Introduction

How would Islamic shurah differ in practice from Western-style democracy? How would the Shariah, an agrarian law code, cope with the political and economic difficulties of the modern industrialized world?
An Islamic state, Mawdudi argued, would be totalitarian, because it subjected everything to the rule of God; but how would that differ in practice from dictatorship, which, Mawdudi rightly insisted, was condemned by the Koran?
Like any ideologist, Mawdudi was not developing an abstruse scholarly theory, but issuing a call to arms. He demanded a universal jihad, which he declared to be the central tenet of Islam. No major Muslim thinker had ever made this claim before. It was an innovation required, in Mawdudi’s eyes, by the current emergency. Jihad (“struggle”) was not a holy war to convert the infidel, as Westerners believed, nor was it purely a means of self-defense, as Abdu had argued. Mawdudi defined jihad as a revolutionary struggle to seize power for the good of all humanity. Here again, Mawdudi, who developed this idea in 1939, shared the same perspective as such militant ideologies as Marxism. Just as the Prophet had fought the jahiliyyah, the ignorance and barbarism of the pre-Islamic period, so all Muslims must use all means at their disposal to resist the modern jahiliyyah of the West. The jihad could take many forms. Some people would write articles, others make speeches, but in the last resort, they must be prepared for armed struggle.
Never before had jihad figured so centrally in official Islamic discourse.
The militancy of Mawdudi’s vision was almost without precedent, but the situation had become more desperate since Abdu and Banna had tried to reform Islam and help it to absorb the modern Western ethos peacefully.
Some Muslims were now prepared for war. One of the people most profoundly affected by Mawdudi’s work was Sayyid Qutb (1906--66), who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953, was imprisoned by Nasser in 1954 and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, and witnessed the brutality of the regime toward Islamists. His experiences in Nasser’s camps scarred him and his ideas became far more radical than Mawdudi’s.
Qutb can be called the founder of Sunni fundamentalism. Almost all radical Islamists have relied upon the ideology that he developed in prison, but he had not always been hostile to Western culture or an extremist. Qutb had studied at the Dar al-Ulum college in Cairo, where he fell in love with English literature and became a man of letters. He was also a nationalist and a member of the Wafd party. He did not look like a firebrand, being small, soft-spoken, and not physically strong.
But Qutb was a devoutly religious man. By the age of ten he had memorized the whole of the Koran, and it remained the lodestar of his life, but as a young man his faith sat easily with his enthusiasm for Western culture and secular politics. By the 1941, his admiration of the West had worn thin, however. The colonial activities of Britain and France in North Africa and the Middle East had begun to sicken him, as did Western support for Zionism. A period of study in the United States was also a disillusioning experience. He found the rational pragmatism of American culture disturbing: “Any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed, and any human element other than ego is not recognized,” he wrote later.
“While the whole of life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production.” But still, he remained a moderate and a reformer, trying to give modern Western institutions, such as democracy and parliament arianism an Islamic dimension in the hope of avoiding the excesses of a wholly secularist ideology.
But Qutb’s experience in prison convinced him that religious people and secularists could not live at peace in the same society. When he looked around his prison, recalled the torture and execution of the Brothers, and reflected upon Nasser’s avowed determination to cast religion to one side, he could see all the hallmarks ofjahiliyyah, which, like Mawdudi, he defined as the ignorant barbarism that was forever and for all time the enemy of faith, and which Muslims, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who had fought the jahili (ignorant) society of Mecca, were bound to fight to the death.
Yet Qutb went much further than Mawdudi, who had only seen the non-Muslim world as jahili. By the 1960s, Qutb was convinced that the socalled Muslim world was also riddled with the evil values and cruelty of jahiliyyah. Even though a ruler such as Nasser outwardly professed Islam, his words and actions proved that he had in fact apostatized.
Muslims were duty-bound to overthrow such a government. He now looked back to the life and career of the Prophet to create an ideology that would mobilize a dedicated vanguard in a jihad to turn back the tide of secularism and force its society to return to the values of Islam.
Qutb was a man of the modern world, and he would create a compelling logos, but he was also profoundly aware of the world of myth. He respected reason and science but did not see them as the sole guides of truth. During his long years in prison, at the same time as he evolved his new fundamentalist ideology, he worked on a monumental commentary on the Koran, which showed his spiritual awareness of the ineffable and the unseen. No matter how rational the human intellect became, he wrote, it was constantly swimming in “the sea of the unknown.” All philosophical and scientific developments certainly constituted progress of a sort, but they were simply glimpses of permanent cosmic laws, as superficial as the waves “in a vast ocean; they do not change the currents, being regulated by constant natural factors.” Where modern rationalism concentrated on the mundane, Qutb still cultivated the traditional discipline of looking through the earthly reality to what was beyond time and change. This mythical, essentia list mentality, which saw worldly events as reflecting more or less perfectly eternal, archetypal realities, was crucial to his thought.
Its apparent absence in the United States had disturbed him. When Qutb gazed at modern secular culture, like other fundamentalists he saw a hell, a place utterly drained of sacred and moral significance, which filled him with horror.
Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media! And add to all this, the system of usury which fuels man’s voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.
He wanted Muslims to revolt against this secular city, and to restore a sense of the spiritual to modern society. Qutb saw history mythic ally He did not approach the Prophet’s life like a modern, scientific historian, seeing these events as unique and located in a distant period. He had been a novelist and a literary critic, and knew that there were other ways of arriving at the truth of what had really happened.
For Qutb, Muhammad’s career was still an archetype, a moment when the sacred and the human had come together and acted in concert. It was in the deepest sense a “symbol,” which linked the mundane with the divine.
Muhammad’s life thus represented an ideal beyond history, time, and place and, like a Christian sacrament, it provided humanity with a “constant encounter” with the ultimate Reality. It was, therefore, an epiphany, and the different stages of the Prophet’s career represented “milestones” that guided men and women to their God. In the same way, the term jahiliyyah could not simply refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, as in conventional Muslim historiography.
“Jahiliyyah is not a period in time,” he explained in Milestones, his most controversial book.
“It is a condition that is repeated every time society veers from the Islamic way, whether in the past, the present, or the future.” Any attempt to deny the reality and sovereignty of God sjahili. Nationalism (which makes the state a supreme value), communism (which is atheistic), and democracy (in which the people usurp God’s rule) are all manifestations of jahiliyyah, which worships humanity instead of the divine. It is a state of Godlessness and apostasy. For Qutb, the modern jahiliyyah in both Egypt and the West was even worse than the jahiliyyah of the Prophet’s time, because it was not based on “ignorance” but was a principled rebellion against God.
But in premodern spirituality, the Muhammadan archetype had been created in the ground of each Muslim’s being by means of the rituals and ethical practices of Islam. It was certainly a mythos in this way for Qutb still, but he now recast it so that the myth became an ideology, a blueprint for action.
The first ummah created by the Prophet in Medina was a “bright beacon,” designed by God “so that this unique image might be materialised in the situations of real life and recourse might be had to it, in order to repeat it within the limit of human capacity.” The archetypal society of Medina had indeed been achieved by “an exceptional generation of men” but it was not an “unrepeatable miracle”; it was “the fruit of human exertion,” and could be achieved wherever that exertion was made.
In the life of Muhammad, Qutb argued, God had revealed a divine program (manhaj), and it was, therefore, superior to all man-made ideologies.
In contemplating the “milestones” of the Prophet’s life, God had shown human beings the only way to build a properly oriented society.
Unlike Christians, Muslims had always experienced the divine not so much in a doctrine as in an imperative; Muslim fundamentalism would always be activist and centered on the ummah. But when Qutb converted the mythos of the Prophet’s life into an ideology, he inevitably simplified it, limited its spiritual potential, and cut it down to size. He removed the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the Prophet’s personal, multifaceted struggle, to create the kind of streamlined program that a modern ideology requires, but in the process, the ruthless selection that this involved inevitably distorted the Islamic vision.
Qutb saw the Prophet’s career proceeding in four stages; to re-create a rightly guided community in the twentieth century, Muslims must also go through this four-fold process. First God had revealed his plan to one man, Muhammad, who then went on to form a.jamaah, a party of committed individuals who vowed to fulfill God’s command and replace the jahiliyyah of Mecca with a just, egalitarian society that recognized only the sovereignty of God. During this first phase, Muhammad trained this vanguard to separate themselves from the pagan jahili establishment, which operated on quite a different set of values. Like other fundamentalists, Qutb saw the policy of dissociation (mafasalah) as crucial. The Prophet’s program showed that society was divided into two utterly opposed camps. Muslims today, Qutb urged, must also reject the jahiliyyah of their own age and withdraw from it to create a pure Muslim enclave. They could, and indeed should, be courteous to unbelievers and apostates in their society, but should keep contacts to a minimum and in general pursue a policy of noncooperation in such crucial matters as education.
This segregation of the faithful from the jahili mainstream intensified in the Prophet’s life when the pagan establishment of Mecca began to persecute the small Muslim community and eventually forced them in 622 to undertake the migration (hijrah) to the settlement of Medina, some 250 miles north of Mecca. Eventually there must be a complete rupture between the true believers and the rest of their Godless society. In Medina, during the third stage of his program, the Prophet established an Islamic state. It was a period of consolidation, brotherly affirmation, and integration, when the jamaah prepared itself for the coming struggle. In the fourth and final stage of the program, Muhammad initiated a period of armed struggle against Mecca, at first in small-scale raids against the Meccan trading caravans, and then by sustaining the attacks of the Meccan army. Given the polarization of this society, the violence was inevitable, as it was for Muslims today.
But eventually in 630, Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to Muhammad and accepted the rule of Islam and the sovereignty of God.
Qutb always insisted that the armed struggle for God would not be an oppressive, coercive campaign to impose Islam by force. Like Mawdudi, he saw his proclamation of the sovereignty of God as a declaration of independence.
It was a universal declaration of human liberation on earth from bondage to other men or to human desires.... To declare God’s sovereignty means: the comprehensive revolution against human governance in all its perceptions, forms, systems, and conditions, and the total defiance against every condition in which human beings are sovereign.
Qutb’s ideology was essentially modern; apart from the centrality of God in his thought, he was in many ways a man of the sixties in his rejection of the modern system. His depiction of the Prophet’s program had everything that an ideology required. It was simple; it identified the enemy, and pointed to the jamaah who would regenerate society. For many Muslims who were disturbed by the fragmentation and reorientation of their society, Qutb’s ideology translated the crucial aspects of the modern ethos into an Islamic idiom to which they could relate. They had certainly not found the “independence” granted by the British either liberating or empowering. Nasser’s catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six Day War of June 1967 had discredited the secular ideologies of Nasserism, socialism, and nationalism for many people.
There was a religious revival throughout the Middle East, and a significant number of Muslims would find Qutb’s ideology an inspiration.
But by making jihad central to the Muslim vision, Qutb had in fact distorted the Prophet’s life. The traditional biographies make it clear that even though the first ummah had to fight in order to survive, Muhammad did not achieve victory by the sword but by a creative and ingenious policy of nonviolence.
The Koran condemns all warfare as abhorrent, and permits only a war of self-defense. The Koran is adamantly opposed to the use of force in religious matters. Its vision is inclusive; it recognizes the validity of all rightly guided religion, and praises all the great prophets of the past. The last time Muhammad preached to the community before his death, he urged Muslims to use their religion to reach out to others in understanding, since all human beings were brothers: “O men! behold we have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” Qutb’s vision of exclusion and separation goes against this accepting tolerance. The Koran categorically and with great emphasis insisted that “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.” Qutb qualified this: there could only be toleration after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a true Muslim state. The new intransigence springs from the profound fear that is basic to fundamentalist religion. Qutb had personally experienced the murderous and destructive power of the modern jahiliyyah. Nasser did seem bent on wiping out Islam, and he was not alone. When Qutb looked back into history, he saw what looked like one jahili enemy after another intent on the destruction of Islam: pagans, Jews, Christians, Crusaders, Mongols, Communists, capitalists, colonialists, and Zionists. Today, these were linked in a vast conspiracy yet again. With the paranoid vision of the true fundamentalist who has been pushed too far, Qutb saw connections everywhere. Jewish and Christian imperialists had conspired together to dispossess the Arabs of Palestine;
Jews had created both capitalism and communism; Jews and Western imperialists had put Ataturk in power to get rid of Islam, and when other Muslim states had not followed Turkey’s example, they had supported Nasser. Like most neuroses, this conspiracy fear flew in the face of the facts, but once human beings feel that they are fighting against great odds simply to survive, their views are not likely to be reasonable.
Qutb did not survive. In 1964, possibly at the request of the prime minister of Iraq, he was released from prison. During his incarceration, his sisters had smuggled his work out and distributed it secretly, but after his release, Qutb published Milestones. The following year, the government uncovered a network of terrorist cells which it alleged to be plotting to assassinate Nasser. Hundreds of Brothers, including Qutb, were arrested, and in 1966, as a result of Nasser’s insistence, Qutb was executed. To the end, however, Qutb himself remained an ideologue rather than an agitator. He always argued that the stockpiling of weapons by the Brothers was a defensive measure only, to prevent a repetition of the events of 1954. He probably thought that the time was not yet ripe to commence a jihad.
The vanguard had to go through the first three stages of the Muhammadan program before they were spiritually and strategically ready to commence the assault on the jahiliyyah. Not all the Brothers would follow him. Most remained true to the more moderate, reformist vision of Hudaybi, but in the prisons and camps a number of Muslims studied Qutb’s work, discussed it, and, in the more religious climate after the Six Day War, began to create a cadre.
The Shii Muslims of Iran also experienced a new wave of secularist aggression when Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution in 1962. This consisted of the establishment of state capitalism, the institution of increased profit-sharing for the work forces and reforms to undermine the semifeudal forms of land ownership, and the creation of a literacy corps. Some of the shah’s projects were successful. The industrial, agricultural, and social projects looked impressive, and the 1960s saw a large increase in the Gross National Product. Even though the shah personally thought women an inferior sex, he introduced reforms that improved their status and education, though this only benefited women of the upper classes.
In the West, the shah’s achievements were hailed with enthusiasm: Iran seemed a beacon of progress and sanity in the Middle East. After the Musaddiq crisis, the shah courted America, supported the State of Israel, and was rewarded with foreign investment that kept the economy afloat. But even at the time, astute observers noted that these reforms did not go far enough.
They favored the rich, concentrated on city dwellers, and ignored the peasantry.
The profits derived from oil and natural gas were not used efficiently but were spent on showy projects and the latest in military technology.
As a result, the basic structures of society remained untouched and an even greater gulf yawned between the Westernized rich and the traditional poor, who had been left behind in the old agrarian ethos.
Because of the decline in agriculture, there was a massive exodus from the country to the cities: between 1968 and 1978, the urban population rose from 38 percent to 47 percent. The population of Tehran almost doubled during these years, increasing from 2.719 million to 4.496 million. The rural migrants did not integrate successfully, but lived in shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities, eking out a precarious living as porters, taxi drivers, and street vendors. Tehran split into modernized and traditional sectors: the Westernized upper and middle classes moved away from the old city to the new residential neighborhoods and the business area in the north of the city, where there were bars and casinos, and where women dressed like Europeans and mixed freely with men in public. It seemed like a foreign country to the bazaar is and the poor, who remained in the old city and the adjacent southern areas.
The vast majority of Iranians were thus experiencing one of the most unsettling of human emotions. The familiar world had grown unfamiliar;
it was itself and yet not itself, like a close friend whose appearance and personality have been disfigured by illness. When the world we know changes as rapidly as Iran did during the 1960s, men and women begin to feel like strangers in their own country. Increasingly, a worrying number of Iranians found that they did not feel at home anywhere. The debacle of 1953 had left many with a corrosive sense of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the international community.
Those few who had had a Western education felt estranged from their parents and families, caught between two worlds and at ease in neither.
Life seemed drained of meaning. In the prolific literature of the 1960s, the most recurrent symbols expressed the growing alienation:
walls, solitude, nothingness, loneliness, and hypocrisy. The contemporary Iranian critic Fazaneh Milani noted the persistence during the 1960s and 1970s of imagery depicting “ingenious forms of protection and secrecy.” Walls surround houses. Veils cover women. Religious taqiyyah protects faith. Taarof [ritualistic modes of discourse] disguise real thoughts and emotions. Houses become compartmentalized with their darni [inner] and biruni [external] and bat ini [hidden] spheres.
Iranians were hiding from themselves and from one another. They no longer felt safe in the Pahlavi state, which was becoming a very frightening place.
The shah had begun his White Revolution by closing the Majlis, believing that he could only push his reforms forward by dictatorial rule and by silencing all opposition. He was supported by the SAVAK, his secret police, formed in 1957 with the help of the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
SAVAK’s brutal methods, its regime of torture and intimidation, made people feel that they were held prisoner in their own country, with the connivance of Israel and the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, two paramilitary organizations were formed, similar to other guerrilla groups that were emerging in the developing world at this time: the Fedayine Khalq, a Marxist group founded by members of the now suppressed Tudeh and National Front parties, and an Islamic corps, the Mujahedin-e Khalq.
Force seemed the only way to fight a regime which blocked all normal opposition and which was based on coercion rather than consent.
Intellectuals tried to fight the regime with ideas. They were disturbed by the malaise in the country, and could see that modernization had been too rapid and had resulted in widespread alienation. The brilliant philosopher Ahmed Fardid (1912--94), who became a professor at the University of Tehran in the late 1960s, coined the term gharbzadegi (“West-toxication”) to describe the Iranian dilemma: the people had been poisoned and polluted by the West; they must create a new identity for themselves. This theme was amplified by the secularist and onetime socialist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923--69), whose Gharbzadegi (1962) became a cult book for Iranians during the 1960s.
This rootless ness and “Occidentosis” was “a disease from without, spreading in an environment susceptible to it.” It was the plight of a people “having no supporting tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.” This plague could devastate Iran’s integrity, eradicate her political sovereignty, and destroy the economy. But Al Ahmad was himself torn both ways: he was influenced by such Western writers as Sartre and Heidegger, and attracted by the Western ideals of democracy and liberty; but he did not see how they could be successfully transplanted in the alien soil of Iran. He expressed what has been described as the “agonized schizophrenia” of the Western-educated Iranians, who felt pulled in two directions, and though he could articulate the problem memorably, he had no solution to propose--though it appears that, toward the end of his life, he was beginning to see Shiism as an authentically Iranian institution that could provide a basis for a genuine national identity and become a healing alternative to the Westernizing disease.