Authors: Jason Burke
Coming from a rural background in Upper Egypt, Qutb was shocked by the unveiled women he met when he moved to Cairo to take up a job as an inspector of schools. Unwilling to marry a ‘dishonourable’ woman, but unable, for lack of family connections, to meet women of ‘sufficient moral purity and discretion’, he remained celibate for the rest of his life (like Jamal al-Din Afghani, who threatened to castrate himself when it was suggested he should marry, and Mohammed Atta). Profound and unresolved sexual issues are evident in much of his writings. A short story about disappointment in love is called
Ashwak
(‘Thorns’). In other work, his fastidious disgust for anything that
smacks of overt sexuality is clear. Women are described as ‘flirtatious’, ‘provocative’, with ‘thirsty lips and bulging breasts’. Frequently they try, without success, to seduce him.
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In 1948, Qutb was sent to America on a government grant. He returned, three years later, convinced that Western society was decadent, sexually depraved, empty, materialistic, superficial, pagan and ignorant. In America, his darker skin had attracted racist abuse and discrimination and his writing about the country is bilious and bitter.
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‘Look at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury and so many other injustices in it,’ Qutb wrote later.
Behold this individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law, at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit; at this behaviour, like animals, which you call ‘free mixing of the sexes’; at this vulgarity which you call ‘emancipation of women’… at this evil and fanatic racial discrimination.
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In 1954, two years after the coup in Egypt which brought the charismatic secularist Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, the Muslim Brotherhood was banned again and Qutb imprisoned. He was released in 1964, arrested again in 1965 and hanged in 1966. His most influential work,
Milestones
, was written in prison. Written in lucid, accessible language it drew together previous trends in radical political Islam and, by looking backwards, took them forward. It is a howl of rage and pain as much as a political tract.
Milestones
starts with a simple warning. ‘Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,’ Qutb says; the human race is in danger of annihihilation. ‘Even Western scholars realize that their civilization is unable to present healthy values for the guidance of mankind and does not possess anything to satisfy its own conscience or justify its own existence.’ Nor, Qutb goes on to say, was Marxism, of which the Egyptian government represented the diluted pan-Arabist version, any alternative. ‘Marxist theory conflicts with man’s natures and needs; it prospers only in a degenerate society or in a society which is tyrannized over.’
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Qutb did not reject the West entirely. What was needed, he said, was a system which would ‘preserve and develop the material fruits of the creative genius of Europe and… provide mankind with
the high ideals and values previously unknown in the West that can restore harmony with human nature.’ That system, he said, was Islam.
According to Qutb, the reason for Islam’s decline relative to the West, the Communist powers and its former glory was straightforward if, given the pronouncements of his ideological avatars over the centuries, relatively predictable:
The Muslim community must be restored to its original form… [it is] now buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations and is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs that are not… related to the Islamic teachings.
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The ‘pure source’ of the Qur’an has become corrupted.
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The result is a return to the days of
jahillyya
, barbarism, ignorance and unbelief. ‘Jahillyya,’ says Qutb ‘is based on rebellion against the sovereignty of Allah on earth,’ and its result is ‘the oppression of his creatures’, leading to ‘the humiliation of the common man under the Communist system and the exploitation of individuals and nations due to the greed for wealth and imperialism under capitalist systems’.
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Here, the influence of contemporary political ideologies is clear. Only under true Islam, said Qutb, do ‘all men become free from the servitude of some men to others’.
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This, Qutb recognizes, was ‘a revolutionary message’ in the days of Mohammed and still is in Egypt in the 1960s. ‘The call “there is no god but Allah” is abhorrent to those in power at any age and place.’
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In the days of the first generation of Muslims, Qutb says:
The banner of social justice was raised in the name of tauhid… and the name of the banner was Islam… Morals were elevated, hearts and souls purified and… there was no need even to enforce the limits and punishments that Allah has prescribed because now… the hope of Divine reward and the fear of Allah’s anger took the place of police and law enforcement agencies.
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It is not for nothing that some commentators have called
Milestones
political Islam’s Communist Manifesto.
To initiate the revival of Islam, Qutb said, ‘a vanguard must set out… marching through the vast ocean of jahillyya which encompasses the whole world’.
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Unless they separate themselves from the influence of the jahillya they too will be contaminated and unable to follow the true
path followed by the Salaf. ‘We must free ourselves from the clutches of the jahili society… [It] is not a worthy partner for compromise. Our aim is first to change ourselves so we may later change society.’
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Aware of the timescale of the ‘cosmic struggle’, Qutb says that though ‘the distance between the revival of Islam and the attainment of world leadership may be vast… the first step must be taken towards [it]’.
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The sight of Muslim Brotherhood activists being tortured and killed in prison had convinced Qutb that jahillyya was not limited to non-Muslim societies as Maududi had thought but was also to be found in contemporary Muslim society as well. Drawing on ibn Taimiya, Qutb said that those Muslims, such as President Nasser, who did not strive to live according to the Shariat were unbelievers and thus
takfir
, or excommunicable. Like many other supposedly Islamic rulers in the Islamic world, Qutb said, Nasser may have claimed to be a Muslim but his actions showed that he was not. Instead he was a hypocrite, a
munafiq
.
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For the young Osama bin Laden, already steeped in traditional Wahhabism, much of Qutb’s message made sense. All his life, bin Laden had listened to impassioned sermons full of references to the past glories of the Arab kingdoms. His teachers had told him that the Salaf were those that he, and all Muslims, should struggle to emulate. Mohammed Qutb, Abdallah Azzam and his fellow preachers at Abdul Aziz University offered comprehensible and radical solutions to complex contemporary political and social issues couched in the language of Salafi–Wahhabi traditionalism with which bin Laden had grown up.
One bin Laden family member remembers Osama reading and praying all the time during this period.
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Bin Laden certainly became deeply involved in religious activities at university after taking part in theological debates and Qur’anic study. He also made useful contacts with young royal princes. As the son of a loyal servitor of the Saudi regime, Osama bin Laden was still far from considering, as Syed Qutb might have done, the rulers in Riyadh as ‘apostate’ or ‘hypocrite’. That was to come much later.
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Mujahideen
In 1979, the year bin Laden left university, several massive events shook the Muslim world: a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the occupation of the grand mosque at Mecca by a radical Wahhabi group. Each event had enormous implications for men like bin Laden. Sadat’s peace deal with the Jewish state epitomized the backsliding of the Arab nationalist regimes (particularly given the shaming defeats of 1967 and 1973), the deposition of the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was a clear example of what could be done about such regimes, the Soviet invasion emphasized the imminent threat from the atheistic West and, for Saudis in particular, the occupation of Islam’s holiest shrine by Juhaiman ibn Said al-Utaiba, a hardline preacher, and 400 radicals in November cast the royal family in Riyadh in an entirely new light.
Juhaiman was a former national guardsman, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina and the grandson of one of the Wahhabi ikhwan killed by the al-Saud regime in 1929. He applied the teachings of the Saudi ulema to their patrons. To Juhaiman and his followers it was thus clear that the house of al-Saud had deviated from the true path of Islam. The rulers of Saudi Arabia were to them little better than tribal warlords. On 20 November 1979 Juhaiman seized control of the grand mosque, the most holy site in Islam, and issued a call to the Saudi nation to overthrow their apostate rulers and their Western backers and establish a rule of ‘justice and equality’. His followers were not just Saudis but also included Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Bangladeshis, Yemenis and Iraqis. The response was as international as the attackers. It took 10,000 Saudi security personnel, thousands of Pakistani troops
and a contingent of French anti-terrorist experts who, as non-believers, needed special permission from the kingdom’s ulema to enter Mecca, to crush the revolt. Though it failed to win the sympathy of the Saudi masses, Juhaiman’s rebellion stunned the Saudi monarchy. As the custodians of Islam’s most holy places, they had expected threats from Communism or secular Arab nationalism, not from within orthodox Islam, the very discourse that gave the house of al-Saud its legitimacy. In 1962, the
Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami
, or Muslim World League, had been set up by Riyadh to fund an international effort to counter, through da’wa, the spread of secular ideologies in the Islamic world. When, in 1971, King Faisal had offered Sheikh Abdel Halim Mahmoud, the then rector of al-Azhar University in Cairo, the premier academic institution of the Islamic world, $100m to finance a new campaign in the Muslim world he had intended the money to be used against communists and atheists, not Islamic radicals.
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Bin Laden was deeply impressed by the strength of the rebels’ faith. Five years later, he sat on the end of his bed in a communal dormitory on the upstairs floor of the offices of a newspaper run by an Afghan mujahideen faction, at number 40 on Peshawar’s Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani Road, talking late into the night with his young friend Khaled.
‘I had long arguments and discussions with him about political issues in particular,’ Khaled told me.
I was critical of the role of Wahhabis in breaking up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Mr Osama said that Abdul Aziz ibn Saud was not a religious leader at all but just a tribal chieftain. He used to say that Wahhabism was exploited and used as a cover so the House of al-Saud could fight against the Ottomans and win land and wealth. We talked often about the promise of the British to give the Arabs a homeland if they rose against the Ottoman Empire and how they were betrayed. We talked about Palestine and current Middle East issues and about the seizure of the grand Mosque. Mr Osama said the men who seized Mecca were true Muslims and that they were innocent of any crime and that they were killed ruthlessly.
Bin Laden had arrived in Peshawar in early 1980. He has told interviewers that he ‘was enraged and went there at once’.
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In fact, it took several weeks to contact the Afghan and Pakistani religious leaders
(whom he had met at the clerical convocations hosted by his father in Saudi Arabia) to make arrangements for travel to Pakistan. The most prominent among his contacts were the leading Afghan Islamic activists Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf.
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Bin Laden’s first trip to Peshawar lasted little more than a month. He returned to Saudi Arabia and started lobbying his brothers, relatives and old school friends to support the fight against the Soviets. For the next four years, bin Laden split his time between his homeland and Pakistan. It is unclear whether he ventured over the border into Afghanistan during this time. Instead his focus was on fundraising and raising the profile of the Afghan jihad in the Middle East.
By 1984 he was spending most of his time in Peshawar, renting a villa at 61 Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani Road to act as a guesthouse and transit point for the growing numbers of Arab volunteers on their way into Afghanistan and as an office. He called it the
beit al-ansar
, or house of the supporters, the
ansar
being the original group of converts made by the Prophet Mohammed in Medina after the hijra.
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He spent much of his time helping out at the offices of
al-Jihad
, Abdallah Azzam’s Arabic-language newspaper, which reported the war in Afghanistan throughout the Islamic world.
Al-Jihad
stood out among the twenty or so newspapers and magazines published in Peshawar. It was free, properly funded by its wealthy Arab patrons, appeared regularly and was staffed almost entirely by Arabs.
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Bin Laden helped the publication with some money and often stayed in the dormitories on the first floor. Journalists in the region began hearing stories of a man known as ‘the Good Samaritan’ who, it was said, would arrive unannounced at hospitals where wounded Afghan and Arab fighters had been brought. According to the stories, he went from bed to bed handing out cashews and chocolates to the wounded and carefully noting each man’s name and address. Weeks later, the man’s family would receive a generous cheque.
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