Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (7 page)

The shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism, and can be highlighted by the history of a single mass organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, in Egypt. The society was founded in March 1928 when Hassan al-Banna, a young teacher inspired by the ideas of al-Afghani,
among others, heard a plea for action from workers in the town of Ismailiyyah. Echoing al-Afghani, he argued that Muslims must draw on their own historical and cultural resources instead of imitating other peoples, as if they were “cultural mongrels.” The six-point program of action that al-Banna devised focused on creating an extensive welfare organization and disavowed violence.

It was the defeat of Arab armies in 1948 and the subsequent creation of the state of Israel that convinced the society to expend its energies beyond welfare to armed politics: Hassan al-Banna called for the formation of a battalion to fight in Palestine. Said to be a state within a state, with its own “armies, hospitals, schools, factories and enterprises,” the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser’s prisons, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prison. The experience of such brutal repression under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a radical orientation in Egyptian Islamist thought. The second influence, a more theoretical one, came from Marxism-Leninism, already the most important alternative to political Islam in intellectual debates on how best to confront a
repressive secular state that had closed off all possibilities of democratic change.

Sayyid Qutb is the most well known among the intellectual pioneers of radical political Islam, a movement that now stands for a radically reformulated notion of
jihad
, a doctrine shared by all Muslims, and now hotly contested. The debate around radical political Islam is thus increasingly a debate on the meaning of “jihad.” Concern for the umma, the Muslim community, is part of the five pillars
(rukn)
of Islam and is binding on every Muslim. The Koran insists that a Muslim’s first duty is to create a just and egalitarian society in which poor people are treated with respect. This demands a jihad (literally, effort or struggle) on all fronts: spiritual and social, personal and political. Scholars of Islam distinguish between two broad traditions of jihad:
al-jihad al-akbar
(the greater jihad) and
al-jihad al-asghar
(the lesser jihad). The greater jihad, it is said, is a struggle against weaknesses of self; it is about how to live and attain piety in a contaminated world. Inwardly, it is about the effort of each Muslim to become a better human being. The lesser jihad, in contrast, is about self-preservation and self-defense; directed outwardly, it is the source of Islamic notions of what Christians call “just war,” rather than “holy war.” Modern Western thought, strongly influenced by Crusades-era ideas of “holy war,” has tended to portray jihad as an Islamic war against unbelievers, starting with the conquest of Spain in the eighth century. Tomaž Mastnak has insisted, “Jihad cannot properly be defined as holy war“: “Jihad is a doctrine of spiritual effort of which military action is only one possible manifestation; the crusade and jihad are, strictly speaking, not comparable.” At the same time, political action is not contradictory to jihad. Islam sanctions rebellion against an unjust ruler,
whether Muslim or not
, and the lesser jihad can involve a mobilization for that social and political struggle.

Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a “just struggle” has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan—until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century.

The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Senegambia had been the first African region to come into contact with the Atlantic trading system. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the slave trade had become the principal business of European powers on the African coast. One of its main effects was widespread violence in day-to-day life. Among those who sold slaves were Islamic rulers in the region. The crisis was felt most deeply in Berber society, which was caught in a pincer movement between Arab armies closing in from the north and the expanding frontiers of the European slave trade in the south.

Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders
(marabout)
intent on unifying the region against the negative effects of the slave trade. The first War of the Marabout began in 1677 in the same area that had given rise to the eleventh-century Al-Moravid movement. The difference was that whereas the Al-Moravids had moved north, ultimately to conquer Spain, the marabout moved south. The second War of the Marabout culminated with the Muslim revolution in the plateau of Futa Jallon in 1690. Among the Berbers of the north and the peoples of the south, militant Islam found popular support for jihad against Muslim aristocracies selling their own subjects to European slave traders. The leaders of the revolution in Futa Jallon set up a federation divided into nine provinces, with the head of each appointed a general in the
jihad. When the last of the revolutionary leaders died in 1751, the leadership passed from the religious marabout to commanders in the army. The new military leaders began an aggressive policy targeting neighbors and raiding for slaves—all under the guise of a jihad. The Muslim revolutions that had begun with the first War of the Marabout had come full circle in the space of eighty years: from leading a popular protest against the generalized violence of the slave trade, they founded a new state whose leaders then joined the next round of slave trading.

The third time jihad was widely waged as a “just war” was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab’s jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi’a “heretics,” whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain.

The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi (the Messiah) in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British). Al-Mahdi was spectacularly successful as the organizer of the revolt. Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists (followers of al-Mahdi) won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed
Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. So long as they fought a hated external enemy, the Mahdists won widespread support in all regions. But once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions and create a united Sudan under a single rule, the anticolonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north—where Messianic interpretations of Islam fought it out against Sufi (mystical) ones—and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898. As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power—at the expense of its supporters.

Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the
call
for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the Cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abul A’la Mawdudi, whose work began to be published in Egypt in 1951, and Sayyid Qutb. Mawdudi (1903-1979) appeared at a moment when the ulama, organized as the Jam’iyat-i-Ulama-i-Hind (Society of the Ulama of India), were supporting a multireligious, decentralized yet united India against the demand, led by political intellectuals, for the creation of Pakistan. As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the
umma.
The irony was that though the formation of Pakistan
gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism and the nation-state that Muhammed Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other nation preoccupied with building its own state. Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islamist intellectuals. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan (“the land of the pure”) was still Na-Pakistan (either “not yet the land of the pure” or “the land of the impure”). For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an
Islamic
state. To realize that end, he established Jamaat-i-Islami (the Islamic Community) in Karachi in 1941 and had himself confirmed as its emir. Key to Mawdudi’s thought was centralized power and jihad as the ultimate struggle for the seizure of state power. He defined “the ultimate objective of Islam to abolish the lordship of man over man and bring him under the rule of the one God,” with jihad as its relentless pursuit: “To stake everything you have—including your lives—to achieve this purpose is called Jihad…. So, I say to you: if you really want to root out corruption now so widespread on God’s earth, stand up and fight against corrupt rule; take power and use it on God’s behalf.
It is useless to think you can change things by preaching alone.”
(italics mine) With both eyes focused on the struggle for power, Mawdudi redefined the meaning of
Din
(religion) in a purely secular way: “Acknowledging that someone is your ruler to whom you must submit means that you have accepted his Din…. Din, therefore, actually means the same thing as state and government.” He also secularized Islam, equating it not with other religions but with political ideologies that seek the conquest of the state, such as popular sovereignty or monarchy or, above all, Communism: “A total Din, whatever its nature, wants power for itself; the prospect of sharing
power is unthinkable. Whether it is popular sovereignty or monarchy, Communism or Islam, or any other Din, it must govern to establish itself. A Din without power to govern is just like a building which exists in the mind only.” Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad.

Mawdudi’s influence on Sayyid Qutb regarding the necessity of jihad as an armed struggle is widely recognized. Less recognized, though, is the difference between the two. Even if Qutb proclaims the absolute sovereignty of God, he does it in a sense entirely different from Mawdudi: “A Muslim does not believe that another besides the one God can be divine, and he does not believe that another creature but himself is fit to worship him; and he does not believe that ‘sovereignty’ may apply to any of his servants.” Indeed, unlike Mawdudi’s preoccupation with the state as the true agent of change in history, Qutb’s thought is far more society centered; Reinhard Schulze has noted that “the deputy of divine sovereignty” for Qutb is “man as an individual” and “not the state, as Mawdudi saw it.”

Sayyid Qutb began his public career in the service of the Egyptian Ministry of Education after graduating from a prestigious teacher-training college in Cairo in 1933. His first book,
The Task of the Poet in Life
, suggested the promise of a literary career. In 1948, Qutb was sent by the ministry on a study mission to the United States. Though the manuscript had been finished prior to his departure, Qutb’s first important book,
Social Justice in Islam
, was published during the time he was in America. Qutb explained his objective in the opening chapter of the book:

We have only to look to see that our social situation is as bad as it can be; it is apparent that our social conditions have no possible relation to justice; and so we turn our eyes to Europe, America or Russia, and we expect to import from there solutions to our problems … we continually cast aside all our own spiritual heritage, all our intellectual endowment, and all the solutions which might well be revealed by a glance at these things; we cast aside our fundamental principles and doctrines, and we bring in those of democracy, or socialism, or communism.