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THE CHALLENGE OF FREEDOM
Dear Saif,
When many of our fellow Muslims talk about the West, we hear them saying that the West has no
values, that anything goes. We hear that everyone is free to do whatever they want. Often this is taken
to mean that men and women are free to have sex with each other without commitments, and outside
of marriage, or that children have no respect for their parents. It goes almost without saying that the
West is seen as Godless.
Let me say immediately that I do not agree with this view. Our lives, yours and mine, are deeply
intertwined with that of the West. In fact, I believe firmly that we are constructed out of elements from
the East and the West. It is impossible to reject one for the other, because it would mean rejecting part
of ourselves, part of our own perception.
But before I get too involved in the question of how we are deeply related to the West, I want to
hone in on this idea that the West has no values, and that freedom is a license for sin and decadence.
This is the basic idea that we often have as Muslims: freedom is license, and license means
anything goes. It means that you can and will take drugs and have random anonymous sexual relations
with everyone. As though it were so simple. I am generalizing, of course, but there is a certain strain
of Islamic thought or prejudice that believes this.
In recent history, one of the key thinkers behind modern extremist Islam, Sayed Qutb, propagated
these ideas. Qutb was a prolific Egyptian writer who was imprisoned in Egypt in the 1950s and
1960s, and executed in 1966. He started out as a literary critic with a passion for Arabic poetry.
Quite a romantic soul. He was very well known and highly regarded. He was sent to the United States
to further his studies, and spent a total of two years there. He seems not to have enjoyed his time
there. Who knows why. He spent his time in a small college in the Midwest. He returned to Egypt
with a changed attitude. From his writings of this time you can view him either as extremely pious and
devout or as bitter and frustrated. He recounts with horror and disgust how he witnessed dances that
involved men and women, and his descriptions of bare flesh carry an almost erotic tone. Was Qutb
mesmerized or was he disgusted? Was he devoutly moral or was he confused by his own urges? He
was certainly unable to understand how this world of the Midwest was in any way related to the little
village he came from in Egypt.