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political islam 447stench of the authoritarian rule and political oppression that webecame accustomed to long time ago.Such ideological revisionism began after the Second World War,as we detect the first traces of politicized doctrines in Egyptian publicationsof that time. We see, for example, how MaÈmåd Shaltåt,the rector of al-Azhar University under Nasser, in his exegesis of theQur"an 116 confuses cause and effect when he writes about al-qit§l andturns the whole universe into a continuous (eternal) battlefield, treatingfighting, conflict, and war as essential rather than accidental(nonessential) conditions of human life. This signalled the end of abenevolent view on history and the beginning of an ideology thatlacks any notion of cooperation, solidarity, and mutual understandingbetween nations and peoples of this world. We see, at the sametime, how Sayyid Quãb writing about ‘jih§d in God’s way’ in his bookSignposts 117 not only invents an arsenal of completely new terminologybut also creates an ideology that legitimises the dethronement of hisown government by force for reasons that have nothing to do withthe question of liberation or the struggle to end oppression or thefight for freedom, justice, and equality. Such thoughts becameextremely influential in the creation of Islamist groups, and in 1997we listened to Aim§n al-£aw§hirÊ, who in an interview with a Frenchnews agency, declared how he permits the killing of a country’s ruleron the basis that he is an apostate and that he does not rule accordingto Allah’s law, that is, on the grounds of apostasy and the absenceof Allah’s rule (ȧkimiyya), thus reminding us of what had been proposedearlier by Sayyid Quãb. Al-£aw§hirÊ basically calls for politicalassassination, heedless of the fact that the rulers of a country (presidentor prime minister, etc.) have been democratically elected, irrespectiveof the actual type of governance (republic, monarchy,constitutional monarchy, etc.), and regardless of whether people areenjoying a period of material prosperity and security, that is, completelyignorant of the actual socioeconomic situation of the country.The only thing that matters to him is whether the ruler is an apostateor not! This turns on its head the traditional politically quietist attitudeof our fuqah§", for whom it was sacrosanct not to attack eventhe most despotic autocrat who in their opinion still deserved obedienceeven if he committed the most cruel crimes against humanity116MaÈmåd Shaltåt, al-Qur"§n wa’l-qit§l (Cairo, 1951).117Sayyid Quãb, Ma#§lim fi’l-ãarÊq (1964), translated into English as: Milestones( Beirut: The Holy Koran Publishing House, 1980).