Before moving on to Qutb, let me make one last key point about Hassan al Banna. This is his vision for women:
... a campaign against ostentation in dress and loose behaviour; the instruction of women in what is proper, with particular strictness as regards female instructors, pupils, physicians, and students, and all those in similar categories... a review of the curricula offered to girls and the necessity of making them distinct from the boys' curricula in many stages of education ... segregation of male and female students; private meetings between men and women, unless within the permitted degrees of relationship, to be counted as a crime for which both will be censured ... the encouragement of marriage and procreation, by all possible means; promulgation of legislation to protect and give moral support to the family, and to solve the problems of marriage ... the closure of morally undesirable ballrooms and dance-halls, and the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes ..."
What he is describing is gender apartheid, and by the way, AJK, something very similar to this is taking place now in Gülen schools in Turkey, with the consequence that girls educated in such schools are meek and silent and subordinated by the age of eight. Would you like to see this for yourself? Get in touch; I'll tell you where to go. If you cannot see that this is a worrying development in a secular country that has until now guaranteed women equality under the law, I'm forced unhappily to conclude that you think the dignity and equality of women are a detail. We can of course discuss this civilly, but when it comes down to it, this makes our perspectives irreconcilable.
Now to Qutb, one of the leading intellectuals of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. His views on women are also of special note; he believed the Koran instructed men to be "managers of women's affairs," and himself never married because he was unable to find a woman of sufficient moral purity. Famously, Qutb's views were shaped by a sojourn in America from 1948 to 1950; he found himself aghast by the "animal-like mixing of the sexes." Americans, he concluded, were "numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether."
Upon returning to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood and became head of its propaganda section and a high member of its guidance council. In 1952, Nassar overthrew the Egyptian government. The Brotherhood welcomed the coup, expecting Nasser to establish an Islamic state, but when Nasser declined to implement Islamic law, the warm relationship between the Free Officers and the Brotherhood soured. (This is to put it blandly; in 1954 they attempted to assassinate him.) Qutb was imprisoned in the ensuing crackdown. He wrote In the Shade of the Qur'an and Milestones from his prison cell.
In Milestones, he advanced the case that nominally Islamic states such as Egypt's were in fact pagan, and therefore the proper target of jihad--the violent kind, not the "conquest of ego" kind. His works are radically anti-secular and anti-Western and raveningly anti-Semitic, and if you don't trust me on this, just read them. The hallmark of his thought is the emphasis on Islam as a complete system of justice and governance--every aspect of human society, law, and governance, he held, should be based entirely and only on Sharia. Everything that is not Islamic should be eliminated. Penalty for fornication? Stoning. That kind of Islamic law, not the "This must be reinterpreted to adapt to modernity" kind. This is not some phobic caricature of Qutb; it's Qutb.
I would like all of you now to pause and read the whole book. It will take you a half an hour. Focus on passages such as these, of which there are many worth considering:
Those who say that Islamic Jihad was merely for the defense of the 'homeland of Islam' diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life and consider it less important than their 'homeland'. This is not the Islamic point of view, and their view is a creation of the modern age and is completely alien to Islamic consciousness. What is acceptable to Islamic consciousness is its belief, the way of life which this belief prescribes, and the society which lives according to this way of life. The soil of the homeland has in itself no value or weight. From the Islamic point of view, the only value which the soil can achieve is because on that soil God's authority is established and God's guidance is followed; and thus it becomes a fortress for the belief, a place for its way of life to be entitled the 'homeland of Islam', a center for the movement for the total freedom of man. Of course, in that case the defense of the 'homeland of Islam' is the defense of the Islamic beliefs, the Islamic way of life, and the Islamic community. However, its defense is not the ultimate objective of the Islamic movement of Jihad but is a means of establishing the divine authority within it so that it becomes the headquarters for the movement of Islam, which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.
The implications are quite clear. This is one of the most radical philosophies ever exposited in the history of human thought, and this is one of the leading intellectuals in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Do note, again, that Qutb himself acknowledges with regret that there are Muslims who disagree. He believes they are bad and mistaken. He laments their error (and makes the case for declaring them apostates). I am quite happy to take their side in the debate, not his.
In 1966, Qutb was executed. The ties from Qutb to al Qaeda are direct: His student Ayman Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden's mentor. Anwar al-Awlaki read Qutb while imprisoned in Yemen and described himself as "so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly."
The links between Qutb and terrorism are not hard to establish. But this is not the crucial point. The crucial point is the nature of the society he envisions as the ideal. You can get to such a society by means of war or you can get there by means of elections; the fact that the latter isn't the former hardly means that it is desirable.
The next question to ask--the next question that is being asked, in our policy-making establishment--is to what extent the mainstream in various contemporary Muslim Brotherhood movements have renounced Qutb or his ideals. It hardly seems an access of paranoia to ask anyone who is in the organization to which he devoted his life and which descends from it directly where, exactly, they stand on Qutb, does it?
What about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Has it renounced Qutb? No, it has not. He is in the pantheon, on the reading list. There is a tendency to minimize his ideas, yes, or to claim they have been misunderstood as a call for violence when in fact that's not what he meant. But they all read him. He remains a central influence.
If you want to know how influential he remains, study his relationship to the new, the current Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie--“considered to be one of the most loyal leaders to the organization of Sayyid Qutb.”
I leave looking up Muhammed Badie--and figuring out exactly where he stands on Qutb--to you as a homework exercise. You may also wish to examine his position on other significant political issues. The comment thread is open for you to report your findings.
His views are not a secret. But for some reason few wish to think about what they might mean.
