Sayyid Qutb and The Philosophical Roots of Islamic
Fundamentalism
PART ONE:By MICHAEL J. THOMPSON

Today I want to talk about Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian
intellectual who revolutionized fundamentalism, and I also
want to consider the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism
itself. It seems to me that Qutb's influence played a major
role in making Islamic fundamentalism into the form that we
know today. What context was he working in, and exactly
what was his critique of the modern-and, indeed, the
western-world?

All forms of fundamentalism are an attempt to reach back to
the past to regenerate the present. In many ways you could
say that it had its greatest moment within Christianity
itself during the Reformation with Luther's entire project
of reinventing Christianity through the return to the
purity of Christian texts (with the doctrine of sola
scriptura) and by turning away from the institutions of the
church, which he thought to be corrupt and deviating from
true Christian teachings, toward the content of the
individual's soul. He wanted to embrace a true Christian
morality with a turn toward conscience.

Now, familiar names like Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Yusef
have been deeply influenced by Qutb's ideas. They have read
his books and studied his ideas. So by understanding Qutb's
objectives I think it is possible to gain at least some
degree of insight into what the contemporary form of
Islamic fundamentalism is trying to achieve, whether it be
in the form of attack or critique.

One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that there
was a huge debate about its causes. On the one hand there
were those on the political left who said that
fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism are the result of
decades of economic exploitation and political
manipulation. Fundamentalism and terrorism are the results
of imperialism, disenfranchisement of the population and of
massive economic inequality and poverty and therefore
people in the Islamic world embraced fundamentalism as a
way of rebelling against these injustices and finding fault
with the imperialist, and Christian, West. Then there were
others who argued that there was something inherent within
the faith of Islam, within the traditions of Islamic
thought and the content of the religion itself, that leads
ineluctably toward the logic of fundamentalism and acts of
terrorism.

Yet in many ways to understand Qutb we need to see him as
someone who fits into neither of those categories. The
problem with the first perspective is that it actually
demeans and devalues what Islamic fundamentalism has to
offer. The kind of fundamentalism that Qutb formulates has
its own philosophical center, its own moral message and set
of ideas to offer. It is not simply a foil to modern
Western consciousness, to capitalism, to modernity, to
liberalism. It is both a critique of it and an alternative
to it.

But what is it an alternative to? The one thing that
characterizes western societies and western democracies
since the Enlightenment is the notion that there is a
distinction between church and state. There is a
distinction between the religious sphere of faith and the
secular political sphere. That is the founding notion of
liberalism and of all western liberal democracies.

What Islamic fundamentalism says-especially Qutb's brand of
fundamentalism-is that this distinction is artificial and
it leads to the moral corrosion of any culture. Once you
have a separation between the realm of God and absolute
moral values and a secular sphere where human beings create
their own morality, you have immediate moral corrosion
through an alienation from the "true" moral principles that
religion (in Qutb's case, Islam) offers. Qutb is very
specific on this point, although I don't think you see
anything very different, in this regard, with a group like
the Christian Coalition in the United States and Christian
fundamentalism here, from the public display of the 10
commandments to other encroachments of religion into the
public realm.

The separation of church and state ironically has religious
(Protestant) foundations. The basic idea was that I can
never tell you what your path to salvation is since that is
ultimately dependent on the individual to find the path to
his own salvation. This was the emphasis on faith and
conscience that Luther's Reformation provided and it means
that no one-including and especially the state-can
privilege one religious creed or doctrine over another.
Faith is something for you and you alone. This means that I
have to tolerate your religious views, which then leads to
religious pluralism. That is the essence of liberalism in
respect to religion and the state.

This separation between the sacred and the secular is
something that fundamentalists find repugnant because they
consider their viewpoint as essentially the only truth,
divined from the realm of God himself. God's messages and
the moral values that we ground on his revealed laws have
to be relinked with the political organization of society.
However, western democracy and western culture in general,
for at least the past 150 to 200 years, has been concerned
with the idea that we can have a just society without any
notion of God underlying it. As human beings we can create
our own system of values that are totally legitimate in and
of themselves. This is another aspect that Islamic
fundamentalism find repugnant: the self-creation by human
beings of their own moral values.

Qutb was born in 1906 in a remote village in Egypt. He
pursued a degree in education and then became a member of
the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was sent in 1948 to
Colorado to study teaching curricula in the US. The people
who sent him thought it might broaden his horizons, and
that he would come back with new ideas about teaching and
educational systems. But the two and a half years he spent
in the US moved him decidedly toward a reaction to the West
and a reformulation of Islamic ideas and values. Upon
returning to Cairo in 1951 he joined the Muslim
Brotherhood. The reason for this is described in his book
on America, The America I Have Seen, which is well read
among Islamic fundamentalist circles, where he recounts
different aspects of American life. The whole point is not
to give an accurate description of what America was about,
although you would recognize some of it. The real point of
the book is to show a broader view of why Islam itself is
not simply true, not just a religious conviction. The point
is that all true human justice and true human happiness can
come only through Islam.

To make this argument, he takes the United States as his
premier example. He talks about visiting a Methodist church
in Colorado where he observed a dance party. In describing
the church dance, he writes, "they danced to the tune of
the gramophone and the dance floor was replete with tapping
feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips
pressed to lips and chests pressed to chests. The
atmosphere was full of desire." In a Methodist church in
1949 this is probably a little over the top. But the
overarching theme is one of cultural and moral decay.

He then goes on to describe American women. "The American
girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity.
She knows it lies in the face and the expressive eyes and
thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round
breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs and
sleek legs. And she shows all of this and does not hide
it." For an Islamic audience, women having any sort of
autonomy or freedom is bad enough, let alone being
seductive.

However, it's not the women in the church that disturb Qutb
the most. What he sees in American culture is a land of
barbarism that is not only immoral but amoral - lacking all
moral values whatsoever. There are no foundations and
therefore human beings start to degenerate into beasts. He
talks about this in the phenomenon of the mass-sporting
event, especially wrestling which really bothered him. He
goes on to write that "this primitiveness [of American
culture] can be seen in the spectacle of the fans as they
follow a game of football, or watch boxing matches or
bloody, monstrous wrestling matches. This spectacle leaves
no room for doubt as to the primitiveness of the feelings
of those who are enamored with muscular strength and desire
it." So the degeneration of culture toward the animalistic
is something that he sees as completely repulsive and it is
directly the result of not being Islamic, and this is the
crux of his project.

In the end, it was the Islamic world itself which was more
Qutb's concern. In the Forties and Fifties the Islamic
world was increasingly following western political models,
whether socialism or liberalism. - Either way, there was
some form of separation between the public and the private,
the sacred and the profane. The fear was that, since Islam
is really the only path to true human happiness, justice,
freedom, and equality, once it is destroyed in the Islamic
world, specifically in Egypt, then humanity has no hope of
ever reattaining these values in the world. Hence the
strong return to Islam and its teachings as an opposition
to the moral decay of the west and its cultural products,
ideas and values.

So philosophically, Qutb makes a distinction between two
kind of social systems. The first one is truly Islamic, or
Nizam Islam. Societies are truly Islamic that follow
Islamic law (sharia) and are therefore enlightened as to
the moral values that Islam has to communicate through
culture and throughout its political system. And then there
are those societies that are pre-Islamic, or ignorant or
barbaric, or Nizam Jahi. The second word is from the root
word Jahiliyya which is a word in traditional Islamic
theology that refers to era before Mohammed, the prophet of
Islam, came with the message given to him from Allah via
the Angel Gabriel.

Before Islam, the Arab peoples, the Jahiliyya, are ignorant
and barbaric. They have not been made human. Jahiliyya
means specifically "pagan ignorance." What Qutb does-and
this is an interesting move for modern fundamentalism-is to
say that Jahiliyya is not simply a period before Mohammed
arrives. It is a state of being itself, in the world. It is
not simply something that was before Mohammed came to the
Arab people; it is all over western Europe, it is all over
the communist world and it is in the United States. The
fact that it is also within the Arab world means that Arab
countries are degenerating toward what the US has become
with its women, its churches, and its bloodlust for
wrestling. It is this usurpation of God's existence and
authority on earth which is the primary focus of Qutb's
critique. Allah's authority must be reconnected to the
entire world, not just its Arab nations.

But it should be emphasized that Qutb's idea is not a
nativist one. The idea is that we are all ignorant but we
can all be enlightened. Ironically enough, in the light of
the events of the last three or four years, this is Qutb's
essential message. This is why Qutb is a more problematic
figure that initially meets the eye and not simply as black
and white as he has been painted. He wants to say that
Islam is not simply for Arabs; it is for the entire human
race, and it is the only way that all human beings can be
truly free and truly equal.

He offers this diagnosis of the crisis of all mankind in
one of his most important books, Social Justice in Islam:

Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice. Not because
of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging
over its head, this being just a symptom and not the real
disease. But because humanity is devoid of those vital
values which are necessary not only for its healthy
development, but also for its real progress. Even the
western world realizes that western civilization is unable
to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind.
It knows that it does not possess anything which will
satisfy its own consciousness and justify its existence.

This is similar to the views of critics of the European
Enlightenment like Nietzsche, Herder and Hamann as far back
as the middle of the Eighteenth century. They felt that the
French and German Enlightenment had produced a scientific
renaissance of the mind at the expense of human values,
culture and morality and that this emphasis on intellectual
progress leaves behind our emotions, leaves behind the true
value of being human.

The modern world, the western world, European civilization
is corrupt, it's bankrupt and going nowhere because it has
no moral foundation for its existence. This is precisely
Qutb's critique. The beginning of this problem is not
within Christian theology itself, or Judaism. This problem
has arrived because of the emergence of modern political
society, of liberalism. Anybody who has read the ABCs of
political theory is familiar with Thomas Hobbes and his
book Leviathan -which introduces the idea of a social
contract. The basic idea is that we are the ones who forge
the political state through conscious, rational choice. We
create the values upon which the state stands. Government,
politics, and culture, the entirety of society itself, is
the result of a social contract which is totally
factitious, it is not the result of God's will. This leads
Hobbes to the separation between the public and the
private. I can do whatever I want at home but in public, I
am accountable to the laws set out in the social contract.

For Qutb and for most fundamentalists, this is the central
problem: you cannot have a public morality and a private
morality. This is seen as a fundamental contradiction. The
western world, western liberalism itself, is seeping into
Islam and into the Arab world, the home of Islam. In the
1950s, many Arab countries were very open to western
notions of political organization and its associated
institutions. And Qutb ran into trouble with the Nasser
regime over this precise issue. Nasser saw the flowering of
the Muslim Brotherhood under Qutb's increasing
philosophical influence and jailed him for ten years. In
detention, in a concentration camp for religious fanatics,
Qutb wrote a thirty volume commentary on the Quran. Through
this period of detention, his whole critique of western
society ceases to become just an analysis of what's wrong.
He now begins to turn to the question of how we can
actually rejuvenate an alternative through a return to
Islam.

Sayyid Qutb and The Philosophical Roots of Islamic
Fundamentalism
PART TWO

It is very easy to critique an idea but it is generally
very difficult to propose an alternative, whether it be a
systemic alternative or just an answer to a problem. What
Qutb sees as the real problem of modern civilization is
that once you separate God (or Allah) from the politics,
from the very system of social organization itself, then
you immediately replace political rule through divine
authority with the rule of men over other men. Without
Allah's presence through divine law, the only choice is
human oppression. He writes in his Social Justice In Islam:

If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of
living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in
Jahiliyya, and all the marvelous material comforts and high
level inventions do not diminish Jahiliyya. This Jahiliyya
is based on rebellion against God's sovereignty on earth.
It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God,
namely sovereignty and makes some men lords over others. It
is now not in that simple and primitive form of the ancient
Jahiliyya, but takes the form of claiming that the right to
create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior,
i.e. politics and to choose any way of life, rests with men
without regard to what God has prescribed. The result of
this rebellion against the authority of God is oppression
of his creatures. When God's wisdom is taken out, the only
result is human oppression of men by men.

The source for this kind of thinking can be seen as rooted,
Qutb argues, in the way that western science and philosophy
have developed. For Qutb, there are two forms of science.
First there are the physical sciences; next are the
philosophical sciences. The physical sciences are medicine,
chemistry, biology, and engineering and they should be
cherished and embraced because they can help with in the
alleviation of physical ills and aid in human happiness. He
has no problem with technology and the sciences, it is
philosophy that is the problem because it forces us to
reconsider our value system, and that leads to moral
corrosion and inevitably the elimination of God from the
world. It leads to questioning the existence of God and his
divinity and it leads to a hubristic assumption that we,
human beings, are the ones in control of our own destiny.
It leads to the death of God and to the shattering of all
kinds of foundation for a true human morality and for human
happiness.

In his period of detention, in the midst of writing his
thirty volume magnum opus on the Quran (probably the least
read of his writings), Qutb begins to articulate new
themes. Traditionally, the general notion of Islamic
scholars, the ulama, or wise men, has always been that the
modern world is too corrupt to realize the ideal Islamic
society, the umma. During Qutb's time, it was a common view
of Islamic theologians and scholars that the modern world
is far too barren of values, too corrupt. There are
occupations, there are wars, etc. and we should simply
forget about trying to establish any form of Islamic law.

Now historically, the ulama was the social organization
that existed immediately after Mohammed gave Islamic law to
the Arab people. And one of the core principles of Islam is
to reinvent or reestablish this umma, or ideal Islamic
society, where there will be peace, equality, and justice:
in short, utopia. Qutb, however, says that this general
position is wrong. The fact that the world is too corrupt
to recognize the umma means you have to fight against that
corruption. You don't sit there and wait for the world to
get better and then establish your ideal Islamic society.
You have to fight against Jahiliyya here and now. You have
to eradicate it from the earth. You have to eradicate it
first from within Islamic society and culture, and then you
have to eradicate it wherever else it may exist on earth.

It is not because, (and this may be the argument of someone
like bin Laden), those caught in jahiliyya are the enemy.
For Qutb, this eradication of jahiliyya will be for
everyone's good. This is always the argument of people who
proselytize: you don't know it yet, but if you submit to
our faith, you will be better off. This connects with the
notion of jihad; another classical Islamic term of Islamic
theology, which simply means "struggle." But Qutb takes
this theological concept and twists it again. Struggle
against what, he asks? You struggle against two things. You
struggle within yourself to realize that Islam is the
truth. Once you know that, you struggle against all of
jahiliyya. That is your one purpose: the elimination of
pagan ignorance from the earth and the true liberation of
humanity.

Qutb was released from prison and two years later began to
publish his writings and essentially began to advocate the
overthrow, in very implicit terms, of the Nasser regime. He
felt that it was a corrupt, pseudo-western regime that was
simply going to reproduce all of the corruption that the
West had brought to Egypt and the Islamic world more
broadly. Inevitably, Nasser had had enough. He arrested
Qutb again and in 1966, he was hanged with a smile on his
face as he dropped from the scaffold.

We have a problematic image of Islamic fundamentalists in
our minds. Someone like bin Laden-along with many other
Islamic fundamentalists-dresses in what we would call
traditional clothing. Qutb, through the day he was hanged,
wore a three-piece suit with short hair and a trimmed
mustache. Qutb's brand of fundamentalism is too
sophisticated to simply be branded as nativistic or
regressive or anti-modern. It is in fact not anti-modern.
What he does is turn around the notion of jihad, and the
notion of how the umma can be realized on earth.
Traditional Islamic scholars held that the umma existed
during the time of Mohammed; it may exist again, but we
cannot reproduce it. All Qutb does is detach these terms
from their traditional historical context and argue that
they are actually forms of thought that can be realized at
any time.

Anybody who knows anything about Marxism and its theory of
history knows that you have to go through the development
of capitalism before you can have a revolution and have
socialism or communism. You have to wait for the
bourgeoisie to come to power to develop the means of
production and technology. Only then can you overthrow the
machinery of the state. It was Trotsky who said we're not
going to wait for this in Russia. We've just got to keep on
pushing, keep on revolting until we get to where we want to
be. This is the doctrine of permanent revolution, and it
was something that people like Mao Zedong also used to
support ideologically the Cultural Revolution in China.
This was an idea that was very influential for Qutb in the
sense that he wanted to keep jihad going until the umma is
realized. You keep on stamping out jahiliyya wherever it is
realized: inside of you, in a suburb of Cairo, or in
Manhattan. It doesn't matter where, as long as you
eradicate it like a plague on humanity itself.

Now, sharia is a system of law that doesn't talk about
justice or equality, but how you regulate your domestic
life: how you wash, how you procreate, etc. Sharia offers a
complete way of running your life according to Allah's
will. And it's only by going back to classical Islamic
texts that you can truly understand what Sharia has to
communicate to you. The core idea is to imbibe sharia
through true engagement with the religious texts. Then you
go through your own jihad and realize that this is the
truth and that this is the way you should live your life.

Augustine says that governments are like hospitals for the
morally diseased. If we were all true Christians, he
argued, we wouldn't have much need of the state because we
would all have ethical consciousness. We would be regulated
from within through religious law. This was similar to
Qutb's idea. Once sharia has completely penetrated both you
and everyone else, the state will be basically useless.
Another Marxian idea, the idea that the state will wither
away once you have communism because you don't need it
anymore. You only need the state because you have class
antagonism, but once that is gone, everyone will get along
fine.

This is similar to Qutbs's idea that the state and its laws
coerce. Only conscience allows you to submit to God freely
once you have understood what sharia has to offer you: the
enlightened path. There is no need for the state, there is
no need for laws. The only thing that will regulate your
activity is God's promise of either paradise or wrath. A
completely unmediated relationship will exist between the
individual and God.

But the Quran says that there is no compulsion in religion,
that no one should be compelled to follow a faith. Qutb
says there is one thing worse than compelling someone to
follow Islam and that is subjecting them to slavery and
oppression. He writes that oppression is worse than
killing. It is better to kill than have people live under a
state of jahiliyya where the oppression of men by other men
is the norm. So the moral set of priorities is completely
shifted. In many ways, killing is generally seen in liberal
democracies as one of the worst things you can do. Of
course, if you recall Dante's L'Inferno, the first circle
of hell if reserved for those who commit treason, not
murder. It hasn't been the case historically that murder
has been seen as the most repugnant of human acts. Qutb
says the same thing. It is worse to allow people to live
under a state of oppression than it is to actually kill
them. All of this filters into the political brand of
contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.

Qutb believed that only Islam preaches a fundamental
equality and universalism. Liberalism doesn't do it,
socialism doesn't do it. Nor did the alternatives that
existed in the 1950s and 1960s across the political
spectrum. He believed that none of these things offer true
universalism, or true equality or true freedom. The only
way to achieve this is through this internalization of
sharia and the overcoming of any kind of distinction of
tribe or class or clan or race. It is overcome when you
embrace true Islam, because Islam is the universal will of
God, the entirety of the cosmos.

In many ways, Qutb is not very original. A lot of his ideas
came from a Pakistani jurist Sayyid Mawdudi, who died in
1979. There is a passage from Mawdudi in which he expresses
this idea that the only way you can have true freedom and
justice in the world is when the entire world is united
under one system of morals and politics. Aquinas calls it
the cosmopolis. Dante calls it a world monarchy. Islam has
its own version as well.

Mawdudi says Islam wants the whole earth and does not
content itself to simply be a part thereof. It wants and
requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this
so that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its
sources of wealth after having taken them away from one or
more other nations. Islam wants and requires the earth in
order that the human race all together can enjoy the
concept and practical program of human happiness by means
of which God has honored Islam and put it above the other
religions and laws. As Mawdudi says:

In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to
employ all forces and means that can be employed for
bringing about a universal, all embracing revolution. It
will spare no efforts for the achievement of this supreme
objective, this far-reaching struggle that continuously
exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible
means are called jihad. It is the absolute, universal
revolution and the overturning of all barbarism and non
Islamic, or pre-Islamic, all jahiliyya, all barbaric
ignorance and reinventing all humanity under one sphere of
justice, peace, and freedom.

My own personal view differs from what a lot of people are
saying now about Qutb. He is not simply engaging in a
critique of political institutions. He is going after what
in philosophy is called epistemology, or how we know about
the world, how we think. The western way of thinking is
based on a post-Enlightenment notion that there are no
absolute moral values that undergird all human society.
There is no such thing as the absolute good, there is no
such thing as only one form of good life. Only through
toleration and pluralism and the acceptance of pluralism
can we survive without social strife and turmoil. This is
precisely the problem that Qutb sees: there are, in fact,
universal values that undergird human existence, and any
rejection of them leads to the corrosion of morality and to
human corruption.

I don't know if anyone has ever read Immanuel Kant's essay,
"What is Enlightenment?" He goes through a whole diatribe
in which he says that enlightenment is me thinking for
myself without any needs. I don't need a doctor to tell me
my diet, I don't need a priest to tell me how to be moral.
I always make my own autonomous choices using reason as my
guide. This whole philosophical movement in German thought
radiated out to western civilization with its emphasis on
the individual. Moral values, science, judgment, come from
me. There is no external authority that rules over my
choices, to believe otherwise is generally seen to be
superstitious. This is an idea that is morally repugnant to
Islamic fundamentalists like Qutb because they are
convinced that there is a transcendental universalism. In
fact, it is this that defines our moral values and our
moral life. Fundamentalists like Qutb see the whole idea
that we ourselves can create the values and the laws by
which we live as an expression of hubris and the price that
is being paid is a falling into corruption, ignorance and
barbarism.

These ideas are encapsulated nicely in this passage from
Qutb:

The Islamic civilization can take various forms in its
material and organizational structure. But the principles
and values on which it is based are eternal and
unchangeable. These are the worship of God alone. The
foundation of human relationships and belief of the unity
of God. The supremacy of the humanity of man over material
things, the development of human values, and the control of
animalistic desires, respect for the family, the assumption
of the vice-regency of God on earth according to his
guidance and instruction and in all affairs of this
vice-regency, the rule of sharia and the way of life
prescribed by him. In the scale of God, the true weight is
the weight of faith. In God's market, the only commodity in
demand is the commodity of faith. The highest triumph is
the victory of soul over matter. The victory of belief over
pain and the victory of faith over persecution.

+++
This article is adapted from a talk sponsored by The New
York Open Center and City University of New York Graduate
Center that was given at CUNY in December,2003.

Michael J. Thompson is the editor of Islam and the West:
Critical Perspectives on Modernity, and founder and editor
of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture
(www.logosjournal.com). He teaches political theory at
Hunter College




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