Roots of Islamicism

Sayyid Qutb became something of a household name when he was identified as the intellectual inspiration behind al Qaeda. James Toth’s Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual gives a portrait of the man and his thought.

In his TLS review of Toth, Robert Irwin notes that in his massive, multi-volume commentary on the Qur’an, Qutb was a more a litcrit than a radical: He “placed a special stress on its aesthetic qualities while paying an unusual amount of attention to the ways in which style, rhythm and striking imagery are used to reach out to the hearts of Muslims. The Qur’an is full of ‘knocks and shouts addressed to people who are fast asleep.’”

But its rhetoric is also a challenge to the corruptions of the world, especially the Muslim world:

“In Ma’alim fi al-Tariq , Qutb stated that most Muslims of his own time were living in a state of jahiliyya , a form of ignorance comparable to that of the Arab pagans before the revelation of the Qur’an, but worse, since modernity has produced new forms of ignorant paganism: ‘secularism, narcissism, charismatic personality cults, democratic legislatures, knowledge [epistemology], tyranny, injustice, free [unrestricted] capitalist markets, usury, family disintegration, immorality [mixed gender practices, erotic popular culture, and what Michel Foucault called bio-power], and the disunity and division within and among communities [racism, nationalism, classism, but not necessarily sexism].”

As Irwin explains, “Qutb was a good hater, but what he hated more than the West and its assumed monopoly over modernity was the spread of Western values in Muslim societies . . . . he first enemies good Muslims had to face were rulers who merely went through the motions of being Muslim. Colonel Nasser was an avatar of Pharaoh, the archetypal tyrant of the Qur’an.” While Qurb rejected Western modernity, he also “tacitly rejected centuries of Islamic theology, jurisprudence and philosophy. The message of Muhammad had been democratized since it was no longer mediated by experts who came after him. Qutb was more familiar with literature than he was with science or history.”

It was not Qutb’s style to argue: “There is an especially intransigent quality to his ex cathedra pronouncements. His version of Islam is like a steel ball. One cannot argue with it, modify it or extrapolate from it. One certainly cannot play with it.” Still, Irwin concludes that “by comparison with those who came after him, Qutb was relatively moderate. Though he preached jihad with the sword, in the first instance against false Muslims in power, and then against infidels worldwide, he did not think that the time for that jihad had yet come. Rather, the true believers should first work to convert lax and lapsed Muslims and create a tali’, or vanguard that would spearhead the coming war. Unlike Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, he was not interested in taking the war to the United States.”