[thechat] FW: some of the whys (very long)

[Scott Dexter]

Thinking this has some relevance. (Ben is a good friend; his dad is a
high-level exec for an American oil company over there). It is well
worth the read.

Dex

B H Speaker wrote on Sunday, March 23, 2003 11:03 AM:
> 
> All,
> 
> You can get a good grasp on the "whys" of the our headlong collision
> with Islam and the Arab world by reading this article.
> 
> For those unaware, my parents live in Doha, Qatar, first row seating
> for current topics of note.
> 
> With legendary timing, they are moving from the Persian Gulf to
> Indonesia this summer.
> 
> peace,
> Ben
> __________________________________________________
> 
> I am sending this to you because it is an excellent summary of the
> thinking of many, if not most, devout Muslims over here, including
> most of those who would not be considered violent.  In the the few
> discussions I've had on the subject of Religion here, I've pointed
> out that separation of Church and State is so fundamental to my
> American way of thinking that I am mystified by the congruence of
> religion and state in Arab countries.  I appreciate several sides of
> the Western support of this - both the American support of diverse
> religions (no government support of any single religion), and the
> 18th Century French philosphers view that state support of any
> religion is a serious threat to the health and sanctity of that
> religion (they could point to both France and Rome for evidence). 
> 
> This is a very fundamental difference between our two cultures - one
> you would be wise to read about and, to the extent you can,
> understand.  In self-defense, if for no other reason.
> 
> Peace,
> Bill Speaker
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------
> 
> March 23, 2003
> The Philosopher of Islamic Terror
> By PAUL BERMAN
> 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> 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 in 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, moneylending 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, nondistorted 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.''
> 
> ''To exterminate'' -- that was Qutb's phrase. Hysteria cried out from
> every syllable. But he did not want to be hysterical. He wanted to
> respond. How? 
> 
> 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, huger 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 the 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 please 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 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. 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.
> 
> 
> 
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