I just finished reading Sayyid Qutb’s Ma’alim fi-l-Tariq [“Milestones”]. This book is not available in my public library system. Since it bears the same relationship to the rise of Islamist totalitarianism as Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto do to European totalitarianism, you would think it would be smart for our libraries to have it. You cannot resist a movement of oppression and aggression by knowing nothing about it. Milestones is the ideological entry-point by which bored, spoilt-brat teenagers in Muslim families are drawn into the movement and converted into zealots for death and destruction. It should be read, grasped, and understood by sane people, so that its insanity can be countered.
The first thing one notices about Qutb’s ideological thought is how little it has to do with traditions of Islam, or the needs of people in Islamic countries. It is profoundly European in inspiration, and its chief models are Hitler, Marx and Lenin. All the elements are there: the justification of genocide, the historical determinism, the elitism masquerading as egalitarianism, the ethnic scapegoats, the rabid hatred of the individual and of democracy, the reduction of human beings to classes and castes to be disposed of by metaphysical formulae, the rejection of logic for dialectic mysticism. Lenin is by far the strongest influence. Whole passages look like they were simply copied out from his works and then a pseudo-Islamic terminology inserted, “revolutionary vanguard” becoming “Islamic vanguard”, and so on. And just as the National Socialist and Communist parties made war on the reasoning mind and glorified mindless obedience, so does Milestones. As Marxist mumbo-jumbo justified the telling of any lie, the betrayal of any value, the commitment of any atrocity, in the name of an implacable destiny, so too, does Milestones.
This kind of influence is perfectly understandable. Qutb was not some remote mountain mufti. He was a privileged urban Egyptian who received a secular, European-style education. He did post-graduate work in Colorado, where he resented the pleasure that Americans took in their lawns as “materialism”, and denounced the “immorality” of high school dances. The independence of women drove him to a sputtering fury. Family life, which is the foundation of traditional Islam, horrified him. One finds in him the usual neurotic sexual prurience of the ideological fanatic: “.…..the American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.” [Qutb, Amrika allati Ra’aytu (America that I Saw)] “Jazz is his [the American’s] preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires …” [John Calvert, “Sayyid Qutb’s American Experience” in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations]. Qtub would fit more into the Berlin of a Hermann Hesse novel than into any Arab souk.
Qutb was by no means alone. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Muslim Brotherhood and other precursors of today’s jihadist movement were profoundly influenced by Marxism and Nazism. Before WWII, Hitler was the greater influence, but with his defeat, Communism became the principal inspiration. In fact, Qutb himself was a delegate to the Communist International, its principle liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood. [R. R. Reilly, The Roots of Islamist Ideology]
European as Qutb’s inspiration might be, it is not without some Islamic roots. In the early Middle Ages, Islam was the apex of human civilization, a fountainhead of science, mathematics, art, technology, literature, music and philosophy. All of these things depended on the assumption that there was a fundamental harmony between reason and Islam. It was the acceptance of this harmony, from the inspiration of Muslim philosophers, that allowed Christianity to raise itself out of primitive squalor. Unfortunately, the hand that lit another’s torch extinguished its own. As well as the rationalism of the great Muslim philosophers and scientists, there were strains (as there were in Christianity) of hostility to rational thought. Among them was the Asharite movement, which sought “to free God’s saving power from the shackles of causality” [Muhammed Khair]. The turning point, where irrationality got the upper hand, probably came in 1192, with the burning of the great library of Cordoba, which held more books than existed in all of Europe. After this, Islamic civilization went into steady decline, and the Middle East slipped into backwardness and poverty. Subsequent flourishes of Islamic culture appeared on the fringes, outside the Arabic-speaking core, such as Moghul India.
Qutb draws on the Asharite tradition, as well as on his Marxist and Nazi sources. But today’s totalitarian Islamism is not an attempt to restore the glories of early Islam. Far from it — it draws its inspiration from the deviations from classical Islam that destroyed those glories. Instead, it is an attempt to restore the vicious, cut-throat world of intellectual Central Europe in the 1930’s, with a costume show of thaubs and beards and burkas pasted onto it.
Not that it ultimately matters whether Qutb cribbed his work form European or Islamic sources. All of these various irrational movements are in essential harmony. The ideology of Unreason, the ideology that reduces human beings to cattle — to be herded, milked, and slaughtered — crosses all geographical, cultural and religious boundaries. It has a unity and simplicity which makes it endlessly adaptable, whatever its flags and anthems might be. Its practitioners have little difficulty scooting from one flag to another, as long as the irrational substance remains the same. Thus, when a Pakistani Imam instructed physicists that they could not use the principle of cause and effect in their work, he was walking in lockstep with the Communist Party sending geneticists to death camps, the purveyors of Nazi racial doctrines, and the fundamentalists seeking to suppress biological science in American schools.
The world is indeed beset by a “conflict of civilizations”, but it is not a conflict between Islam and the “West” (whatever the hell that silly term is supposed to mean), but between Reason and Unreason, between civilization and brute barbarism. That conflict is taking place everywhere on this planet, and within every culture, nationality and religion.
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