I have been aware for some time that many ideas about Islam are circulating, especially among Evangelical Christians, that seem to me, ill-informed. I have been in contact with someone who I wanted to help understand more exactly how the modern Islamist tradition, in its several forms, got started. I have felt that anyone who had little or no knowledge of Sayyed Qutb was unlikely to have an adequately informed conception of what the modern movement was. So to this person I wrote a note on Qutb’s significance for modern Muslim thought. I don’t know how many of my friends care about such a topic but for those few who may take the time to read a long discourse on the origins of modern Islamist thought and its social expression as Islamist movements like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, here is what I wrote to this person.
Dear xxxx,
I hope you will forgive me for a long discourse on the modern Islamist movement, as it seems to me crucial to place it in its historical context. Pursuant to that, we need to understand how important Sayyed Qutb was for the development of the radical movements that have taken form in the last couple decades.
After his trip to the States in the 1940s Qutb came to the conclusion that the West was hopelessly decadent, but he was alarmed at the advance of Western influences into the Muslim world. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the only hope for Islam was to reject all traditions and practices that failed to comport faithfully with Islam. Thus, it was not only the Western world but also the casual Muslims of his time that were the problem. In the tradition that developed from his ideas it came to be considered OK, even necessary, to exterminate Muslims that were not zealous for Islam. It was in the interest of starting a popular uprising against all secular authority in the Middle East that Anwar Sadat was murdered in October 1981 by radical Islamists influenced by Sayyed Qutb.
Modern radical Islamism was conceptually developed in two places, Egypt and India, both countries where local Muslim populations had been subjected to extended and sometimes brutal colonialist regimes. But it was the Afghanistan war that enabled radical ideas, such as those formulated in Egypt (by Qutb, for example) and India (by Maududi) to become socially organized into a movement.
There have been many reactions among Muslims to the overwhelming influence of Western society, not all of them violent. As far as I know, all of the violent traditions have come out of Hanbalism, which is a much smaller tradition of fiqh than the others. Ibn Hanbal was the most extreme of the early fuqaha. And Muslims like him have debated over what “Islam,” variously conceived, is and what it’s obligations entail, for thirteen hundred years. Most Muslims ascribe to other traditions of fiqh than Hanbalism and are more moderate in their practice. I have known few who actually try to live exactly by all the rules the faqih have formulated. Al-Ghazali famously tried and in the attempt lost his mind; and to tell the truth, the one person I know who took it literally eventually gave up and became a Christian.
Qutb was significant because he formulated a response to the Western juggernaut that, by the 1950s and afterwards, seemed to many young Muslims to be the only hope for the salvation of Islam. A radical rejection of all forms of non-committed Islam was taken to be the only way to save the faith. So it was OK to kill Anwar Saddat, a devout Muslim. But social conditions in Egypt were so repressive that the young men trying to save Islam could not organize. (There is a well-viewed video of Zawahiri speaking for Muslims from prison, announcing their zeal for Islam.) That’s where the Afghan war became so significant, because there the disenfranchised and frustrated young Muslims from all over the world could come and join a war whose moral grounds were obvious (against a “godless” state). And it was there that the two radical voices of frustration converged, from Egypt and India, supported by money from Saudi Arabia, a regime already sold out to Wahhabism. (Wahhabism is an extreme and basically violent tradition of Islam that was formulated in the 1700s. In 1744 Ibn Wahhab, a local cleric who opposed the veneration of shrines (common practice among many Muslims) and promoted the strict practice of all the regulations as defined by the tradition of Ibn Hanbal, was recruited by Muhammad Bin Saud to help him wage war against all the other tribal leaders of the region — it was “a pact with the devil”, one of my Saudi friends told me.) In any case, several social elements converged in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier in the 1980s: 5 million disenfranchised refugees from Afghanistan fleeing the war along with their children who needed to be educated; hundreds of Imams trained in the strict traditions of Islam from Saudi Arabia (Wahhabis) and India (Deobandi School); and also Saudi money.
When the war was over most of the young radicals went elsewhere to join the “jehad” that was, as they saw it, now in motion: Chechnya and Yugoslavia, for instance. And Al-Qaeda took form with Ben Ladin’s announcement of a holy war against the United States in 1996, as well as the Taliban, who formed in 1994 originally to bring order to the chaos in Afghanistan, and had no international pretensions.). Al-Qaeda was a creation of someone influenced by Qutb through his brother Muhammad Qutb, and it was he, emboldened by the victory in Afghanistan, who had the vision to, as he saw it, resume the struggle against the Western world that the Turks (Muslims) had lost on September 11, 1683. Hence the attack on “the looming towers” on September 11, 2001.
Please forgive such a long note, but my point is to encourage you to look further into the formative influences on modern Islamic thought. A good place to begin is The Looming Tower (Lawrence Wright). In fact, it is a fun book, full of the kind of detail you would very much enjoy.
Best, Bob
Robert L. Canfield