The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (13 page)

In Rida’s view, the problem with the historical caliphate wasn’t just the corruption and fecklessness of sultans. It was also the
ulema
, or scholars, who had been merely subservient to power when it was their duty to ensure that the rulers were acting in accordance with Islamic principles and the best interests of the
umma.
In Rida’s vision of the Islamic state, the
ulema
would elect the caliph, who would in turn regularly seek their counsel, or
shura.
The Quran and the sunna, depending on your perspective, either enjoin or just recommend that the ruler seek counsel, but, as Rida saw, in reality Muslim rulers have rarely sought anything but a rubber stamp from all but their closest advisers. And those courageous souls who were tempted to resist the unjust power of the sultan found themselves caught in a dilemma, calculating whether the advantages of rebellion outweighed the negatives. The annals of Muslim history show that in the face of a choice
between tyranny and anarchy, most chose tyranny. For instance, Ibn Taymiyya, whose reputation Rida had helped revive, wrote that “sixty years of an unjust ruler is better than one night without a Sultan.”
⁵
(It may seem odd that such a supporter of state power would be credited with providing the basis for Anwar Sadat’s assassination, but in fact Ibn Taymiyya never argued that despotic rulers could be justly murdered. What he did say was that while it was not licit to kill a Muslim ruler, it was permissible to spill a ruler’s blood if he was not really a Muslim. This was the claim the Islamists made about Sadat—who as “pharaoh,” in his killer’s formulation, represented non-Islamic values.)

Rida was a systematic thinker. His most famous disciple, Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, was not. Banna was more like a community organizer, a man intent on raising the self-esteem of a people that had lost its way, and later, as the ranks of the Brotherhood began to swell with the middle and the working classes, he became a political activist. Although Banna agreed with Rida that an Islamic state was the “archetype” of good government, he never theorized what such a polity might look like. He simply knew that a political order determined by the Quran, God’s final and perfect message, would solve everything. Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political program could be boiled down to its slogan “The Quran is our constitution.” This was not just a statement of faith. It was also effectively a warning directed against those Egyptian intellectuals and officials promoting a system of government in which man, not God, would write laws.

Early on, the Brotherhood resolved to use violence to bring about this new order, embarking on a campaign of riots and assassinations, like the 1948 murder of the prime minister, an assassination that led to the apparently retaliatory killing of Banna himself a year later. So while Montasser al-Zayyat claimed that the government made the Islamists violent, the reality is that their murderous streak dates back to well before the Mubarak regime. In 1954, in fact, the
Brotherhood made an attempt on Nasser’s life, after which the Egyptian president responded with a massive roundup and a period of severe repression that culminated in the 1966 hanging of the Brotherhood’s chief theorist, Sayyid Qutb.

Since 9/11, Qutb has rightly been identified as a major ideologue, and perhaps the transformational figure, in the development of radical Islam. Western critics have likened the onetime poet and litterateur to European writers and intellectuals grappling with the existential issues of modernity.
⁶
For the existentialists, the question was how to find authenticity after God had turned his back on mankind; but for Qutb, it was the other way around—until man once again drank from the pure Islam of its prophet, he was doomed to live in a state of pre-Islamic ignorance, or
jahiliya.

Most of the attention that has been paid to Qutb in the West has focused, understandably, on his profound hatred of modern Western culture. And yet while Salafism was indeed a response to the West, Qutb must be primarily understood in the context of Islamic modernism. Like his predecessors—Banna, Rida, ‘Abduh, Afghani, and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab—Qutb looked back to the first Muslim community in order to restore the contemporary
umma
to its rightful place as the best of all nations. For the Salafis, what they were trying to achieve was not an imaginary utopia (like that of the communists) that could only be realized in the future, but a real Eden that had been lived in historical time and ruled by the messenger of God. To avail themselves of that model, the reformers had to rid Islam of the imperfections that had accumulated since its golden era, for the fault was not with the final and perfect message revealed by the creator of all things but with the Muslims who had abandoned or corrupted that message. The Salafis differed from each other in how much of the past they thought worth preserving—‘Abduh’s strictures, for instance, were less severe than Rida’s in sweeping away large chunks of Islamic history and precedent. But their reference point and purpose were the same—they looked toward the past in order to save the
present. What sets Qutb apart from his predecessors is his refusal to excuse his contemporaries for their culpability in Islam’s fall from grace.

Qutb took Salafism, a Muslim current purging itself of Islamic history and sources, to its logical conclusion by rejecting not only the recent past but the present as well. If the problem with the lands of Islam is not Islam but the Muslims who have misunderstood and corrupted it, then the fault that must be eradicated is not exclusively in the past. The present is also blameworthy. For Qutb, that justified war not only against unjust rulers but also against the
jahiliya
societies that had produced them, for in the end Muslims themselves were in error. That is, the real problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East, Qutb believed, was the Arab and Muslim societies that had lost their way. And that required an endless war against the
umma
to purge it of its non-Islamic impurities.

This willingness to use any means necessary to bring about the new order is the essence of Qutb’s radicalism. But in the context of Middle Eastern history, what we have come to call radical Islam is actually not so very radical. Political violence and coercion, as Rida noted, had been the norm for over thirteen hundred years of Muslim history. They were also standard practice in modern Arab politics. From the 1960s through the time of his death, Yasser Arafat waged a campaign of terror targeting Europeans and Americans as well as Israelis and other Arabs, a campaign of terror that differed from bin Laden’s only in its ideological packaging. The same was so for the Arab nationalist regimes of Syria and Iraq, which fought each other and other rivals with terror. Arab terror in the name of Islam is hardly different from Arab terror in the name of Arab nationalism. Radical Islam is only where the violence that is an inherent part of the Arab political order meets Salafism, Islam’s reformist, progressive, and modern current that reaches its end point with Qutb’s perpetual, purgative war against the
umma
itself.

Qutb’s advocacy of takfirism—the war on apostasy—trickled
down into the Islamist mainstream, and became a catchphrase among younger militants who had begun to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had become relatively moderate after Sadat came to power in 1970 and began releasing Islamist prisoners from jail, where they had been broken by torture and executions. The Brotherhood’s members had also just grown older; the agents of almost all of the world’s violence are young men, and jihad is no different. Newer organizations like al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad offered the young the chance to make headway outside the rigid hierarchy of the Brotherhood, and to take up the weapons that their elders had laid down. Still, while the newer groups and the Brotherhood differed in tactics, it is inaccurate to think of them as two separate currents when they are both part of one intellectual trend, the Islamist movement, and heirs to a history of armed insurrection, one that culminated, in some sense, with Sadat’s assassination—“the one operation that al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and Jihad did together,” said the rehabilitated Zayyat, with the shadow of a smile crossing his lips.

It is said that those who live by the sword must die by it as well, a tautology in a society where political power can only be won through violence. This “cycle of violence” in the Middle East is thousands of years old, the defining characteristic of a political order that Ibn Khaldun described almost eight hundred years ago. Once a ruling class reaches a certain stage of decadence, another group that still adheres to a strong warrior ethos will come along and defeat it in war. The ideology of the group is finally beside the point, just so long as it binds them to one another and preserves their
assabiya.

It is a common misperception that Arab regimes and the Islamists are sworn ideological enemies, when it is much more accurate to think of them in biblical terms as two brothers wrestling for the same share of power. (It was no coincidence, for example, that the organizational structure and elitist ethos of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad were almost identical to those of the Free Officers, the
Arab nationalist military clique that had put Nasser into power.) Political repression is not the root cause of Islamist terror. Repressive violence and terror are two aspects of a political culture that has no mechanism for either sharing power or transmitting political authority from one governing body to another except through inheritance, coup, or conquest. The Islamists make war to win power; the regimes fight to maintain it. And so in the end, there are only two laws of Arab politics: the first is to seize power, after which political legitimacy is granted provided that the second law is observed—to maintain power.

Sadat, for instance, is even today criticized for violating the second law by freeing Muslim Brotherhood prisoners, a whirlwind he reaped as blowback—a charge also leveled against Washington for supporting the Afghan Arabs who would later become Al Qaeda. This theory of the vicious result of unintended consequences, blow-back, proposes that the victim is a sorcerer’s apprentice touching off a chain of events that would not have otherwise come to pass without his foolish meddling. But the blowback theory assumes a political realm where there is no will to power except that which the victim unwittingly conjured by his own actions. This is nonsense. Political ambition is in the nature of human existence; it is a given in any society. The purpose of political institutions is to manage that struggle. Liberal democracies do it with mechanisms like checks and balances, separation of powers, multiple parties, and free elections. Arab societies have other methods. The most common, as Rashid Rida remarked of Muslim history, is the use of violence to do away with rivals. But there are other techniques as well.

It is impossible to murder and jail every pretender to the throne, for they are legion. So another method used by Arab rulers is to set potential challengers at each other’s throats, in the Arab-regime equivalent of a steel-cage match. That’s why Arab states have so many different, and redundant, security services. While their purpose may seem largely domestic surveillance and repression, in fact they spend
most of their time competing with each other for money, prestige, and power, leaving them too occupied with each other to take on the ruler himself.

Another useful strategy for keeping political rivals at an arm’s distance is jihad. To spread Islam through conquest is the religious injunction that pushed the
umma
to expand throughout the former Byzantine and Persian empires, then to North Africa and India. But jihad has other benefits, namely, that as the borders of the empire are pushed outward, the warrior class moves farther from the capital. Through jihad, the ruler turns the energies of the military elite to his advantage and keeps potential competitors far from the palace. In Arab history, the most ambitious commanders were dispatched elsewhere to conquer other lands so they would not be tempted to try their luck at home. And elsewhere was often Egypt: Amr ibn al-As conquered Egypt in the service of the second caliph, Omar ibn al-Khattab; the Abbasid commander Ibn Tulun was sent from Samarra to Cairo, where he founded his own dynasty; as did the ambitious Albanian infantryman Muhammad Ali Pasha, who nominally governed Egypt for the sake of the Ottoman sultan but was in reality a regional power unto himself. The price for not keeping the warrior class far from the center of power is loss of power. That’s what happened to the Egyptian monarchy: after the Free Officers felt that the monarchy had betrayed them in the 1948 war with Israel, Colonel Nasser and his companions returned from Palestine to send the king packing in a bloodless coup.

In addition to keeping rivals away from power by directing their attention elsewhere, jihad serves another strategic purpose, namely, to advance the interests of the palace abroad. Just as the early Islamic conquests brought glory to the caliph back home in Damascus or Baghdad, and as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rulers of the Barbary States had their privateers and cutouts ransom European and American vessels in exchange for tribute due the palace, so Islamist groups’ activities abroad have served (and continue to serve)
the interests of Arab regimes. This is sometimes hard for Americans to see, because so many of us find the notion of a state being solely dedicated to its self-interest vulgar and outmoded. But the reality is that it is just normal foreign policy for states to turn their internal problems against rivals and even allies for their own security and prosperity. And Arab regimes have become adept at doing just that.

Nasser, for instance, may have crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, but he also used the Islamists to his benefit. He was not opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood on principle, as, say, the defender of a secular Arab worldview that had no use for Islam and its prophet, but only because it challenged his rule. And yet the Islamists were plenty useful when they went into exile in Saudi Arabia, where Nasser hoped that they would destabilize a rival regime. Sadat, similarly, got rid of his Islamist elements by dispatching them to Afghanistan, where they assisted his new U.S. ally in countering Soviet influence. And when Mubarak moved into the presidential palace, he followed the example of his predecessors and sent some jihadis off to die in foreign lands, even as those who stayed to challenge him were beaten militarily, broken in prison, and later used for regime propaganda. Mubarak’s repentant Gama’a prisoners came in handy when the Americans confronted Egypt after 9/11. When the Americans said that the Islamists attacked the United States because the regime was ruthless with them—that 9/11 was born in the dungeons of Egypt-Mubarak’s response was,
No, we’re on good terms with them, we have a truce with the Islamists, their problem is with you.
This formula deflected Washington’s furies and gave the Mubarak government common ground with its Islamist rivals:
America is our enemy, too—look at what it does to the Palestinians.