A Quiet Revolution (17 page)

pert on matters pertaining to Islam.”
8

Modernity and the ideas of the West are inextricably part of the Is- lamist movement of today, as Roy goes on to emphasize. With the ex- ception of Iran, the Islamist movements of the twentieth century have everywhere been led, as Roy notes, not by clerics but by secularly trained intellectuals steeped in a “Westernized environment” who subsequently took on the task of working and writing as religious thinkers. Such thinkers typically insist in their writings, Roy further notes, on the “ra- tionality of religious prescriptions.” Their very insistence on rational- ism, and on rationality as a vital category, is itself a “sign that modernity has worked its way into the very heart of Islamist discourse.”
9

From early on al-Banna himself had deliberately sought to mini- mize and set aside doctrinal and theological differences among Muslims, and he had applied himself to working to bring about consensus in the interests of pan-Islamic unity. This continued to be a feature of Islamist thought and Brotherhood activism as the Brothers worked with Wah- habis and across their differences for common goals, among them the renewal of Islam worldwide, the establishment of Islam as a primary ground of identity transcending all national borders, and the promotion and dissemination of the socially conservative forms of Islam to which Wahhabis, the Muslim Brothers, and other Islamists were committed. Most notable and visible was their signature commitment to gender seg- regation and thus also to the presence of the hijab as mandatory for women: dress that proclaimed that foundational commitment.

In Egypt, the Brotherhood and other Islamists set out to win over the mainstream Muslim majority, encouraging them to leave aside their beliefs, habits, practices, and ways of dress and to adopt in their place those of the Islamists. This entailed the double task of persuading peo- ple both that Islam as they, their parents, and grandparents had prac- ticed it was flawed, faulty, inadequate, and incorrect, and that only Islamic beliefs and practice as taught by Islamists represented those of “true” Islam. The task for activists was to work through da‘wa to awaken the Muslim majority from their “anaesthetized faith” and convert them to the engaged, activist Islam preached and practiced by Islamists, along with all its specific commitments of practice, lifestyle, and dress. Their goal was to transform the “somnolent” masses into people with “blazing

. . . fully awakened” souls who would be imbued with “love for the Is-

lamic cause” and thus willing to devote themselves to working and mak- ing sacrifices for the good of the community.

And in Egypt the Islamist cause would, within a few short years, prove spectacularly successful.

The soaring oil prices after the war of
1973
and the enormous wealth the Arab oil states commanded thereafter would give rise to other condi- tions—aside from vastly increased resources for funding Islamist out- reach—that would further contribute to the spread of Islamism and that would promote the spread of Saudi Arabian and Gulf forms of religious practice to Egyptians and other Arabs and Muslims.

First, Saudi and Arab Gulf wealth opened the door to immigrant labor from many parts of the world, particularly from the neighboring and linguistically compatible Arab world. Graduates of Egyptian uni- versities (the beneficiaries of Nasser’s policies, which had made univer- sity education free and available to all who qualified) now eagerly competed for the opportunity to work in the Arabian Peninsula, where salaries were far higher than those of Egypt. The figures for Egyptians, both men and women, employed in the Arabian Peninsula rose through

the seventies and early eighties from
10
,
000
in
1968
to
1
.
2
million by

1985
.
10

After a stint in the Arabian Peninsula, returnees to Egypt had ac- quired the funds to buy properties and goods that had previously been out of reach. They were very well to do compared to Egyptians who had not had the opportunity to work in the Peninsula. Many retained the styles of dress they had adopted there, and these styles, including hijab, now became among the fashions of the wealthy. Just as in earlier decades wearing European-style dress and adopting Western languages had been signs of wealth and chic, so now it was the hijab and dress and practices in the style of Saudi Arabia that were the signs of wealth, chic, and pres- tige.
11

The wealth of the oil-producing countries was itself regarded as a sign of God’s favor to Muslims, and in particular to Muslims who fol- lowed the strictest forms of Islam, including wearing hijab. Other Mus- lims would do well to adopt those conservative practices, many thought, so that they too could receive God’s bounty and blessings.
12

Moreover, returnees contributed to Islamist causes, charities, and voluntary associations, and made donations for the building of mosques and other Islamic institutions. The numbers of privately funded mosques (as distinct from state-funded mosques staffed by government-appointed imams) now rose rapidly—increasing from twenty thousand in
1970
, ac- cording to one study, to forty-six thousand by
1981
. Mosques, in turn, often offered, besides the daily and Friday prayers and sermons, varieties of services and religious instruction, including day-care centers and kindergartens and health-clinics and lending libraries of books and tapes.
13

In
1973
, too, Islamist associations began to organize summer camps sim- ilar to those that the Muslim Brothers had organized prior to Nasser’s dissolution of the Brotherhood in
1954
. Those attending those camps, noted Kepel, would be “initiated into the ‘pure Islamic life.’” This in- volved “regular daily prayers, ideological training, an apprenticeship in the skills of the preacher and the tactics of proselytism, socializing within the group and more.” These summer camps served as schools and train- ing camps, Kepel continues, “for the cadres and future cadres of the Is- lamist movement.” Within a few years its graduates would be among the activists in the vanguard engaging in da‘wa and promoting the spread of Islamism.
14

As the power and influence of Islamism grew, the government also continued to try to gain support and authority by promoting religion and religious themes. Ever larger numbers of mosques had become cen- ters of Islamist preaching and activism, much of it often implicitly crit- ical of and oppositional to the government. As private, Islamist-funded mosques grew in number, mosques were clearly venues that no state could afford to ignore. Thus government-built mosques also began to multiply; they were staffed by imams appointed by the government and delivered government-approved sermons.
15

Seeking to gain legitimacy among the steadily more religiously in- clined populace, the government increased religious curricula in schools and universities and increased religious programming on radio and tel- evision. It was probably in these years that the terms secular and secu- larist—language initially promoted most likely by the Muslim Brothers

and the League to discredit Nasser’s Arab nationalism and socialism— began to be liberally applied retrospectively and of course pejoratively to the Nasser era, including to the norm of bare heads that many Mus- lim women of that era, the pious as well as the less pious, had widely adopted.
16

By the later seventies the Islamist currents that Sadat had encouraged were now on a collision course with his government. From
1977
onward, after members of the militant Islamist group Takfir wal-Hijra murdered a former minister and were captured and brought to trial, the fissures between Islamists and the government, moderates as well as radicals, grew clearer. Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in November
1977
and his subse- quent Camp David negotiations, both of which were opposed by Is- lamists, moderates and militants alike, exacerbated tensions.

On his return to Egypt after signing the Camp David accords in March
1979
, Sadat began to launch verbal attacks on Islamists. He was critical not only of militants but also of those who “cloaked” their criti- cism of him in religion, specifically the leadership of the Muslim Broth-

erhood. Soon Sadat began taking action against Islamist organizations

—moderate as well as militant—freezing the assets of those on univer- sity campuses and eventually, in September
1981
, even ordering their dis- solution. Meanwhile, Sadat was also arresting many of his nonreligious critics, imprisoning many intellectuals in
1981
.
17

On October
6
,
1981
, Sadat was shot on the stand where he was re- viewing the military parade commemorating the launch of the
1973
Ra- madan War. A military truck had come to a halt before the stand and four men jumped out, firing automatic weapons. Sadat and a number of dignitaries were instantly killed. One of the men, who would become known as the group’s leader, had shouted as he opened fire: “I am Khalid al-Islambuli. I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”

The four were part of the militant organization Islamic Jihad, whose leader and theoretician was Abdel Salam Faraj. Faraj was an elec- trician who had written a book called
Al-Farida al-Ghaiba
(The Neg- lected Duty, sometimes translated as The Hidden Imperative), a book informed and inspired, as were so many Islamist writings, by Qutb’s ideas. “The neglected duty” was jihad. The book strongly affirmed the

notion that righteous, committed Muslims had a duty to struggle against God’s enemies and rise up against and remove illegitimate un-Islamic regimes and rulers.

Khalid al-Islambuli, a twenty-four-year-old officer in the army at the time, was the one who had hatched the idea of assassinating Sadat on the occasion of the military parade. He had joined the army because he dreamed of becoming a pilot, but he had been appointed instead to the

artillery corps. On September
3
,
1981
, he had returned home to learn that

his brother, the leader of a nonmilitant Islamist organization on the cam- pus of Asyut University, had been arrested with others in Sadat’s crack- down on all Islamists. Khalid, filled with grief and anger and intent on vengeance, devised the assassination plot, which he took to Faraj, who approved and facilitated it. Khalid and his three accomplices, as well as Faraj, would be executed in
1982
.

Another member of Islamic Jihad was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command. Following Sadat’s assassination, al- Zawahiri was arrested for and convicted of dealing in weapons. He re- ceived a three-year sentence.

For al-Zawahiri, as for so many others, Qutb’s philosophy had been a critical influence. Al-Zawahiri would declare in
2001
that “Sayyid Qutb’s call for loyalty to God’s oneness and to acknowledge God’s sole authority and sovereignty” had been the “spark that ignited the Islamic

revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad. The bloody chapters of this revolution continue to unfold day after day.”
18

*

Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease— but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress. Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience . . .

The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor

materially or because its economic or military power has be- come weak. The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind . . .
‌

It is necessary to revive that Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of sev- eral generations, and crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to Is- lamic teachings, and which, in spite of all this, calls itself “the world of Islam.”
19

Qutb’s writings remain the key works of the Islamic Revival, which has been steadily unfolding throughout the forty-plus years since his death. While
Milestones
is regarded as the “ideological foundation of rad- ical political Islam”
20
and has been reprinted many times and translated into many languages, all of Qutb’s books continue to be widely read and studied and his theories and scholarship discussed and debated—and occasionally also criticized and repudiated, including by learned conser- vative scholars of Islam. Qutb can be justly described, in the words of Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Zaman, as among the “most influen- tial architects of contemporary Sunni Islamist political thought” and as a thinker whose works have “provided several generations of Sunni Is- lamists with a moral map of history and politics in which Muslim expe- riences of impotence and suffering are simultaneously explained and offered redress.”
21

Qutb’s influence indeed has been so profound and pervasive that, as another Qutb scholar, Yvonne Haddad, remarked, “In a certain sense, a great deal of what is being published at present is either inspired by his writings, plagiarized from his books, or is commentary on his ideas.”

Writing in the
1980
s and noting that Qutb’s influence knew no borders,

Haddad went on to list just some of the developments under way around the world that marked the trail of Qutb’s pervasive influence. In Iran, for example, she notes, Qutb’s writings not only inspired such prominent intellectuals as Ali Shariati but they inspired the student revolutionaries who in
1979
brought down the shah. In Kuwait, the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations translated and published his books