The War We Don’t Understand
This Egyptian philosopher's words inspired al-Qaeda, the Iranian Revolution, and generations of jihadists — all in the name of "freedom."
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Clarke-Serret, author of “Exodus: The Quest for Freedom.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Sayyid Qutb may be the most influential philosopher of our time.
Although many may be ignorant of his name, none, surely, are ignorant of his effect. Equipped only with his writings, his brother Mohammed went forth to teach at a prestigious Saudi university.
Then, inspired and radicalized, one notorious student went on to commit the crime of the century. His name? Osama bin Laden.
Yet his teachings spread far beyond Sunni realms. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Shia though he may have been, took great succor from the intellectual poisoned well of Qutb. Behold, it was the basis of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Sayyid Qutb was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and an influential Egyptian, Islamist intellectual. Many of his 24 books were outlawed by the Egyptian state and, having been accused of (two) assassination attempts on his Egyptian, pan-Arabist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (military officer and former President of Egypt), he was imprisoned and ultimately executed in 1966.
Although his body decomposed in the bowels of the earth, his soul failed to ascend into the Islamist heaven above. Instead it influenced a whole generation of Egyptian high society — with politicians, intellectuals, and literary figures being radicalized by his words.
School children and university students were taught from a curriculum that showcased his writings and, thus, a whole new generation became versed in Islamist ideology. We too must now undergo a similar education in order to understand the threat we face.
Let us begin with a potential positive and highlight the apparently beneficent objective of Sayyid Qutb’s ideology. Although he would go on to incite martyrdom and murder in the name of Islam, his goal was not death per se. In many ways, he sought precisely that which we all seek, from the Marxist to the English liberal. He sought freedom — freedom from oppression, freedom from tyranny and, most emphasized of all, freedom from slavery.
In echoes of the Communist Manifesto, which called on the workers to liberate themselves from their chains, Qutb called on the Islamist believer to do likewise.
In echoes of the Exodus, where the Israelite slave/servant was delivered from human oppression so as to become a slave/servant of God in the wilderness, so too Qutb called on the true follower of Islam to liberate themselves from their human masters. Only then may they enjoy true freedom under the sovereignty of God.
Even in England, where Voltaire praised the diverse mixing of religions in the marketplace and waxed lyrical about the toleration of the state towards non-Anglican denominations, he does so in the name of liberty. His contempt for the nature of tyrannical human government is more than evident enough.
Thus understood, Qutb’s objective is no radical departure from those religious and non-religious ideologies that have flourished in foreign realms. The liberation of mankind from chains is a universal ideal it seems.
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spoke of the gradual reduction of classes over time. In the feudal era, many competing interests strove together in order to satisfy their group interest, yet by the emergence of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, society was left with just two significant rival classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This was a positive development on the road to communism, they affirmed, yet in the need to agglomerate the peasantry in towns and educate them at least to a minor degree, the capitalists had created a rod for their own back.
Ultimately, it was claimed, the workers would rise up in revolution and, after a undetermined period of proletariat dictatorship, a single communist class would emerge united in harmony and freed from slavery. Qutb’s Islam appears as just one more attempt, certainly just as dangerous, to subsume humanity in one equal, international class where all “freely submit” to a determined order.
Therefore, when reading Qutb’s book, “Milestones,” one should resist the temptation to equate Islamism with wider Islamic culture or indeed religion in general. Perhaps its most potent frenemy is the godless, secular, yet borderless Marxism. In both cases, we see an ideology directly opposed to the nation and any identity forged in language, culture, place, or ethnicity. In both cases, we see a restrictive, universalist, violent internationalism proposed as a cure to slavery and oppression.
The precise contours of the “freedom” proposed by Sayyid Qutb are, by this point, familiar to all. The acceptance of the revelation of the Quran is an act of pure religious faith and not as a journey of intellectual discovery:
The complete adherence to its teachings without question or reflection
The refusal to admit a secular sphere separate from the True Faith
The conviction that Islam is all-encompassing and applicable to every domain of life
The judgment that all non-Islamic sources and wisdom are devoid of value and, insofar as previous Muslim scholars and philosophers have attempted to integrate Islam within a wider pool of knowledge, they have done so in sinful error
According to Qutb, the Islamic world has fallen into decay through its mixing with invalid sources of wisdom (the symmetry with the Nazi idea of racial intermingling is worryingly plain).
To purify the Ummah (an Arabic word that generally translates to “nation” or “community”) and the world along with it, it is necessary to return to the values of the first Islamic generation. Islam must no longer be viewed as a culture, philosophy or source of inspiration for a particular segment of the world’s population; rather it must return to seeing itself as the one universal faith which contains the sole and unique truth within the bounds of its holy scriptures.
Qutb reaffirmed the division of the world into a House of Peace and a House of War, with a third intermediate grouping being designated for the People of the Book, which is to say Christians and Jews. Unlike the heretic polytheists who must be fought until they submit to Islam, the fellow monotheists of the world have a choice: accept the supremacy of Islam and pay a tribute tax, or face the consequences.
“Milestones,” as the English title suggests, does not see the process as either quick or easy. It is a process that must be achieved methodically, step by step. When surrounded by a majority of non-believers, the true Muslim may need to restrain themselves, just as in the days of the first Muslims of Mecca. But where they can, they fight to win; in the first place against those judged as rejecters of monotheism and, where necessary, against those individuals of the People of the Book who refuse to accept the supremacy of the one True Faith.
The Ummah has fallen so far since those days when it conquered the world that it has become necessary to lead the “defensive” charge with a “vanguard.” Those who fear nothing and have left worry at the door, so convinced are they by the truth of the Message.
When faced with “poverty, difficulty, frustration, torment” and untold setbacks, the Islamist fighter will not be downhearted. Instead, they will continue in their quest for “human freedom from oppression” under a vanilla, all-encompassing, international and universal submission to the Truth. It will be left to the reader to decide whether such a remedy does indeed constitute freedom.
Sayyid Qutb specifically rejected the idea that the purpose of life is utilitarian; that we must seek out pleasure or defend against pain. Neither does it derive meaning from the search for knowledge. Rather, in Qutb’s most alarming conception, life must be properly characterized as a “struggle between beliefs — whether unbelief or faith, whether Jahiliyyah1 or Islam.”
He correctly noted that if the struggle were political or economic or racial, “ its settlement would be easy,” but conceived as a struggle between faiths, no peace is possible without submission. It is in this notorious paragraph that we finally understand the century-long failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Political issues can be resolved “easily,” as can those involving racial injustice, but those founded on fundamentalistic faith are unavoidably intractable.
Qutb’s route to his Islamist goals run through martyrdom. This prescription is clearly outlined for the reader in Chapter 12 (entitled “This is the Road”), and its effectiveness is claimed to stem from the liberation of the martyr from the “worship of this life.”
Nothing, not even torture, will have the power to deter the vanguard from their bloody mission. In a particularly disturbing passage, Qutb even referenced with approval the martyrdom of children:
“The messenger of God — peace be upon Him — said: ‘When a certain person’s child dies, God asks the angels: Did you take away the soul of My servant’s child? They say: Yes. Then He says: Did you take away the apple of My eye? They say: Yes. Then He says: What did My servant say? They say He praised You and said, Indeed we belong to God and to Him we will return. Then He says: Build a house for My servant in the Garden and call it the House of Praise.’”
Once again, we see the resonances of this philosophy in today’s events. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their chief sponsor Iran are perfectly willing to see the death of their children, even encourage such death, in the “sure” knowledge that the young departed will soon be entering the Garden.
Death is to be celebrated.
Death must triumph over life so that oppression may cease from the Earth. In his own words, “This world is not a place of reward.”
I have been very careful through this recounting of Sayyid Qutb’s Islamism — a death cult’s manifesto in the fine sentence construction of a well-read academic — to never conflate the subject term with the faith of Islam. I do not do so out of political correctness, but rather because that is the distinction that Qutb himself implied.
To be sure, what Qutb calls Islam and I call Islamism is what the former views as the one “True Islam.” But, in having to emphasize the purity of his account, the author necessarily implied that the (vast) majority of Muslims, who are not in the vanguard, have a different interpretation of their faith. It is not for me as a non-Muslim to declare what is, in fact, the “correct interpretation,” merely that there are (bloody) disputes on this point between Qutb’s followers and those who fall outside the Islamist tent.
Qutb’s camp clearly constituted the overwhelming minority in 1966; otherwise, what need did he have to speak of a vanguard? Indeed, what need did he have to speak of a step-by-step process at all?
It is Qutb’s very frustration that the Muslims of his day were contaminated by outside influences which inspired him to produce this controversial work in the first place. He viewed the descent from the supposed purity of early Islam as the reason for the economic and social decay of the Muslim world.
His ideology’s appeal, the desire to “Make the Ummah Great Again,” is precisely that which encouraged Osama bin Laden, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and a raft of well-heeled, supposed intellectuals to follow his lead. Either Islam is true and we must reform backwards to recover our greatness, or Islam is false and we have been rejected by God. We cannot permit the latter. Thus we must fight.
The difference between Qutb’s freedom and Western freedom could not be more stark. When contrasting the intellectual decay of Catholic France with the economic progress of Anglican England, Voltaire heartily endorsed the tolerance of the latter as the key to its success.
One can only guess at with what contempt he would view Qutb’s Islamism, yet one can be sure of his prescription: If the Muslim World were to truly seek economic, intellectual, and political progress, if it were to genuinely seek freedom from oppression on earth, then it must follow the route of 18th-century England; it must liberate the market, open up its trade routes, and accept the concomitant and peaceful mixing of religions.
It is noted with great joy that the United Arab Emirates (in particular) has belatedly become aware of the interrelationship between trade and peace, and the interrelationship between tolerating the Quakers and achieving greatness.
Perhaps that’s the secret. Perhaps that’s why the Muslim world has declined. The route to Islamic recovery is not freedom from oppression through mass oppression; it is the embrace of peace through religious diversity underpinned by freedom of trade.
Yet, change is coming. The United Arab Emirates is in the vanguard, the Saudis are following close behind, and Qutb’s Sayyid Iranian, Islamist tyranny may soon be breathing its last breath.
An Arabic term referring to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, often translated as “ignorance” or “the Age of Ignorance”
When I read of the terms "House of Peace and a House of War' it reminded me of the Soviets referring to "Zones of Peace and Zones of Contention." Have read much of the Koran and it seems to me to be a warrior code similar to Bushido as used by Imperial Japan before 1945 and their losing WWII.
Excellent. Now if the rest of the world will read this and understand…. (Wishful thinking).