Sayyid Qutb

To be genuinely religious is to  be  an extremist, in the eyes of the World. I am a religious extremist: I happen to be a largely peaceful one.

This is sort of a counterpoint to my previous post, and in it I will be talking about something that I don't usually talk about: the viewpoints of an Islamic scholar. An Islamic scholar who, intentionally or unintentionally, inspired a generation of Islamic militants and terrorists.

Now, I don't think that Muhammad was a prophet. I follow the Torah and the Tanakh. But you can listen to all sorts of people and take what is good from it, and I happen to think some of what Qtub said was actually good. So, lets take it as given that I think Qutb was genuinely an insightful guy, if misguided in certain respects.

What I am going to talk about is the mistake he made, and consequently the mistake that those who followed his teachings and engaged in violence and terrorism made.

(Well some of those were probably just plain bad people and didn't need a reason but lets assume for the sake of argument that guys like Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden were just trying to follow Qtub's lead. Qtub was dead, executed, before they became particularly active, so he wasn't around to lead or teach them.)

What was the mistake I am referring to?

Qtub and at least initially guys like al-Zawahiri were operating on two fundamentally contradictory assumptions. One, that countries that describe themselves as Muslim are not actually Muslim and that "Real Islam" is, if not extinct, severely moribund. This is because of Jahiliyyah, ignorance, a world system of spiritual darkness. And second, that these fundamentally secular "muslim" people in fundamentally secular countries following man-made laws would, upon being reintroduced to "Real Islam," rise up against their secular leaders and institute rule by G-d's law alone.

Now this contradictory assumption is based on the fact that Muhammad did in fact rapidly conquer the original world of Jahiliyyah, the pagan, Jewish and Christian world in which his movement was founded. So they might say the light of the Quran wowed the people and gave Muhammad & Co. a degree of success and conquest that would seem improbable. The force of the Quran alone, so this thinking goes, conquered that part of the world. Thus, it could do it again.

However, the people that Muhammad converted, did not believe they were already Muslims. This if you will is an additional level of Jahiliyyah that Qtub did not account for. Therefore his followers' attempts to overthrow secular rule and institute Shariah law alone, instead of spontaneously arousing a movement from the populace, failed miserably.

An example of this is the attack on foreign tourists at an archeological site. Now, people say that at least some people in Muslim countries were dancing in the streets when 911 happened. IF that is true, it is because America was viewed as a geopolitical enemy. Not a religious one. America supports Israel: most Muslims do not like Israel because of their treatment of the Palestinians. When terrorists attacked European tourists at an ancient Egyptian archaeological site, the Egyptian people on the whole were furious. Why?

For a very secular, Jahiliyyah reason: tourists brought money. Many livelihoods were dependent on tourists. The Egyptian government and people as one condemned the attack and condemned others that followed just as vociferously. It was these attacks that turned the Egyptian people AWAY from Islamic fundamentalism, not TOWARD a Shariah state. Their plan to inspire an uprising utterly failed. Indeed, before the US government turned them into a sort of hero for some, Al Qaeda was really sort of a sad discredited organization on the downturn.

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What lessons can we draw from this? No sane person thinks that killing random European tourists was morally acceptable, and it certainly wasn't useful. If Qtub's idea was radical devotion to Shariah, al Zawahiri's slaughter of innocents isn't in accordance with it. Qtub himself may or may not have been involved in trying to assassinate Egypt's secular leader (that's why he was executed,) but that's a military target. Not a civilian one. Of course Qtub was accused of plotting even more dire things than that, but for those things we will never know where Nasser's propaganda ends and Qtub's own thought and actions begin. He was accused of plotting to flood the entire lower Nile valley, killing untold people. Did he actually plan that? We'll never know for sure. My guess is that he did not.

Okay, lets forget about Islamic militants. Lets take a more sensible example from militant Christians. When Paul Jennings Hill killed an abortion doctor and his bodyguard, was that a morally acceptable action? In my opinion, yes. Laudable even. He killed a person to prevent them from continuing to kill innocent people.

Did it accomplish a damn thing in the big picture? Is America more likely to outlaw abortion now than before he did it?

Absolutely not. So should he have done it? I would argue, no. Which is to say, it was not an effective means to what should be our shared end, eliminating abortion altogether.

According to the Torah, the whole community was supposed to enforce the Law. If someone was convicted of a crime that carried the death penalty, the whole community stoned him. In that context, it was obligatory for a community member to stone that person. It would have been immoral for them not to. Neither was one stone likely to kill someone. The community killed that person. That's the very reason why stoning as versus some other execution method was commanded.

That condition, the whole community enforcing the Law, does not exist in America and especially not as regards abortion. Should an abortion provider be stoned to death? Yes. Is it obligatory for ME by myself to stone them to death, in the absence of such a religious community and their shared obligation to uphold the Law? No.

In the previous post, I said that a "ends justify means" morality is immoral. If you justify an action by its intended end, any action could be considered moral. True moral action is motivated by principle. No end can justify the taking of a life. Some principles can. So for instance, if I am on a liferaft in the middle of the arctic ocean, and we are running out of food or taking on water, pushing my fellow passenger off the boat is still murder. It is not murder if HE was trying to push me or someone else off the boat beforehand.

Just as much however, the lack of viable ends can justify the lack of action, if that action is not obligatory. So in the stoning example above, the community stoning the person is obligatory and you as a community member taking part in that action is obligatory. Where the community does not exist, the action is not obligatory. It may be laudable, as Paul Hill killing that abortion doctor was laudable, but you are not an immoral person if you do not do it. There, ends can take precedence because the action is not morally required.

Suppose shooting kids in schoolyards was the law of the land. You could legally hunt kids in schoolyards. Would it be laudable if I were to shoot the shooter? Absolutely. Am I morally required to shoot the shooter? Absent a direct individually-binding commandment from G-d Himself, no.

Qtub's fundamental mistake was to underestimate Jahiliyyah. It is ironic that the person who made that concept relevant for the modern world (or at least the modern Islamic world) did not truly understand it. While I am not the person to recommend readings from the New Testament, he should have read the last few chapters of the Gospel of John. In it, Jesus says that SATAN is the ruler of this world.

The supposedly Muslim population of Egypt, they weren't slaves to Jahiliyyah against their will. They wanted to be secular in outlook, while hanging on to selected parts of Islam. They wanted Jahiliyya, just as the overwhelming majority of humans on Earth want Jahiliyya.

In a world absolutely dominated by Jahiliyya then, including human law allowing what G-d's law condemns, the most constructive actions are to

1. Wait on G-d's action. Jahiliyya inevitably leads to destruction as it is anti-life in the long run. Destruction can sow the ground for new growth. That destruction is not ours to create, it is the inevitable consequence of fighting G-d's law. We must prepare as if that destruction is imminent, whether it is or not.

2. Build a core community that accepts G-d's law and does not participate in the Jahiliyya-version of religion like modern Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Instead, it would be based on G-d's word in the Tanakh alone. Qtub believed, correctly, that the word of G-d must not be taken merely as a subject of intellectual or cultural curiosity or interest, but like the commands of a commanding officer in war. A community that takes its lead from the Tanakh alone, not from cultural Judaism or cultural Christianity, would be a serious enough endeavor for several lifetimes.

Thus actions like those of Paul Hill, though commendable, are not either required or useful. How much less the actions of those like Eric Rudolph in the Olympic Park bombing which both violated G-d's law in its action (killing innocents) and was at best not useful for moving the country towards those goals he believed in. You don't get to kill innocents to prove the point that killing innocents is immoral. He broke G-d's law. It is ironic then, that while Rudolph is cooling his heels in Supermax, Hill was executed.

"Forget it Jake, it's Jahiliyya." ;)