voyage to America,

he was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism. It is true that, after

his return to Egypt, he veered into ever more radical directions. But in the

early 1950's, everyone in Egypt was veering in radical directions. Gamal

Abdel Nasser and a group of nationalist army officers overthrew the old king

in 1952 and launched a nationalist revolution on Pan-Arabist grounds.

And, as the Pan-Arabists went about promoting their revolution, Sayyid Qutb

went about promoting his own, somewhat different revolution. His idea was

''Islamist.'' He wanted to turn Islam into a political movement to create a

new society, to be based on ancient Koranic principles. Qutb joined the

Muslim Brotherhood, became the editor of its journal and established

himself right away as Islamism's principal theoretician in the Arab world.

 

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in

Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements

dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European

imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new

Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity,

which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but,

even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And

both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the

glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern

version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the

Arabs were conquering the world.

 

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists could be compared, in these ambitions,

with the Italian Fascists of Mussolini's time, who wanted to resurrect the

Roman Empire, and to the Nazis, who likewise wanted to resurrect ancient

Rome, except in a German version. The most radical of the Pan-Arabists

openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a

racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the

Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a

theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The

Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had their similarities then, and their

differences. (And today those two movements still have their similarities

and differences -- as shown by bin Laden's Qaeda, which represents the most

violent wing of Islamism, and Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which

represents the most violent wing of Pan-Arabism.)

 

In 1952, in the days before staging his coup d'etat, Colonel Nasser is said

to have paid a visit to Qutb at his home, presumably to get his backing.

Some people expected that, after taking power, Nasser would appoint Qutb to

be the new revolutionary minister of education. But once the Pan-Arabists

had thrown out the old king, the differences between the two movements began

to overwhelm the similarities, and Qutb was not appointed. Instead, Nasser

cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to

assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder.

Some of the Muslim Brotherhood's most distinguished intellectuals and

theologians escaped into exile. Sayyid Qutb's brother, Muhammad Qutb, was

one of those people. He fled to Saudi Arabia and ended up as a distinguished

Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. Many years later, Osama bin Laden

would be one of Muhammad Qutb's students.

 

But Sayyid Qutb stayed put and paid dearly for his stubbornness. Nasser

jailed him in 1954, briefly released him, jailed him again for 10 years,

released him for a few months and finally hanged him in 1966. Conditions

during the first years of prison were especially bad. Qutb was tortured.

Even in better times, according to his followers, he was locked in a ward

with 40 people, most of them criminals, with a tape recorder broadcasting

the speeches of Nasser 20 hours a day. Still, by smuggling papers in and out

of jail, he managed to continue with his writings, no longer in the

''Western tinged'' vein of his early, literary days but now as a

full-fledged Islamist revolutionary. And somehow, he produced his ''In the

Shade of the Qur'an,'' this gigantic study, which must surely count as one

of the most remarkable works of prison literature ever produced.

 

Readers without a Muslim education who try to make their way unaided through

the Koran tend to find it, as I have, a little dry and forbidding. But

Qutb's commentaries are not at all like that. He quotes passages from the

chapters, or suras, of the Koran, and he pores over the quoted passages,

observing the prosodic qualities of the text, the rhythm, tone and

musicality of the words, sometimes the images. The suras lead him to discuss

dietary regulations, the proper direction to pray, the rules of divorce, the

question of when a man may propose marriage to a widow (four months and 10

days after the death of her husband, unless she is pregnant, in which case

after delivery), the rules concerning a Muslim man who wishes to marry a

Christian or a Jew (very complicated), the obligations of charity, the

punishment for crimes and for breaking your word, the prohibition on liquor

and intoxicants, the proper clothing to wear, the rules on usury, money

lending and a thousand other themes.

 

The Koran tells stories, and Qutb recounts some of these and remarks on

their wisdom and significance. His tone is always lucid and plain. Yet the

total effect of his writing is almost sensual in its measured pace. The very

title ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' conveys a vivid desert image, as

if the Koran were a leafy palm tree, and we have only to open Qutb's pages

to escape the hot sun and refresh ourselves in the shade. As he makes his

way through the suras and proposes his other commentaries, he slowly

constructs an enormous theological criticism of modern life, and not just

in Egypt.

 

Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of

unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's

inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations

were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable,

anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were

turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb

admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think

that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on

the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was

the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest

nature and modern life?

 

A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in

the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following

Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western

civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal

error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and

deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after

many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over

life.

 

Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in

ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion,

Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to

Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and

to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every

sphere of life -- how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at

one with God. This could be done by obeying a system of divinely mandated

laws, the code of Moses. In Qutb's view, however, Judaism withered into what

he called ''a system of rigid and lifeless ritual.''

 

God sent another prophet, though. That prophet, in Qutb's Muslim way of

thinking, was Jesus, who proposed a few useful reforms -- lifting some

no-longer necessary restrictions in the Jewish dietary code, for example --

and also an admirable new spirituality. But something terrible occurred. The

relation between Jesus' followers and the Jews took, in Qutb's view, ''a

deplorable course.'' Jesus' followers squabbled with the old-line Jews, and

amid the mutual recriminations, Jesus' message ended up being diluted and

even perverted. Jesus' disciples and followers were persecuted, which meant

that, in their sufferings, the disciples were never able to provide an

adequate or systematic exposition of Jesus' message.

 

Who but Sayyid Qutb, from his miserable prison in Nasser's Egypt, could have

zeroed in so plausibly on the difficulties encountered by Jesus' disciples

in getting out the word? Qutb figured that, as a result, the Christian

Gospels were badly garbled, and should not be regarded as accurate or

reliable. The Gospels declared Jesus to be divine, but in Qutb's Muslim

account, Jesus was a mere human -- a prophet of God, not a messiah. The

larger catastrophe, however, was this: Jesus' disciples, owing to what Qutb

called ''this unpleasant separation of the two parties,'' went too far in

rejecting the Jewish teachings.

 

Jesus' disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus' divine

message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism's legal system,

the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life.

Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of

the Greeks -- the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from

physical life, a zone of pure spirit.

 

In the fourth century of the Christian era, Emperor Constantine converted

the Roman Empire to Christianity. But Constantine, in Qutb's interpretation,

did this in a spirit of pagan hypocrisy, dominated by scenes of wantonness,

half-naked girls, gems and precious metals. Christianity, having abandoned

the Mosaic code, could put up no defense. And so, in their horror at Roman

morals, the Christians did as best they could and countered the imperial

debaucheries with a cult of monastic asceticism.

 

But this was no good at all. Monastic asceticism stands at odds with the

physical quality of human nature. In this manner, in Qutb's view,

Christianity lost touch with the physical world. The old code of Moses, with

its laws for diet, dress, marriage, sex and everything else, had enfolded

the divine and the worldly into a single concept, which was the worship of

God. But Christianity divided these things into two, the sacred and the

secular. Christianity said, ''Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto

God what is God's.'' Christianity put the physical world in one corner and

the spiritual world in another corner: Constantine's debauches over here,

monastic renunciation over there. In Qutb's view there was a ''hideous

schizophrenia'' in this approach to life. And things got worse.

 

A series of Christian religious councils adopted what Qutb thought to be

irrational principles on Christianity's behalf -- principles regarding the

nature of Jesus, the Eucharist, transubstantiation and other questions, all

of which were, in Qutb's view, ''absolutely incomprehensible, inconceivable

and incredible.'' Church teachings froze the irrational principles into

dogma. And then the ultimate crisis struck.

 

Qutb's story now shifts to Arabia. In the seventh century, God delivered a

new revelation to his prophet Muhammad, who established the correct, non

distorted relation to human nature that had always eluded the Christians.

Muhammad dictated a strict new legal code, which put religion once more at

ease in the physical world, except in a better way than ever before.

Muhammad's prophecies, in the Koran, instructed man to be God's ''vice

regent'' on earth -- to take charge of the physical world, and not simply to

see it as something alien to spirituality or as a way station on the road to

a Christian afterlife. Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages took this

instruction seriously and went about inquiring into the nature of physical

reality. And, in the Islamic universities of Andalusia and the East, the

Muslim scientists, deepening their inquiry, hit upon the inductive or

scientific method -- which opened the door to all further scientific and

technological progress. In this and many other ways, Islam seized the

leadership of mankind. Unfortunately, the Muslims came under attack from

Crusaders, Mongols and other enemies. And, because the Muslims proved not

faithful enough to Muhammad's revelations, they were unable to fend off

these attacks. They were unable to capitalize on their brilliant discovery

of the scientific method.

 

The Muslim discoveries were exported instead into Christian Europe. And

there, in Europe in the 16th century, Islam's scientific method began to

generate results, and modern science emerged. But Christianity, with its

insistence on putting the physical world and the spiritual world in

different corners, could not cope with scientific progress. And so

Christianity's inability to acknowledge or respect the physical quality of

daily life spread into the realm of culture and shaped society's attitude

toward science.

 

As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity's influence, began to picture

God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual

inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for

a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for

knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the

scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the

Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the

European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity,

over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the

sacred and the secular.

 

Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to

dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous

schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That

was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the

sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The

crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian

West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis

on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to

something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of

modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition

-- a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb's

account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been

imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the

experience doubly painful -- an alienation that was also a humiliation.

 

That was Qutb's analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on

something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the

feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb

evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine

that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950's and 60's, Qutb had

already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the

suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was

the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements

while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of

walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe

altogether, located in the Koranic past -- the agony of being pulled this

way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely

chosen, the religiously mandated -- a life of confusion unto madness brought

on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.

 

Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, surrounded by criminals and composing

his Koranic commentaries with Nasser's speeches blaring in the background on

the infuriating tape recorder, Qutb knew whom to blame. He blamed the early

Christians. He blamed Christianity's modern legacy, which was the liberal

idea that religion should stay in one corner and secular life in another

corner. He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown

themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during

their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian

captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result

they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant

when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions

of Qutb's Koranic commentary -- their perfidy, greed, hatefulness,

diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad

and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part

of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.

 

And Qutb blamed one other party. He blamed the Muslims who had gone along

with Christianity's errors -- the treacherous Muslims who had inflicted

Christianity's ''schizophrenia'' on the world of Islam. And, because he was

willing to blame, Qutb was able to recommend a course of action too -- a

revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure

of modern life and was going to put man at ease with the natural world and

with God.

 

Qutb's analysis was soulful and heartfelt. It was a theological analysis,

but in its cultural emphases, it reflected the style of 20th-century

philosophy. The analysis asked some genuinely perplexing questions -- about

the division between mind and body in Western thought; about the

difficulties in striking a balance between sensual experience and spiritual

elevation; about the steely impersonality of modern power and technological

innovation; about social injustice. But, though Qutb plainly followed some

main trends of 20th-century Western social criticism and philosophy, he

poured his ideas through a filter of Koranic commentary, and the filter gave

his commentary a grainy new texture, authentically Muslim, which allowed him

to make a series of points that no Western thinker was likely to propose.

 

One of those points had to do with women's role in society -- and these

passages in his writings have been misinterpreted, I think, in some of the

Western commentaries on Qutb. His attitude was prudish in the extreme,

judged from a Western perspective of today. But prudishness was not his

motivation. He understood quite clearly that, in a liberal society, women

were free to consult their own hearts and to pursue careers in quest of

material wealth. But from his point of view, this could only mean that women

had shucked their responsibility to shape the human character, through

child-rearing. The Western notion of women's freedom could only mean that

God and the natural order of life had been set aside in favor of a belief in

other sources of authority, like one's own heart.

 

But what did it mean to recognize the existence of more than one source of

authority? It meant paganism -- a backward step, into the heathen

primitivism of the past. It meant life without reference to God -- a life

with no prospect of being satisfactory or fulfilling. And why had the

liberal societies of the West lost sight of the natural harmony of gender

roles and of women's place in the family and the home? This was because of

the ''hideous schizophrenia'' of modern life -- the Western outlook that led

people to picture God's domain in one place and the ordinary business of

daily life in some other place.

 

Qutb wrote bitterly about European imperialism, which he regarded as nothing

more than a continuation of the medieval Crusades against Islam. He

denounced American foreign policy. He complained about America's decision in

the time of Harry Truman to support the Zionists, a strange decision that he

attributed, in part, to America's loss of moral values. But I must point out

that, in Qutb's writings, at least in the many volumes that I have read, the

complaints about American policy are relatively few and fleeting.

International politics was simply not his main concern. Sometimes he

complained about the hypocrisy in America's endless boasts about freedom and

democracy. He mentioned America's extermination of its Indian population. He

noted the racial prejudice against blacks. But those were not Qutb's themes,

finally. American hypocrisy exercised him, but only slightly. His deepest

quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel

was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a

liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal

society.

 

The truly dangerous element in American life, in his estimation, was not

capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women's

independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America's separation of

church and state -- the modern political legacy of Christianity's ancient

division between the sacred and the secular. This was not a political

criticism. This was theological -- though Qutb, or perhaps his translators,

preferred the word ''ideological.''

 

The conflict between the Western liberal countries and the world of Islam,

he explained, ''remains in essence one of ideology, although over the years

it has appeared in various guises and has grown more sophisticated and, at

times, more insidious.'' The sophisticated and insidious disguises tended to

be worldly -- a camouflage that was intended to make the conflict appear to

be economic, political or military, and that was intended to make Muslims

like himself who insisted on speaking about religion appear to be, in his

words, ''fanatics'' and ''backward people.''

 

''But in reality,'' he explained, ''the confrontation is not over control of

territory or economic resources, or for military domination. If we believed

that, we would play into our enemies' hands and would have no one but

ourselves to blame for the consequences.''

 

The true confrontation, the deepest confrontation of all, was over Islam and

nothing but Islam. Religion was the issue. Qutb could hardly be clearer on

this topic. The confrontation arose from the effort by Crusaders and world

Zionism to annihilate Islam. The Crusaders and Zionists knew that

Christianity and Judaism were inferior to Islam and had led to lives of

misery. They needed to annihilate Islam in order to rescue their own

doctrines from extinction. And so the Crusaders and Zionists went on the

attack.

 

But this attack was not, at bottom, military. At least Qutb did not devote

his energies to warning against such a danger. Nor did he spend much time

worrying about the ins and outs of Israel's struggle with the Palestinians.

Border disputes did not concern him. He was focused on something cosmically

larger. He worried, instead, that people with liberal ideas were mounting a

gigantic campaign against Islam -- ''an effort to confine Islam to the

emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the

activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human

secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and

function.''

 

He trembled with rage at that effort. And he cited good historical evidence

for his trembling rage. Turkey, an authentic Muslim country, had embraced

secular ideas back in 1924. Turkey's revolutionary leader at that time,

Kemal Ataturk, abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient caliphate

-- the caliphate that Qutb so fervently wanted to resurrect. The Turks in

this fashion had tried to abolish the very idea and memory of an Islamic

state. Qutb worried that, if secular reformers in other Muslim countries had

any success, Islam was going to be pushed into a corner, separate from the

state. True Islam was going to end up as partial Islam. But partial Islam,

in his view, did not exist.

 

The secular reformers were already at work, throughout the Muslim world.

They were mounting their offensive -- ''a final offensive which is actually

taking place now in all the Muslim countries. . . . It is an effort to

exterminate this religion as even a basic creed and to replace it with

secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions and

organizations.''

 

That one question dominated Qutb's life. It was a theological question, and

he answered it with his volumes on the Koran. But he intended his theology

to be practical too -- to offer a revolutionary program to save mankind. The

first step was to open people's eyes. He wanted Muslims to recognize the

nature of the danger -- to recognize that Islam had come under assault from

outside the Muslim world and also from inside the Muslim world. The assault

from outside was led by Crusaders and world Zionism (though sometimes he

also mentioned Communism).

 

But the assault from inside was conducted by Muslims themselves -- that is,

by people who called themselves Muslims but who polluted the Muslim world

with incompatible ideas derived from elsewhere. These several enemies,

internal and external, the false Muslims together with the Crusaders and

Zionists, ruled the earth. But Qutb considered that Islam's strength was,

even so, huge yet. ''We are certain,'' he wrote, ''that this religion of

Islam is so intrinsically genuine, so colossal and deeply rooted that all

such efforts and brutal concussions will avail nothing.''

 

Islam's apparent weakness was mere appearance. Islam's true champions seemed

to be few, but numbers meant nothing. The few had to gather themselves

together into what Qutb in ''Milestones'' called a vanguard -- a term that

he must have borrowed from Lenin, though Qutb had in mind a tiny group

animated by the spirit of Muhammad and his Companions from the dawn of

Islam. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to undertake the renovation

of Islam and of civilization all over the world. The vanguard was going to

turn against the false Muslims and ''hypocrites'' and do as Muhammad had

done, which was to found a new state, based on the Koran. And from there,

the vanguard was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the

world, just as Muhammad had done.

 

Qutb's vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the

legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules.

Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ''a life

for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.''

Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ''it involves

an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of

profligacy in society.'' Shariah specified the punishments here as well.

''The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is

stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred

lashes, which in cases is fatal.'' False accusations were likewise serious.

''A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste

women.'' As for those who threaten the general security of society, their

punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and

feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.''

 

But Qutb refused to regard these punishments as barbarous or primitive.

Shariah, in his view, meant liberation. Other societies, drawing on

non-Koranic principles, forced people to obey haughty masters and man-made

law. Those other societies forced people to worship their own rulers and to

do as the rulers said -- even if the rulers were democratically chosen.

Under shariah, no one was going to be forced to obey mere humans. Shariah,

in Qutb's view, meant ''the abolition of man-made laws.'' In the resurrected

caliphate, every person was going to be ''free from servitude to

others.'' The true Islamic system meant ''the complete and true freedom of

every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the

other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and

some others are slaves who obey, then there is no freedom in the real sense,

nor dignity for each and every individual.''

 

He insisted that shariah meant freedom of conscience -- though freedom of

conscience, in his interpretation, meant freedom from false doctrines that

failed to recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia. Shariah, in

a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural

order in the universal. It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a

single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of

the other totalitarian doctrines of the 20th century. It was, in his words,

''the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.'' It was an

impossible vision -- a vision that was plainly going to require a total

dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on

man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would

interpret God's laws to the masses. The most extreme despotism was all too

visible in Qutb's revolutionary program. That much should have been obvious

to anyone who knew the history of the other grand totalitarian

revolutionary projects of the 20th century, the projects of the Nazis, the

Fascists and the Communists.

 

Still, for Qutb, utopia was not the main thing. Utopia was for the future,

and Qutb was not a dreamer. Islam, in his interpretation, was a way of life.

He wanted his Muslim vanguard to live according to pious Islamic principles

in the here and now. He wanted the vanguard to observe the rules of Muslim

charity and all the other rules of daily life. He wanted true Muslims to

engage in a lifelong study of the Koran -- the lifelong study that his own

gigantic commentary was designed to enhance. But most of all, he wanted his

vanguard to accept the obligations of ''jihad,'' which is to say, the

struggle for Islam. And what would that mean, to engage in jihad in the

present and not just in the sci-fi utopian future?

 

Qutb began Volume 1 of ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' by saying: ''To live

in the shade of the Qur'an' is a great blessing which can only be fully

appreciated by those who experience it. It is a rich experience that gives

meaning to life and makes it worth living. I am deeply thankful to God

Almighty for blessing me with this uplifting experience for a considerable

time, which was the happiest and most fruitful period of my life -- a

privilege for which I am eternally grateful.''

 

He does not identify that happy and fruitful period of his life -- a period

that lasted, as he says, a considerable time. Perhaps his brother and other

intimates would have known exactly what he had in mind -- some very pleasant

period, conceivably the childhood years when he was memorizing the Koran.

But an ordinary reader who picks up Qutb's books can only imagine that he

was writing about his years of torture and prison.

 

One of his Indian publishers has highlighted this point in a remarkably

gruesome manner by attaching an unsigned preface to a 1998 edition of

''Milestones.'' The preface declares: ''The ultimate price for working to

lease God Almighty and to propagate his ways in this world is often one's

own life. The author'' -- Qutb, that is -- ''tried to do it; he paid for it

with his life. If you and I try to do it, there is every likelihood we will

be called upon to do the same. But for those who truly believe in God, what

other choice is there?''

 

You are meant to suppose that a true reader of Sayyid Qutb is someone who,

in the degree that he properly digests Qutb's message, will act on what has

been digested. And action may well bring on a martyr's death. To read is to

glide forward toward death; and gliding toward death means you have

understood what you are reading. Qutb's writings do vibrate to that morbid

tone -- not always, but sometimes. The work that he left behind, his Koranic

commentary, is vast, vividly written, wise, broad, indignant, sometimes

demented, bristly with hatred, medieval, modern, tolerant, intolerant,

paranoid, cruel, urgent, cranky, tranquil, grave, poetic, learned and

analytic. Sometimes it is moving. It is a work large and solid enough to

create its own shade, where Qutb's vanguard and other readers could repose

and turn his pages, as he advised the students of the Koran to do, in the

earnest spirit of loyal soldiers reading their daily bulletin. But there is,

in this commentary, something otherworldly too -- an atmosphere of death. At

the very least, it is impossible to read the work without remembering that,

in 1966, Qutb, in the phrase of one of his biographers, ''kissed the

gallows.''

 

Martyrdom was among his themes. He discusses passages in the Koran's sura

''The Cow,'' and he explains that death as a martyr is nothing to fear. Yes,

some people will have to be sacrificed. ''Those who risk their lives and go

out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of

God are honorable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great

surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be

considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself

clearly states.''

 

Qutb wrote: ''To all intents and purposes, those people may very well appear

lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial physical means

alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth and persistence,

while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete inertia and

lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God

gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood.

Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus

after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their

community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people,

having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active

existence in everyday life.

 

''There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to

live.''

 

And so it was with Sayyid Qutb. In the period before his final arrest and

execution, diplomats from Iraq and Libya offered him the chance to flee to

safety in their countries. But he declined to go, on the ground that 3,000

young men and women in Egypt were his followers, and he did not want to undo

a lifetime of teaching by refusing to give those 3,000 people an example of

true martyrdom. And, in fact, some of those followers went on to form the

Egyptian terrorist movement in the next decade, the 1970's -- the groups

that massacred tourists and Coptic Christians and that assassinated Egypt's

president, Anwar Sadat, after he made peace with Israel; the groups that, in

still later years, ended up merging with bin Laden's group and supplying Al

Qaeda with its fundamental doctrines. The people in those groups were not

stupid or lacking in education.

 

On the contrary, we keep learning how well educated these people are, how

many of them come from the upper class, how wealthy they are. And there is

no reason for us to be surprised. These people are in possession of a

powerful philosophy, which is Sayyid Qutb's. They are in possession of a

gigantic work of literature, which is his ''In the Shade of the Qur'an.''

These people feel that, by consulting their own doctrines, they can explain

the unhappiness of the world. They feel that, with an intense study of the

Koran, as directed by Qutb and his fellow thinkers, they can make sense of

thousands of years of theological error. They feel that, in Qutb's notion of

shariah, they command the principles of a perfect society.

 

These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving

Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they

are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death.

Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and

immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a

life of struggle or jihad for Islam, and struggle means martyrdom. We may

think: those are creepy ideas. And yes, the ideas are creepy. But there is,

in Qutb's presentation, a weird allure in those ideas.

 

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too,

speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone

is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here

I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of

enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder.

But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak

of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of

weapons inspectors, of coercion and non coercion. This is no answer to the

terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists

had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this.

Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better

and for worse.

 

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and

the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of

liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal

society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress

a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to

wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

 

 

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are

they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious

leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to

worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have

trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and

possibly the greatest worry of all.

 

*Paul Berman has written for the magazine about Vaclav Havel, Vicente Fox

and other subjects. He is the author of the coming ''Terror and Liberalism''

(W.W. Norton), from which this essay is adapted.

*

Bin Laden Urges Americans to Convert

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/bin-laden-urges-americans-to-convert/n2007090722070\

9990017

 

 

Turkish Elections Put US Doctrine to Test

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/turkish_elections_put_us_doctr\

..html

 

Secularism is the Enemy of Islam .. it remains to be seen whether Iraq will

become a Secular, Democratic country.

 

On 31 August 2007 .. Turkey elected its first Islamist President. It

remains to be seen if Turkey will remain a Secular country that embraces

Democracy. If the Military fears that this will not be the case .. odds are

they will step in (again) and Turkey will then be a Secular country with a

Military Government. Butch

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Butch,

 

Just wanted to say thanks for an important post. An IMPORTANT post! The

tremendous variety and erudition of you folks is why I consider this one of

the most valuable lists there is.

 

Dave

 

Semper in fæcibus sumus, sole profundum variat.

 

> Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian philosopher who was active in

> Egypt's Islamic fundamentalist movement...

 

 

 

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