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Date Posted: 21:59:39 04/24/03 Thu
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 67.30.245.31
Subject: THE PHILOSOPHER OF Islamic Terror

who know, maybe Iraqis people will choose a Islamic fundamentalist government. Who is the USA or any government to tell them what form of government they should have. maybe all the oil(from organic plant material grown in the 2nd dimension) under the midle east makes the whole areas consciounes a verry low vibration.

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THE PHILOSOPHER OF Islamic Terror

At the heart of the Islamic fundamentalist movement stood Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual hero of Osama bin Laden. He called for a vanguard of true Muslims to renovate Islam and take it to all the world.
PAUL BERMAN
New York Times

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over al-Qaida. 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-Qaida was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring.

Yet al-Qaida 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-Qaida upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview, according to which "Crusaders and Zionists" have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. This worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places.

Al-Qaida was created in the late 1980s by three armed factions -- Osama 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-Qaida's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950s and '60s.

At the heart of that Muslim Brotherhood single school of thought stood a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into al-Qaida, 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 in 1966. "Milestones" became a classic manifesto of the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. It was drawn from his vast commentary on the Quran called "In the Shade of the Quran," which is, in its fashion, a masterwork.

Al-Qaida 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.

Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of nationalist army officers overthrew Egypt's king in 1952 and launched a nationalist revolution on Pan-Arabist grounds. 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 Quranic 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.

Once the Pan-Arabists had thrown out the king, the differences between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities. Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder.

Nasser jailed Qutb in 1954, briefly released him, jailed him again for 10 years, released him for a few months and finally hanged him. During his years in prison, by smuggling papers in and out, Qutb managed to continue writing, no longer in the "Western tinged" vein of his early, literary days but now as a full-fledged Islamist revolutionary. Somehow, he produced "In the Shade of the Quran," which must surely count as one of the most remarkable works of prison literature ever produced.

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?

In Qutb's view, Christianity had 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.

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.

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.

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.

Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, 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.

The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb's Quranic 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 worried 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."

Qutb 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.

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. 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 Quran. And from there, the vanguard was going to take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.

Martyrdom was among his themes. 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 1970s -- 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-Qaida 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 Quran."

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 Quran, as directed by Qutb and his fellow thinkers, they can make sense of thousands of years of theological error. They believe that, in Qutb's notion of Islamic law, 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. But our 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.

President 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.


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Paul Berman is the author of the coming "Terror and Liberation," from which this essay is adapted.

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