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THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 4 of 4

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pond studyRecently at lunch a friend mentioned ISIS and immediately shook his head to express his great shock at the unconscionable violence of these fanatics. He also said he was mystified by what makes them tick. At the time, I happened to be writing up the material about their core religious beliefs for these posts, and at the end of long conversation he and I had about those beliefs, he said: I didn’t know any of that, and it’s helpful to know that these guys don’t come out of thin air.

I hope that these posts equally help you to understand core religious reasons why ISIS is responsible for so much death and despair. These shockingly brutal hellhounds include religion among the justifications for their rampage across Iraq and Syria, their beheadings, apparently even of children, their persecution of Christians, and their stated goal of establishing a regional caliphate (Islamic state). Its leader, a terrorist called Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, known as the “Invisible Sheik,” recently changed the organization’s name from ISIS to IS, the Islamic State, and named himself as caliph (religious and political head of the state).

All of this has taken place even though ISIS probably numbers only about 25,000 (currently) and despite the fact that early this year “al Qaeda central” (so-called) finally disowned ISIS, which was a large branch of al Qaeda. For interested readers, Bobby Ghosh, previously Time magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, has a short article on the history of ISIS.

Over the years, I have found the clearest, most concise, and most comprehensive framework for understanding al Qaeda and ISIS in the persuasively argued writings of the Egyptian intellectual turned political racial, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), whose influence in the Middle East remains strong. So far in these posts, beginning here, AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 1 of 3 we have been looking at Qutb’s curious bio and the general religious-politic picture of Egypt during his adult life. Beginning with this post we are moving from those general topics to his specific religious beliefs, which helps in understanding what drives jihadist organizations such as ISIS and al Qaeda.

I want to cover Qutb’s religious views in some depth in these posts because few Americans know that the jihadis have a well-thought-out religious rationale, and fewer still know what that rationale is. Although I will be offering a reader’s digest version of it, I believe it is nevertheless a fair assessment that speaks for itself. Christians, in particular, I think, will want to turn a sharp ear to it because some of Qutb’s religious descriptions of what is at the heart the world’s problems may, surprisingly, remind them of ways in which their own preachers and teachers have identified these problems. And, personally, I found it interesting that Qutb brought a combined philosophical and theological intelligence to his criticisms of and prescriptions for whatever aspect of life was in his sights that was not unlike how some Christian philosophers and theologians I have read discuss root problems.

But I want to be clear about three things. One, Qutb’s religious views add up to being highly socially and politically activist, but the books of his that I have read, do not call for beheadings and similar other horrors, as far as I can determine. The syntax of at least one of his popular books, however, Milestones, which we will look at later, is very militant-sounding, and fanatics, of course, will bring and apply their gross spiritual disorder and misuse of the imagination to anything. (Barry Cooper’s excellent book, New Political Religions, discusses this disorder at length.)

gobsmackedTwo, in my view some Muslim scholars, such as Muqtedar Khan (the University of Delaware and the Brookings Institution), who is a self-described liberal Muslim with whom I have had dialogue, seem “soft” on Qutb even when discussing Milestones. See, for instance, this article by Khan. Three, I am not suggesting that Qutb’s religious views hold the truth about life. My purpose here is simply to try to present his views accurately, for they are serious stuff with serious social and political ramification, whether they are acted on peacefully and incrementally or in a revolutionary manner by jihadist organizations.

Having closely read a number of Sayyid Qutb’s English-translated books, I agree with the comment of essayist and critic Paul Berman that “Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep” (New York Times Magazine). Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christian theology, church history, church councils, Constantinianism (the formal alliance of church and state first employed by the Roman emperor Constantine), the Renaissance and Reformation periods, and the salient ideas of many Western thinkers, politicians, and Christian figures of his day – Qutb was conversant with and critical of them all. Although he appreciated the benefits of science and technology, he criticized as lamentable the intellectual climate and institutionalism of modern Western Europe, and he mounted significant criticisms of American life, liberal democracy, Communism, socialism, Marxism, fascism, Nazism, and capitalism.

Qutb’s knowledge of Islam and the Qur’an, of course, was extensive. After reading three English volumes of Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an, Berman, in his book Terror and Liberalism, concluded that for Qutb, “a proper understanding of the Koran can be achieved only in an atmosphere of serious struggle, and only by someone who is engaged in a ferocious campaign for Islam, not by someone at ease in his chair. The Koran, he observes, does not merely offer a body of knowledge, to be plucked at will, as if from a tree. The Koran offers a way to live.” (The direct bearing of ideas upon actions, of theory on practice, was huge in Qutb’s worldview, as we will see in a future post when we look at his book Social Justice in Islam.)

Despite being an intellectual, Qutb wrote in a simple, straightforward style that appealed to Muslim youth. Gilles Kepel, a foremost Western scholar on Qutb, notes that Qutb’s style was very different from the complex rhetoric of the Islamic scholars. In his book Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Kepel writes: “Qutb spoke directly to his readers, using the modern idiom to get simple points across.”

Qutb’s doctrine of “the sovereignty of God” over all of life and history is crucial to his worldview and seems to be the theological starting point for his analysis of the world’s root problem, of what I call Qutb’s view of history’s fatal flaw, and his solutions to it. Some knowledge of this will help us understand ISIS. A short account follows in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Patrick Dohney & Magdalena Roeseler respectively  (permissions via Creative Commons)

THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 2 of 4

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Egyptian dancing girl (unknown)Yesterday in Time online, Pulitzer prize-wining reporter Mark Thompson wrote: “If you’re having a tough time figuring out how much of a threat … ISIS poses to the United States, you’re hardly alone.” A large reason for that widespread lack is because our leaders and the media use the word “ideology” to label the threat but do not explain what that ideology is. It is an Islamist, that is a religious-political, ideology, and we here on this blog we are currently looking at key aspects of it in the influential writings of the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who became a political radical.

After returning to Egypt from two years “exile” in America, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood in early 1950, which immediately gave this persuasive communicator a ready-made national platform to promote his emerging brand of Islamist ideology, or political Islam. Much in the news because of its role in Egyptian politics in 2012, the Islamist organization has had a long and controversial history in Egypt.

Founded in 1928 by Egyptian-born Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), a schoolteacher, the Muslim Brotherhood by the 1940s had grown into Egypt’s leading political alternative. It opposed Western liberalism, international Communism, and the separation of religion and politics. It was socially, religiously, and politically highly activist and promoted Islamic unity, strict modesty, and gender separation. Their slogan, still popular with today’s Islamist movements, was: “The Qu’ran is our constitution.”

In Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Gilles Kepel, a Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. in Islamic thought, writes:

“Islam, for the Brothers, was a complete and total system, and there was no need for looking for European values as a basis for social order. Everything was made clear in the Koran, whose moral principles, the Brothers believed, were universal. This doctrine was shared by the entire Islamist movement, whatever their other views. All agreed that the solution to the political problems facing Muslims lay in setting up an Islamic state that would implement the law of the sacred texts of Islam – the sharia – as the caliph had done in the past.”

Hasan al-Banna had a decisive shaping influence on Qutb’s emerging Islamist worldview. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the birth of the movement known as political Islam, which preaches a return to the totality of Islam for all of life, including nonseparation of religion and government. Al-Banna had become its most influential proponent after studying the life of Muhammad and his companions and making conclusions about what he thought was the original vision of Islam in its first decades, which al-Banna complained Muslims had lost. Islamic scholar Noah Feldman, in his book After Jihad, writes that for al-Banna and his Muslim Brotherhood

“Islam was not merely a faith but a comprehensive worldview that covered the whole field of human existence…. It provided a blueprint for a just society, organized along Islamic principles.”

Al-Banna laid the guilt for what he called the pre-twentieth century decline of Islam at the feet of Islamic scholars (the ulema), whom he felt had reduced Islam from a comprehensive way of life to religious life only. Feldman continues:

“The mature Banna’s Islam was therefore both political and fundamentalist: political in refusing to be relegated to the sphere of the private or the personal, and fundamentalist in the technical sense that it went back to the most basic, fundamental elements of Islam: the divine message of the Qur’an and the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his followers.”

Al-Banna popularized the term “Islamic” as an adjective to distinguish his worldview from Western and other worldviews, including nationalist Muslim ones. The terms “Islamism” and “Islamist” also arose from al-Banna’s system of thought and, according to Feldman, the two terms were meant to describe “not just Muslims but people who see Islam as a comprehensive political, spiritual, and personal worldview defined in opposition to all that is non-Islamic.”

Egyptian lamp and jug (Matt Create)Following Banna’s logic, the Brotherhood became increasingly political and strongly opposed to the British-backed monarchy of Egypt, which, it said, failed to promote Islamic law and government. Al-Banna publicly denounced Egypt’s King Farouk and wrote letters to him demanding the Islamization of Egyptian life. In 1949, when Qutb was in America, al-Banna was murdered by the Egyptian secret police. His sudden death further radicalized Qutb, who, after joining the Brotherhood, quickly gained status as its leading intellectual and the editor of its radical newspaper.

By the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule (1954-58), the Brotherhood had reorganized as a major political player in Egypt, with chapters springing up outside Egypt, a process that Feldman believes “was the single most important institutional element in the diffusion of political Islam.” Although the Brothers generally sought gradual transformation of Egyptian society through peaceful means, such as through the publication of articles, newspapers, and periodicals, and by supporting social welfare initiatives, such as hospitals, schools, and charities, its reformist tone was edgy if not militant and its potential for violence was occasionally actualized.

During the 1950s, Brotherhood members were arrested for sedition and several of its leaders were executed by hanging after being accused of the failed 1954 assassination attempt on Egyptian prime minister Nasser. The government’s suppression of the Islamist organization then became so severe that many of its key leaders fled to Saudi Arabia, where they were welcomed by the princes, who put them to good use. In Terror and Liberalism, the essayist and critic Paul Berman writes:

“The Saudi princes were determined to keep their own country on a path of pure adherence to Saudi Arabia’s antique and rigid version of Islam [Wahhabism]; and Egypt’s intellectuals, with their stores of Koranic knowledge, had much to offer. The Egyptian exiles [from the Brotherhood] took over professional chairs in Saudi universities. And their impact was large. Qutb’s younger brother, Muhammad Qutb, a distinguished scholar in his own right, fled to Saudi Arabia and became and became a professor of Islamic studies. One of his students was Osama bin Laden.”

Story continues next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

First image (unknown credit), second image by Matt Create (both via Creative Commons)

THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 1 of 4

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red sunsetThe militancy practiced by extremists such as al Qaeda and ISIS is not irrational, at least not to them. To them, it has a large degree of its religious and intellectual justification in the prolific writings of the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, a Sunni Arab who for much of his adult life was more a man of letters than a political radical.

Early adult life. Born in 1906 and educated in Cairo, Qutb received degrees in teacher training and education in 1929 and 1933.  From 1933 to 1949, Qutb served the Egyptian ministry of education as a teacher and school inspector. He eventually resigned over philosophical differences with the ministry and to devote himself full time to writing. During this period, he acquired some Western leanings and had serious interests in poetry and journalism, and he published poems, short stories, essays on social and literary criticism, and books.

But Qutb was not apolitical. He ran with prominent elite intellectuals who had interests in domestic and international politics. During the 1930s, for instance, he increasingly objected to British influence in Egypt’s political life and deplored Jewish immigration to Palestine. Gilles Kepel, a foremost Western scholar on Qutb, writes in Muslim Extremism in Egypt that by 1945, “the principal subject matter of [Qutb’s] articles [had] shifted from literature to nationalism, political events, and social problems.” And Qutb had a growing disillusionment with the West, as we know from a book he wrote in the 1940s, Social Justice in Islam, which I will discuss in a future post. And in 1948, Qutb condemned the founding of the Jewish state.

“Exile” in America. As Qutb’s political writings became more critical of the Egyptian government in the 1940s, his polemics against the Egyptian monarchy infuriated King Farouk, who wanted him imprisoned. Influential friends, however, negotiated a deal in which Qutb, in 1948, went into a kind of voluntary exile in the United States, ostensibly to study the American education system on behalf on Egypt’s Ministry of Public Instruction. Farouk was friendly with Western governments, and according to Kepel “it was hoped that [Qutb] would return a supporter of ‘the American way of life.’” But the complete opposite occurred. Qutb’s time in America was a turning point for him on the road to political radicalism. Two experiences in particular stand out.

The first was what seems to have been a deeper conversion to Islam on the ship that was taking him to America. What specifically took place I have not been able to discover. Essayist and critic Paul Berman wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Qutb showed “that even before his voyage to America, he was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism.” But apparently he was not a regularly practicing Muslim, for Kepel wrote that during the voyage Qutb began praying five times a day and preaching to his coreligionists. At any rate, his heightened sense of religious meaning, and its moral implications, walked off the ship with him on to America soil, where another life-changing experience awaited him.

old churchQutb brought his penetrating mind to bear on American life while he studied and traveled in the States for two years. Although impressed by American technology, he was appalled by much else that he saw, especially American materialism, its sexual immorality, and the freedom it allowed to women. He detested America’s separation of church and state and what he considered the prejudiced way the American press reported on Muslim events in the Middle East. Kepel writes that Qutb was shocked at a country so “devoid of any values that made sense to him.”

Qutb lay the blame at the feet of American Christianity. For instance, while studying at Colorado State College of Education, in Greeley, he attended a church service and the social event that followed, a church dance. Bruce Lincoln, of the University of Chicago Divinity School, writes in Holy Terrors that “Qutb was not disturbed simply by the eroticism he took to be indecorous and improper” – the room, Qutb would later write, “became a confusion of feet and legs; arms twisting around hips; lips met; chest pressed together.” More troubling for Qutb, Lincoln wrote, “and analytically most revealing, was the enabling condition of this offensive spectacle: the disconnection between the preceding ‘religious’ service and the ‘social’ event that followed.”

By the end of his America trip, Qutb had concluded that Christianity had failed in America because it had split religious life off from politics and the rest of life. It was therefore antithetical to the kind of whole-life Islam that Qutb was now practicing. Disgust with American Christianity and American values fueled Qutb’s growing religious and political radicalization. In the next post we will pick up the story of how it crystalized and began having a huge influence on a new generation of radicals in the Middle East, especially Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and now ISIS.

Story continues next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Image by mikelehen & davidecasteel respectively (permission via Creative Commons)