Understanding the Adversary: Sayyid Qutb and the ... - Australian Army

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Terrorism Peta TarlintonSayyid Qutb’s Career and IdeologySayyid Qutb, an Egyptian, was born in 1906 and received a conservative Islamic education.He attended university in Cairo and began a career in the Egyptian Ministry ofEducation. In the late 1940s, Qutb studied education at the University of NorthernColorado, receiving a master’s degree. The experience of three years in America from1948 until 1951 convinced Qutb that US society was materialistic, decadent, in thrallto consumerism and technology, and had little to offer the Arab world. Moreover, heviewed American support for the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 as a rejectionof Arab equality. As a result, Qutb developed an uncompromising hatred towardsthe Jewish and Christian civilisations. This hatred would come to shape the remainderof his personal and professional life. He believed that, in its division between churchand state, the West had created a ‘hideous schizophrenia’ in modern life, causingpersonal alienation and contributing to the rise of secularism—both of which threatenedIslamic society. 2 Returning to Egypt in the early 1950s, Qutb joined the Islamistmovement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and soon became its leading theoretician.In 1952, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of officers overthrew the Egyptianmonarchy in a military coup and inaugurated a nationalist and pan-Arab revolution.Nasser initially looked to the Muslim Brotherhood for support. However, Qutb wantedNasser to introduce an Islamic ‘community of belief’, or umma, rather than pan-Arabnationalism. It was not the promotion of Arab civilisation as much as the promotionof Islamic civilisation that concernedQutb. By 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood hadbeen banned and many of its leading figureshad gone into exile to Saudi Arabia. One ofthese figures was Qutb’s younger brother,Muhammad Qutb, a religious scholar, whobecame a professor of Islamic studies andlater taught Osama bin Laden. Sayyid Qutbremained in Egypt. In 1954 he was accused ofconspiring to assassinate President Nasser andBoth Marxism and Westerndemocratic liberalism rancounter to Qutb’s view ofthe totality of religious life.was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. During his incarceration, Qutb wrote histhirty-volume interpretation of the Qur’an entitled, In the Shade of the Qur’an, and his1964 manifesto Milestones. Finally, in 1966, as the Egyptian regime moved towards aform of Arab socialism and closer links with the Soviet Union, Qutb was executed fortreason. In the words of his biographer, Hasan, Qutb ‘kissed the gallows’. 3 He became‘the martyr of the Islamic revival’ throughout the Middle East and his books came toform the nucleus of the modern Islamist movement. 4For Qutb, the Qur’an was not merely a body of belief; it was a way in whichto live, based on a oneness with God. Both Marxism and Western democraticpage 174 Volume II, Number 2 Australian Army Journal
Understanding the Adversaryliberalism ran counter to Qutb’s view of thetotality of religious life. Marxism denied Godwhile liberalism restricted God and translatedfaith into private rather than public morality.As Paul Berman has observed, what Qutbdisliked the most about the modern West was‘the split between the sacred and the secularin modern liberalism’. 5 Such a split threatenedthe purity of Islam as a total belief system.From this perspective Qutb viewed KemalAtatürk’s secular reforms in Turkey in the 1920s as retrograde and marking the endof the Islamic Caliphate. The spread of Western-style liberalism into the MiddleEast threatened to create ‘partial Islam’, which could only lead to annihilation of thefaith. Atatürk’s reforms amounted to little more than an offensive against Muslimcountries. Such an offensive, wrote Qutb, was ‘an effort to exterminate this religion[of Islam] as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions havingtheir own implications, values, institutions and organizations’. 6Qutb’s answer to creeping secularism was for a vanguard to begin the renovationof Islamic life globally. The key elements of his writings that inform contemporarypolitical Islam as a movement include the concepts of hakimiyyah, jahiliyya andjihad. All three concepts are central to understanding the ideological foundationfor current anti-Western attitudes and modern Islamic terrorism.Hakimiyyah… what Qutb disliked themost about the modernWest was ‘the split betweenthe sacred and the secularin modern liberalism’.One of the intellectual tools that Qutb uses to explain his Islamist philosophy isthe term hakimiyyah. This term is derived from the Arabic word hukm, meaningto rule or govern, and Qutb uses it in a divine sense, referring to the absolutesovereignty of God. Islam stands entirely on the belief in the Oneness of God, itsinstitutions and all its laws, and insists on man’s total bondage to God alone. Whenthe belief that there is no deity except God (la illaha illa Allah) dominates humanexistence—including government, law, education and individual private life—Islamfulfils its true purpose in securing freedom for all individuals.Central to the practical manifestation of Islam in society is the implementationand acceptance of Shari’ah (Divine Law). While denoting legality, Shari’ah is not tobe confined to law or government and is to encompass everything pertaining to theorganisation of human life, including principles of faith, justice, morality, behaviourand knowledge. Such an approach requires a complete dismissal of all man-madesocial systems. Since the Shari’ah is viewed by Qutb as the embodiment of God’s willon earth, anything less than complete submission is heretical.Australian Army Journal Volume II, Number 2 page 175
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Understanding the Adversary: Sayyid Qutb and the ... - Australian Army

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