Understanding the Adversary: Sayyid Qutb and the Roots of Radical Islam
The al-Qa’ida terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 acted as a catalyst in revealing the new dynamics of a global security environment in which radical Islamism has emerged as a violent and dangerous opponent to liberal democracy. These attacks were symptomatic of how, in the latter half of the 20th century a cycle of Islamic radicalism had swept through the Middle East, fuelled by the works of powerful ideologues. One of the most influential of these Islamist ideologues was the Egyptian scholar, Sayyid Qutb. Indeed, many observers consider Qutb to have been the key figure in providing the ideological template of contemporary militant Islam and its philosophy of terror.1
The aim of this article is to try to provide an understanding of the roots of modern Islamist ideology—both in its historical context and its current employment by groups such as al-Qa’ida and the Muslim Brotherhood—through an examination of the beliefs of Sayyid Qutb. The article explores two areas. First, Qutb’s career and the key themes of his works that form a template for modern Islamism are examined. Second, the article briefly analyses the impact of Qutb’s writings on the radicalisation and militancy of al-Qa’ida—the prototypical Islamist terrorist threat of the 21st century.
Sayyid Qutb's Career and Ideology
Sayyid 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 of Education. In the late 1940s, Qutb studied education at the University of Northern Colorado, receiving a master’s degree. The experience of three years in America from 1948 until 1951 convinced Qutb that US society was materialistic, decadent, in thrall to consumerism and technology, and had little to offer the Arab world. Moreover, he viewed American support for the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 as a rejection of Arab equality. As a result, Qutb developed an uncompromising hatred towards the Jewish and Christian civilisations. This hatred would come to shape the remainder of his personal and professional life. He believed that, in its division between church and state, the West had created a ‘hideous schizophrenia’ in modern life, causing personal alienation and contributing to the rise of secularism—both of which threatened Islamic society.2 Returning to Egypt in the early 1950s, Qutb joined the Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and soon became its leading theoretician.
In 1952, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in a military coup and inaugurated a nationalist and pan-Arab revolution. Nasser initially looked to the Muslim Brotherhood for support. However, Qutb wanted Nasser to introduce an Islamic ‘community of belief’, or umma, rather than pan-Arab nationalism. It was not the promotion of Arab civilisation as much as the promotion of Islamic civilisation that concerned Qutb. By 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood had been banned and many of its leading figures had gone into exile to Saudi Arabia. One of these figures was Qutb’s younger brother, Muhammad Qutb, a religious scholar, who became a professor of Islamic studies and later taught Osama bin Laden. Sayyid Qutb remained in Egypt. In 1954 he was accused of conspiring to assassinate President Nasser and was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. During his incarceration, Qutb wrote his thirty-volume interpretation of the Qur’an entitled, In the Shade of the Qur’an, and his 1964 manifesto Milestones. Finally, in 1966, as the Egyptian regime moved towards a form of Arab socialism and closer links with the Soviet Union, Qutb was executed for treason. 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 to form the nucleus of the modern Islamist movement.4
For Qutb, the Qur’an was not merely a body of belief; it was a way in which to live, based on a oneness with God. Both Marxism and Western democratic liberalism ran counter to Qutb’s view of the totality of religious life. Marxism denied God while liberalism restricted God and translated faith into private rather than public morality. As Paul Berman has observed, what Qutb disliked the most about the modern West was ‘the split between the sacred and the secular in modern liberalism’.5 Such a split threatened the purity of Islam as a total belief system. From this perspective Qutb viewed Kemal Atatürk’s secular reforms in Turkey in the 1920s as retrograde and marking the end of the Islamic Caliphate. The spread of Western-style liberalism into the Middle East threatened to create ‘partial Islam’, which could only lead to annihilation of the faith. Atatürk’s reforms amounted to little more than an offensive against Muslim countries. 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 having their own implications, values, institutions and organizations’.6
Qutb’s answer to creeping secularism was for a vanguard to begin the renovation of Islamic life globally. The key elements of his writings that inform contemporary political Islam as a movement include the concepts of hakimiyyah, jahiliyya and jihad. All three concepts are central to understanding the ideological foundation for current anti-Western attitudes and modern Islamic terrorism.
Hakimiyyah
One of the intellectual tools that Qutb uses to explain his Islamist philosophy is the term hakimiyyah. This term is derived from the Arabic word hukm, meaning to rule or govern, and Qutb uses it in a divine sense, referring to the absolute sovereignty of God. Islam stands entirely on the belief in the Oneness of God, its institutions and all its laws, and insists on man’s total bondage to God alone. When the belief that there is no deity except God (la illaha illa Allah)dominates human existence—including government, law, education and individual private life—Islam fulfils its true purpose in securing freedom for all individuals.
Central to the practical manifestation of Islam in society is the implementation and acceptance of Shari’ah (Divine Law). While denoting legality, Shari’ah is not to be confined to law or government and is to encompass everything pertaining to the organisation of human life, including principles of faith, justice, morality, behaviour and knowledge. Such an approach requires a complete dismissal of all man-made social systems. Since the Shari’ah is viewed by Qutb as the embodiment of God’s will on earth, anything less than complete submission is heretical.
Jahiliyya
The term jahiliyya means to be ‘in ignorance of divine guidance’. In his manifesto, Milestones, Qutb writes that the world is divided into two kinds of societies: Muslim and non-Muslim jahiliyya (ignorant) societies. In Muslim societies, Islam is applied to all aspects of life through observance of Shari’ah. Consequently, Qutb believed that Islamic society was, ‘by its very nature, the only civilised society, and the jahili societies, in all their various forms, are backward societies. It is necessary to elucidate this great truth’.7 Qutb defined a jahili society as any society that ‘does not dedicate itself to submission to God alone, in its beliefs, in its observances of worship and its legal regulations’. Jahili included all Christian and Jewish societies as well as all ‘idolatrous societies’, with specific reference to countries such as Japan and the Philippines, and some countries in Africa.8
As Qutb believed that Jews and Christians had distorted their original beliefs in the infallibility of God’s law by conceding legislative power to secular authority, they were jahiliyya—the enemy. The West’s defection from the ‘way of God’ came through its secularism of political and administrative life by a conscious separation of church and state. Qutb ruled out any accommodation with the jahili system. The only proper Muslim relationship with jahiliyya was one of complete rejection. As such, those Muslim societies that chose to incorporate elements of jahili systems into the Islamic framework—that is, through the adoption of a secular government or legal systems—were also jahiliyya. As the enemy of Islam they were to be destroyed. For Qutb jahiliyya societies are incapable of offering an individual true freedom. He argues:
When, in a society, the sovereignty belongs to God alone, expressed in its obedience to the Divine Law, only then is every person in that society free from servitude to others, and only then does he taste true freedom. This alone is ‘human civilisation’.9
In Qutb’s view, Western society bestowed higher value on materialism rather than on the dignity of the individual. If materialism dominated, as was the case with the United States and Europe, and ‘all other human values are sacrificed at its altar, then such a society is backward’.10 Consequently, such a society could not confer freedom in the real sense but offered only a degraded and regressive existence. Submission to a human authority not sanctioned by God meant that individual freedom would be lost to a material world susceptible to corruption. In this way, the roots of jahili society became mere human desires, ‘which do not let people come out of their ignorance and self-importance’.11 Qutb believed that true Muslims in the vanguard movement must engage in a constant struggle against the influence of jahiliyya. Qutb believed that revolution, not reform, was required. It is only through the total destruction of secular societies that the Islamic system could be secure. Thus Qutb wrote, ‘the foremost duty of Islam in this world is to depose of jahiliyya from the leadership of man, and to take the leadership into its own hands and enforce the [Islamic] way of life’.12
Jihad
The term jihad, meaning ‘struggle’ or ‘striving’ (in the way of God), was central to Qutb’s radical form of Islam. Jihad was necessary in order to make the Islamic way dominant in the world and was commanded by the Qur’an. Qutb believed that ‘since the objective of the message of Islam is a decisive declaration of man’s freedom, not merely on the philosophical plane but also in the actual conditions of life, it must employ jihad’.13 According to Qutb, jihad is a legitimate method by which Islam may seek victory over the influence of jahiliyya, thus ensuring the sovereignty of God on earth. Qutb rejected the writings of those who stipulated that Islamic jihad is only permissible in a ‘defensive war’. Indeed, he condemned such as an attempt to separate Islam from its method of affirmation.14
Qutb’s rationale for using armed violence was associated with the notion of justified conflict against one’s enemy. The reasons for jihad are ‘to establish God’s authority on the earth; to arrange human affairs according to the true guidance provided by God; to abolish all the Satanic forces and Satanic systems in life; to end the lordship of one man over others’.15 The Egyptian ideologue believed that the struggle to secure such a victory could not be achieved under a national banner, but only under the banner of faith alone. Jihad is a revolution of ideas and a war of ideologies unlimited by geography or state sovereignty; it is a universal phenomenon that necessitates the revolution of a community of believers (umma) in order to achieve the destruction of jahiliyya and the restoration of God’s command over life. Jihad is the physical power that Islam should bring to bear in order to abolish the jahili system.16
Qutb's Influence on Contemporary Militant Islam: The Case of Al-Qa'ida
Qutb’s revolutionary writings and his execution at the hands of Nasser have had a significant impact on the leadership of al-Qa’ida. In particular, Qutb has been one of the most important influences on Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri—the man considered to be the intellectual architect behind much of al-Qa’ida’s rhetoric and campaign planning. In Montasser al-Zayyat’s recent critical biography of al-Zawahiri, The Road to Al Qaeda: the Story of Bin Laden’s Right-Hand Man, al-Zayyat describes the extensiveness of Qutb’s influence on the leader’s ideology and principles:
In Zawahiri’s eyes, Sayyid Qutb’s words struck young Muslims more deeply than those of his contemporaries because his words eventually led to his execution. Thus, those words both provided the blueprint for his long and glorious lifetime, and eventually led to his end.17
This admiration was reinforced by the fact that al-Zawahiri’s uncle, Mahfouz Azzam, was a lifelong friend of Qutb and was engaged as his lawyer until his death in 1966. Like many in Egypt and the broader Islamic community, al-Zawahiri saw Qutb as a revolutionary and a martyr whom he aspired to emulate by membership of the Islamic Jihad Group.18 Subsequently, almost every publication by al-Zawahiri included admiring references to Sayyid Qutb and his contribution to modern Islamic revival. For example, Zawahiri notes:
Although Qutb... was oppressed and tortured by Nasser’s regime, [his] influence on young Muslims was paramount. Qutb’s message was and still is to believe in the oneness of God and the supremacy of the Divine path. This message fanned the fire of Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad. The chapters of this revolution are renewing one day after another.19
Osama bin Laden also clearly identified with Qutb’s Islamist ideology. As mentioned earlier, while a student at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was tutored by Qutb’s brother, Muhammad, and close friend Abdullah Azzam. The latter was bin Laden’s Islamic Law professor and later went on to found Afghan–Arab terrorist training camps in Peshawar, Pakistan. Of Palestinian origin, Azzam chiefly instructed his students with the works of Islamist ideologues such as Qutb. Heavy instruction in Qutbian philosophy provided bin Laden with an ideological basis for the evolution of his revolutionary ideas. His numerous public announcements since the mid-1990s have continually reflected key Qutbian beliefs, indicating an earnest desire that he and his followers in the al-Qa’ida network are the spearhead of the modern international Islamic movement, committed to restoring Islam to the glory of its medieval days.20
Militarily, the al-Qa’ida leadership has adopted Qutb’s understanding of jihad and embraced his overall objective—that is, the destruction of jahiliyya for the creation of ‘freedom’ defined in an Islamist sense. This view is reflected in al-Qa’ida’s rhetorical emphasis on an overall international strategy. By appropriating Qutb’s interpretation of the justification for jihad, al-Qa’ida has been able to rationalise war against the United States. The adoption of Qutb-style ideas have also allowed al-Qa’ida to establish a strong international support base through the unification of diverse Islamist movements, nourished on anti-Western hostility and emphasising their holy duty as Muslims to carry out jihad.
Conclusion
For Sayyid Qutb, Islam was not divisible into the sacred and the secular. An Islamic system means the abolition of man-made laws in a theocracy based on the shar’iah. The enemies of such an Islamic system were Jews and Christians as well as Muslim hypocrites who perpetrated corruption. Understanding Qutb’s ideology and its influence is a step towards comprehending the motivation behind political Islam and its use of terrorism as a tool of warfare. Western understanding of Islamist ideology remains weak and is framed by a secularism that is rejected by movements such as al-Qa’ida.
While military force and law enforcement are essential in the global war on terror, the West must engage in the war of ideas being waged in the Islamic world. In the 1990s such an engagement was not pursued effectively and, as in the 1930s with fascism, the West slept while danger gathered. In the 21st century, we require intellectual ammunition to win what is a global struggle. Sayyid Qutb’s writings provide a convenient entrée into the radical ideology of contemporary political Islam and, as such, deserve critical evaluation by Western strategists and intelligence agencies. As daunting as the global struggle against Islamist terror may be, in terms of knowledge of its enemy, the West can afford to sleep no longer.
Endnotes
1 See John Calvert, ‘The Mythic Foundations of Radical Islam’, Orbis, Winter 2004; Clive Bradley, ‘The rise of political Islam’, Workers Liberty, vol. 2, no. 2, March 2002; and Yvonne Haddad, ‘Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival’, in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John Esposito, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983.
2 Quoted in Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, W. Norton & Co., New York, 2003, p. 75.
3 Quoted in ibid., p. 101.
4 J. A. Nedoroscik, ‘Extremist Groups in Egypt’, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer 2002, p. 54.
5 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, p. 87.
6 Ibid., p. 92.
7 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, Mother Mosque Foundation, New York, 1979, p. 94.
8 Ibid., p. 81.
9 Ibid., p. 94.
10 Ibid., p. 96.
11 Ibid., p. 132.
12 Ibid., p. 131.
13 Ibid., p. 63. For a discussion of jihad see R. C. Martin, ‘Religious Violence in Islam: Towards an Understanding of the Discourse on Jihad in Modern Egypt’, in Paul Wilkinson and Alasdair M. Stewart (eds), Contemporary Research on Terrorism, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1987, p. 61.
14 Haddad, ‘Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival’, pp. 84-5.
15 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, p. 70.
16 Ibid., pp. 57; 71.
17 Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al Qaeda: The Story of Bin-Laden’s Right Hand Man, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 25.
18 Virginia Murr, The Power of Ideas: Sayyid Qutb and Islamism, Rockford College Summer Research Project 2004, Rockford College, 2004, at <http://www.stephenhicks.org/Murr%20on%Qutb.php>.
19 Ayman Zawahari, Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, quoted in al-Zayyat, The Road to Al Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right Hand Man, pp. 24-5.
20 Christopher Blanchard, Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology, CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Washington DC, November 2004, p. 6.
