Tag Archives: ISIS

THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF AL QAEDA AND ISIS part 3 of 4

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arch in blue skyMark Twain is noted for having said that history may not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme. If you were in your early teens or younger between September 11, 2001, when the United States launched its “war on terrorism,” and May of 2003, when the U.S.-led war about Iraq “ended,” you probably had other things to do than to notice the glut of news stories that were on the Web and in the media about ending the threat of terrorism that was coming out of the Middle East.

Such stories, and every conceivable kind of spin-off that can be imagined, from every point of view, dominated the news during that twenty-month period. If you went on the Web to find a sports score or even just tomorrow’s weather, to find what you were looking for you had to plow through any number of stories about defeating al Qaeda, or the war in Iraq, or U.S. airstrikes, and so on. So if you were in your early teens then, just know that today’s profuse news stories about the threat of terrorism, airstrikes on ISIS, and every conceivably related matter is not something new in the world. History is just rhyming. And pray that the following ten years does not rhyme with the ten years that followed the “end” of the war about Iraq.

But today we have a leg up. A huge amount of scholarship that was not available on 9/11 is now available about the religious dimension of what is going on. In this series of posts, I am drawing on that research to help us understand the religious dimension of the threat.

In the Middle East, Sunni Muslim extremists such as al Qaeda and ISIS find a large degree of religious justification for their political and social militancy in the writings of the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). An intellectual, schoolteacher, and critic, Qutb, a Sunni Arab, did not turn to radical Islamist ideology until he was in his forties, and in 1951 he joined the Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was soon one of its leading figures. We covered this ground in the two previous two posts.

We pick up the story with Qutb’s arrest in Cairo for sedition in 1954. He was sentenced to hard labor in what some have likened to a concentration camp. Except for two short periods, he spent nearly twelve years in prison, where the persuasive communicator studied extensively and wrote many books, including most of his thirty-volume commentary on the Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an. He was executed by hanging in 1966.

sticking pointsWith the Brotherhood’s loss of the al-Banna, murdered by the Egyptian secret police in 1949, Qutb, after joining the organization, became editor of the Brotherhood’s radical newspaper. This gave him a national platform for advancing his growing body of writings, which promoted Islamic ideology, or political Islam (government that follow Islamic principles).

After his death, Qutb’s books (many still available only in Arabic) began having a huge effect on Muslim youth who were coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s. This was not what the Egyptian government expected now that they had Qutb out of the way. This postmortem is another of the curious twists of Qutb’s story. At his trial, passages from his militant-sounding book Milestones were cited as proof of its author’s treasonous intent. Having closely read the book, I can see why, and we will look at that book in a future post. On the other hand, a sustained public outcry arose during the trial from leading Muslims around the world who supported Qutb, and the government’s showcasing of Milestones at the trial backfired. It triggered the book’s publication throughout the Muslim world after Qutb’s death.

Organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS (or simply IS, the Islamic state) do not come out of thin air, and for the next several posts I want to look carefully at core religious beliefs of Qutb’s political Islam. There we will find a well-thought-out religious ideology that Sunni Islamic militant groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS use to justify their existence. It shows us what the world is up against. And although even President Obama wants to “destroy” ISIS, as he said in his September 10 address to the nation, it cannot be destroyed by military power. For the problem is not merely organizational. It is individual. It is the problem of a gross spiritual disorder of the heart. Here’s why.

Beginning decades ago, for any number of reasons, scores of individuals began adopting a dangerous religious-political ideology that can lead to choosing the violent paths that groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS have chosen to go. These individuals call this the way of jihad. (Many Muslim scholars, for good reason, object to the militants using the word “jihad,” but I am using it because the militants use it of themselves.) Having committed to jihad, they then go to fight for jihad in any way possible in any country, such as individuals did in Afghanistan against Soviet Russia in the 1980s (Osama bin Laden was there and helped to finance that jihad). Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group were eventually given safe haven in Afghanistan by the Taliban government in the late 1990s. Other individuals traveled to Chechnya in the 2000s to fight the jihad against the Russians. Others went to fight for jihad in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of that country in 2003, and individuals who have joined ISIS are fighting for jihad in Iraq and Syria.

In short, the heart of the problem is the hearts of the individuals who comprise al Qaeda and ISIS, and although all kinds of different kinds commit to fight for jihad, they find their basic theological and religious unity in the writings of Sayyid Qutb. Of course not everyone fighting for jihad has read Qutb. His writings, however, provide the most comprehensive and well-articulated fundamental rationale for political Islam, or Islamist ideology. And in that rationale the individuals can find their inner unity and, in my view, a way to justify their violence, which they call fighting for jihad.

Qutb’s rationale has been widely disseminated in the Middle East and taken up by individuals who have either read Qutb firsthand or accepted his views through secondary sources, perhaps imams or other preachers. Some understanding of Qutb’s Islamist ideology will help us  understand of what unites the jihadists religiously and theologically as individuals. This heart problem is what ultimately must be addressed if Islamist jihadism in the world is to end. Getting some understanding of it is the first step down that road.

Continued in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Top image by Chris Hagood (permission 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)