The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

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 worldview, according to which ''Crusaders and Zionists'' have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places -- a worldview 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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,584478,00.html

Is this the man who inspired Bin Laden?

Robert Irwin on Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamist fundamentalism

Thursday November 1, 2001
The Guardian

As the west struggles to get to grips with its newest enemy, pundits, scholars and journalists have combed every inch of Osama bin Laden's life story for clues to what turned an apparently quiet and unexceptional rich Saudi boy into the world's most feared terrorist. But the most useful insights into the shaping of Bin Laden may lie not in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, or the rampant materialism of 1970s Saudi Arabia, but the biography of a long dead Egyptian fundamentalist scholar called Sayyid Qutb.
Qutb, regarded as the father of modern fundamentalism and described by his (Arab) biographer as "the most famous personality of the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century", is being increasingly cited as the figure who has most influenced the al-Qaida leader. Yet outside the Muslim world, he remains virtually unknown.

Qutb was the most influential advocate in modern times of jihad, or Islamic holy war, and the chief developer of doctrines that legitimise violent Muslim resistance to regimes that claim to be Muslim, but whose implementation of Islamic precepts is judged to be imperfect. Although Qutb is particularly popular in Saudi Arabia, his copious writings have been translated into most of the languages of the Islamic world. In the 1960s and 70s, when many Afghan religious scholars came under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb's ideas attracted particular interest in the faculty of religious law in Kabul, and the scholar Burhanuddin Rabbani translated him into the Afghan language of Dari. However, though Qutb is studied everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, there are many versions of fundamentalism and his writings have been read and interpreted in many ways (and some Islamic fundamentalists have actually written polemics against Qutb's version of Islam).

Qutb was born in 1906, in Mush, a small village in Upper Egypt. Later he was to look back on the superstition and backwardness of village life. He was mostly educated at Dar al-'Ulum, a secular secondary college, and subsequently worked for the Egyptian ministry of education as an inspector of schools. In the 1930s and 40s he led a second life as a literary man about town. He haunted cafes, published literary criticism as well as a not particularly successful novel.

Everything changed in 1948 when he was sent to study education in the US. It was a fateful decision. Perhaps those who sent him thought that it would broaden his horizons. What happened was that on the voyage out he decided that his only salvation lay in an unswerving allegiance to Islam. Almost immediately his newfound resolve was tested on the liner, as a drunken American woman attempted to seduce him. Qutb did not succumb, nor was he later won over by the charms of the American way of life. He was repelled by prejudice against Arabs and shocked by the freedom that American men allowed their women. He described the churches as "entertainment centres and sexual playgrounds". After two and a half years of exposure to western civilisation he knew that he hated it and, on his return to Egypt in 1951, he joined the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

In the early 1950s the Muslim Brotherhood was in transition, as many of its members abandoned faith in gradualism and education as the way to bring about an Islamic revolution in Egypt and came to espouse violence instead. Qutb followed a similar trajectory. In 1954, he and many other Muslim Brothers were rounded up by Nasser's regime. He was to spend 10 years in prison. Though conditions were harsh, Qutb was not prevented from writing. He was released in 1964, then rearrested in 1965 after members of the Muslim Brotherhood had attempted to assassinate Nasser. He was routinely tortured before being brought to trial and then hanged on August 29 1966.

What Qutb wrote is of more significance than his somewhat shadowy life. His major work is Fi Zalal al-Koran (In the Shadow of the Koran), a commentary on the Koran in 30 volumes which began to appear in 1952 and was completed in prison. Apart from its length, two things are striking about the commentary: first, Qutb's unfailing sensitivity to the Koran's literary qualities; secondly, Qutb's relentless insistence on the unconditional demands made upon those believers. From his reading of the Koran, he deduced that the Christians are all destined for hell and in other, shorter, later works he polemicised against Christians, Jews and the western way of life.

Orientalism was another engine of the Jewish conspiracy: "It would be extremely short-sighted of us to fall into the illusion that when the Jews and Christians discuss Islamic beliefs or Islamic history or when they make proposals concerning Muslim society or Muslim politics or economics, they will be doing it with good intentions."

However, Qutb's fiercest polemics were reserved for those who were Muslims - or rather, those who claimed that they were Muslims. Neither Egypt under Nasser's dictatorship nor Arabia under the Saudi monarchy had made any serious attempt to implement the Shari'a, or religious law. More generally, the territories of Islam were governed by corrupt, westernised dictators and princes whose spiritually heedless and ignorant ways could only be compared to those of the Jahili Arabs - that is to say, to the pagan ways of the Arabs prior to the coming of Mohammed and the revelation of the Koran.

The corrupt regimes had to be resisted and overthrown. In order to find a hallowed precedent and legitimisation for such resistance Qutb had to go back to the era of the Mameluke Sultans of Egypt and to the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1268-1328). Taymiyya, a somewhat curmudgeonly Islamic purist, had been outspoken in his opposition to almost everything that was not explicitly sanctioned by the Koran and the Prophet and his intransigence several times led him into conflict with the Mamelukes and, consequently, imprisonment.

However, when they found themselves at war with the Muslim Mongol Ilkhans of Iran, the Mamelukes asked him for a judgment sanctioning the holiness of their cause and, surprisingly, he obliged. He declared that, though the Mongols might have professed Islam, they did not follow absolutely all the prescriptions of the religion and that therefore they were Jahili pagans against whom jihad had to be waged. Taymiyya's verdict has underwritten Islamic resistance movements from the 1950s onwards. It was cited by the assassins of Sadat in 1981 and it is also used to justify the struggle against the Saudi monarchy.

Qutb seems to have rejected all kinds of government, secular and theocratic, and, on one reading at least, he seems to advocate a kind of anarcho-Islam. On the one hand his writings have exercised a formative influence on the Taliban, who, under the leadership of the shy, rustic Mullah Omar seem to have been concentrating on implementating the Shari'a in one country under the governance of the Mullahs. On the other hand, Qutb's works have also influenced al-Qaida, which, under the leadership of the flamboyant and camera-loving Bin Laden, seems to aim at a global jihad that will end with all men under direct, unmediated rule of Allah.

In the context of that global programme, the destruction of the twin towers, spectacular atrocity though it was, is merely a by-blow in al-Qaida's current campaign. Neither the US nor Israel is Bin Laden's primary target - rather it is Bin Laden's homeland, Saudi Arabia. The corrupt and repressive royal house, like the Mongol Ilkhanate of the 14th century, is damned as a Jahili scandal. Therefore, al-Qaida's primary task is to liberate the holy cities of Mecca and Medina from their rule. Though the current policy of the princes of the Arabian peninsula seems to be to sit on their hands and hope that al-Qaida and its allies will pick on someone else first, it is unlikely that they will be so lucky.

· Robert Irwin is Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement

Wow. I'm going have to get to know this dude better.

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 noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things.

I work with university students who are wrestling with Christian world-view issues. My frequent admonition to them is, Never bring a knife to a gun fight. You can't confront a total world view, a grid for interpreting all of reality, with a "personal salvation experience" courtesy of a "personal Savior" that makes me "personally" happy, oh so happy, I've got the love of Jesus in my heart!

Pietism has proven singularly inept vis-a-vis that clownishly non-transcendent religion of secular humanism. Providentially, pietism is not the whole story.

Augustine's magnum opus The City of God laid the foundation for an imperfect Christian social order that endured for a thousand years. Today, the hard-core worldview refiners come from a dynasty of Reformed (Calvinist) scholars such as Cornelius Van Til, Abraham Kuyper, R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North.

IMHO, we'd better get our act together. The God who took down Communism is now dealing with Islam -- and secular humanism, that absurd faith in civil government as the font of progress and wealth, is next in line.

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