By PAUL BERMAN
In the days
after
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 Qaedawas
driven from its bases
in
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
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
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
his execution in 1966, a philosopher named SayyidQutb
-- 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 bookwas
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
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
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
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, HamidAlgar
of the
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
him reeling back to
I am skeptical of that interpretation, though. His
book from the 1940's, ''Social Justice and Islam,'' shows that, even before
his voyage to
his Islamic fundamentalism. It
is true that, after his return to
radical directions. GamalAbdel
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, SayyidQutb
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
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-Arabistscould be compared,
in these ambitions, with the Italian Fascists of Mussolini's time, who
wanted to resurrect the
the Nazis, who likewise wanted to resurrect ancient
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'sQaeda,
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,
between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities,
and Qutb was not appointed. Instead,
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. SayyidQutb's
brother, Muhammad Qutb, was one of those
people. He fled to
Studies. Many years
later, Osama bin Laden would be one of
Muhammad Qutb's students.
But SayyidQutb
stayed put and paid dearly for his stubbornness.
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
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. ButQutb'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
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
philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization
in ancient
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
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 SayyidQutb,
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
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:
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
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.
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. ButQutb
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'sKoranic
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
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
mentioned
exercised him, but only slightly. His
deepest quarrel was not with
States because it was a liberal
society, not because the
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
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
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.
1924.
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 SayyidQutb. 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 SayyidQutb
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 SayyidQutb. In
the period before his final arrest and execution, diplomats from
But he declined to go, on
the ground that 3,000 young men and women in
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, AnwarSadat,
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 SayyidQutb'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 SayyidQutb. 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
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 VaclavHavel,
Vicente Fox and other subjects. He is the
author of the coming ''Terror and Liberalism'' (W.W. Norton),
from which this essay is
adapted.