At this time an outcry has arisen everywhere, a warning alarm about the fate of humankind in the thrall of a materialist civilization devoid of faith and human spirit – the white man’s civilization. The alarms are various; at times they warn of the descent of all humanity into the abyss; others warn of its descent into Marxism; still others have made various suggestions to prevent these manifold dangers. But all of these attempts are futile because they do not deal with the foundation of the problem, they do not attack the vast and extensive roots of the problem which lie buried beneath European soil. All these outcries and all these remedies just make clear to us the deficiencies and myopia of the European mentality and its vision.40
The West is no longer the source of good as well as bad things, deep in material benefits but shallow in spiritual matters; it has to be rejected in toto. This conviction had been building up over decades among many Muslims. Two destructive world wars and the Great Depression had revealed serious structural flaws in the Western models of politics and economy. Decolonization further undermined the political power of Western countries; and desperate attempts to regain it – in Suez in 1956, and in Algeria and Vietnam – destroyed any fragments of remaining political and moral authority. A further devastating blow to the reputation of the West was the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands in 1948. It confirmed the duplicity that the West had shown with the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement (revealed to the world by Lenin after the Bolshevik Revolution) by which the British and French planned to divvy up the Arabic-speaking countries between them after the First World War; and the racial arrogance revealed at the Paris Peace Conference seemed to have been institutionalised by the imposition of a European settler nation on the Middle East.
Events occurring in far-off lands may have affected only elite perceptions of the West in Muslim countries. But internal changes exposed much larger populations to political tumult and an angry awakening to inequality and injustice. The overall population of Muslim countries increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, forcing many people out of rural areas into crowded cities and towns; the proportion of Muslims living in urban areas rose exponentially between 1950 and 1990. Exposed to the new communications media, the conspicuous consumption of the elites and rampant inequality, many Muslims embraced Islam with a new fervour. Mosques and madrasas sprang up across the new urban landscape. Cheap books and magazines made Islamic piety more widely available and popular Muslim journalists and preachers (few of whom had received the traditional education of the ulema) began to offer a new do-it-yourself Islam to people uprooted from traditional social structures. The pluralization of Islamic authority, of which al-Afghani and Abduh and many other members of the lay Muslim intelligentsia had been the harbingers, was never so accelerated as it was in the last half of the twentieth century.
This new Islam was boosted, too, by the ideological logic of modern nation-building programmes. In countries like Turkey and Egypt, where top-down reforms were imposed by despots, modernization became synonymous with the removal of Islam from the centre of public life, the devalidation of Islamic education and law, and the marginalization of Islamic scholars. As al-Afghani had observed during his travels in the Muslim world, the imperatives of modernization and economic growth imposed by Western powers had radically disrupted the old cohesion of Islamic societies by producing new classes and redistributing power among them.
New urban elites emerged from modern educational institutions and bureaucracies, and they tended to have little time for traditional sources of authority. Many of them enriched themselves at the expense of the rural poor. A reservoir of discontent built up, especially among the people most marginalized by this process, such as the clergy, small-town merchants, provincial officials and men from semi-rural backgrounds – the kind of people who hung around al-Afghani.
What gave anti-Westernism a broader mass base and intellectual foundation was the failure of secular nationalist programmes in post-colonial Muslim countries. In many instances – Egypt, Tunisia, Indonesia, Algeria – the postcolonial Muslim state followed the colonial state’s policies, especially in its suspicion of popular Islam, and tried to restrict if not eliminate altogether the latter’s role in public life. But the vast majority of people in Muslim countries never stopped believing in Islam. They also failed to develop the habit of seeing Islam as a purely religious phenomenon, separate from economics, politics, law and other aspects of collective life.
Westernized and secular postcolonial elites saw Islam as an obstacle to the national task of secular development and economic consolidation; they often cracked down brutally on Islamic groups. But when such modernizing endeavours failed, as they were bound to in many cases, or caused mass suffering, the prestige of Islam was further enhanced. Not only that: in the eyes of their victims, the failures of modernization and secularization diminished the credibility and authority of local elites in Muslim countries and their ideologies of modernization.
Sayyid Qutb witnessed the severe deficiency of both Western-style liberalism and socialism in Egypt; he was also an early critic of nationalism, which he saw as an aspect of the intellectual colonialism suffered by Egypt. Not surprisingly, Qutb, whose life and ideas dramatized the widespread recoil from secular Western ideologies to Islamism, went on to become the inspiration for several generations of radical Islamists in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
Born into a once-prosperous rural family that had fallen on hard times (a background shared by many radicals across Asia), Qutb came of age in an Egypt energized by the post-1919 nationalism of Saad Zaghlul’s nationalist Wafd party. He studied at a secular college in Cairo; his first mentor was a journalist of a fairly conventional liberal bent, and Qutb served as a teacher for many years in Egypt’s modern education system. Indeed, as a literary critic and early admirer of Egypt’s greatest novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, Qutb ranged himself against the more religious writers of his time.
But as the Wafd party failed to make any headway against the pro-British monarch, and the impotence of Western-style liberalism became clear against a background of British gunboat-aided encroachments on Egyptian sovereignty, Qutb began to change his mind. Salafist Islam, of which he was to become a prominent spokesperson, was still a minor current in the secular nationalist Egyptian mainstream. Rashid Rida had turned the pan-Islamism of al-Afghani into a major international force through his magazine al-Manar, and influenced by him, Hasan al-Banna would form the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, giving Salafism an organizational basis. But it was men like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa Kamil who, assisted by Christian and Jewish Arabs, largely led the project of fighting British imperialism and inculcating a sense of Arab nationalism in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Prevented from presenting the Egyptian case at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Saad Zaghlul’s Wafd party led a major uprising against British rule. Secular symbols marked the revolt. a Coptic priest demanded independence from the pulpit of the al-Azhar mosque. Peasants participated in large numbers. The British seemed to give in by unilaterally declaring Egypt a sovereign state in 1922. However, this turned out to be a charade. The British held on to their special privileges in the country, making it impossible for the Wafd government, which came to power in Egypt’s first elections in 1924, to function. Britain’s major collaborator – the monarch – helped by dismissing the parliament on the first day it met in 1925. The British controlled almost every ministry in Egypt. Political self-expression for Egyptians was limited to an appointed Legislative Council, which merely rubber-stamped British decisions. The British occupation forces held the real power in the country, exercising it in 1926 with an actual gunboat that forced the Wafd out of the government.
Relations between the Arab world and the West were never so fraught as they were between the two world wars. Muslim intellectuals who stressed Western ideologies of nationalism, secularism and democracy felt cruelly betrayed by Europe’s refusal to sup
port their aspirations for national independence. Now demarcated by European-style borders, the old boundary-less Dar al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire became an obstacle course for Muslims, even for those going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Working secretly together, Britain and France had already parcelled out among themselves bits of Ottoman territory they had seized after the Great War, creating arbitrary new states in the form of Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon and promising a separate homeland to European Jews in British-ruled Palestine. Fuelled by anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish immigration to Palestine picked up during the inter-war years, when Egyptians were preoccupied with domestic politics.
While Arabs everywhere protested against the appropriation of Palestinian lands, European businessmen extracted Egypt’s resources, degrading its original inhabitants into cheap labour. The Wafd party kept being elected with large majorities but was thwarted from holding political office since it was seen by the British as an ‘ultra-democratic, anti-foreign revolutionary regime’.41 As Nehru, who observed the case of Egypt from India, caustically commented in 1935 ‘democracy for an Eastern country seems to mean only one thing: to carry out the behests of the imperialist ruling power and not to touch any of its interests. Subject to that proviso, democratic freedom can flourish unchecked.’42
Powerful anti-imperialist agitations and uprisings finally reduced British control of Egypt and Sudan in 1936, confining it to the occupation of the corridor of the Suez Canal. The continuing political uncertainty did not help economic reconstruction, especially in the countryside where a rising population and pressure on agricultural land increased poverty. In the eyes of many Egyptians, an overly Westernized ruling elite assumed a colonialist posture towards the mass of poor and illiterate people; these disaffected Egyptians would soon form the bulk of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
In the 1930s, Sayyid Qutb emerged as a critic of British interference, the growing inequalities in Egypt, and the Egyptian inability to support Palestinian Arabs against Zionist settlers. He broke with his liberal mentors, and as anti-colonial movements intensified in India, Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia and Kenya Qutb despaired at Egypt’s ‘native collaborators’.43 His anguish deepened with the establishment in 1948 of the state of Israel, which the systematic murder of 6 million Jews had made a moral imperative for many Western nations. In the war that followed, the Zionists defeated the combined Arab armies, expelled hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants of Palestine, and proclaimed an independent state. This constituted a radical defeat for Egypt in particular – the most modern of Arab nations – and Israel became, and has remained, a symbol of Arab impotence against Western power.
Israel’s victory and Egypt’s military humiliation in 1948 were major milestones in Qutb’s new thinking, as was his trip later that same year to the United States, then the embodiment of post-war modernity. This was where Qutb first began to develop his larger critique of Western civilization as unhealthily obsessed with material and technological progress to the detriment of moral freedom and social justice.
Like Liang Qichao, Qutb found little in the American model of politics and society to recommend back home. Democracy was unworkable in his view, not because it assumed an educated and aware citizenry but because it made human beings the final source of sovereignty, rather than God. Furthermore, the idea that the good life was to be defined in terms of economic well-being became repugnant to Qutb, and also discredited Marxism in his eyes. American expressions of social liberalism and individualism – sexual freedom in particular – appalled him even more. Racism, of which he encountered the anti-Arab variant as well as the traditional version, struck Qutb as an essential feature of America’s material plenitude, generated by the ‘conceit’ that this was ‘the White Man’s endowment’.44 He freely employed the words ‘white man’ as an epithet thereafter: ‘We must nourish in our school-age children sentiments that open their eyes to the tyranny of the white man, his civilization, and his animal hunger.’45
Qutb had already been inspired by the idea of a vanguard Islamist party and Islamic state floated by the Pakistani thinker Abul Ala Mawdudi. Soon after his return from America in 1950, he became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and aggressively began to espouse an Islamist view of politics, society and economy, exhorting Muslims to replace secular regimes with the divine laws as manifested in the Sharia. Like al-Afghani and Abduh before him, Qutb was indifferent to exegetical traditions of Islam, preferring to focus on the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet. Unlike al-Afghani, however, Qutb felt no need to reconcile Islam with reason or science. As he saw it: ‘He who feels a need to defend, justify and apologize is not capable of presenting Islam.’ He deplored the fact that many Muslims exposed to the modern West felt as though ‘Islam stood accused, in need of defending itself, like a prisoner on trial’.46 Qutb had previously included non-Muslim Asia in his broad anti-imperialist front. ‘It seems,’ he had written in 1943, ‘that Eastern civilization and its spiritual treasures is the sanctuary for the world in its present crisis.’47 But now he focused on the ‘bloc of Islam, which, strengthened by the new states of Pakistan and Indonesia, represented the dignity of the Muslim East’.48
Convinced that modern secular life posed more problems than solutions, Qutb began to inveigh against Egypt’s political and social development, which under the auspices of British imperialism had proceeded along mostly Western lines. An opportunity came for Qutb to put his ideas into practice when anti-imperialist Egyptian army officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, staged a coup against the Egyptian king in 1952. Nasser invited Qutb to submit his ideas for a righteous polity but the army officers, who were of a secular and socialist bent, rejected Qutb’s blueprint for an Islamic state. For Qutb, this was a clear sign that Nasser’s regime was, notwithstanding its strident anti-Zionism and pan-Arabism, a mere clone of godless Western imperialists. Relations between the Muslim Brotherhood and the army deteriorated quickly, to the point where the organization was proscribed; Qutb soon found himself imprisoned and tortured. Accused of conspiring against the revolution, he was arrested three times, and kept in prison for most of the next ten years, during which time he suffered from a variety of ailments. The publication of his seminal book, Milestones, landed him in prison for the last time in 1964.
Qutb was given a brisk trial in 1966, after which he was hanged and then buried in an unmarked grave. His relatively brief life belies his influence, which was immense and endures to this day. Just a year after his death, Israel comprehensively defeated Arab armies in the Six-Day War, and the humiliation finally discredited the secular Arab nationalism espoused by Nasser. Though forced underground by the secularist despots who followed Nasser in Egypt, Qutb’s ideas now travelled all over the Muslim world.
His influence spread because Qutb did not just politically challenge the West and Westernizing elites; he also repudiated their epistemological and metaphysical worldview. As he asserted in Milestones:
Humanity is standing today at the brink of an abyss, not because of the threat of annihilation hanging over its head – for this is just a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself – but because humanity is bankrupt in the realm of ‘values’, those values which foster true human progress and development. This is abundantly clear to the Western World, for the West can no longer provide the values necessary for [the flourishing of] humanity.49
Qutb extended a conventional critique of corrupt Middle Eastern regimes and failed modernization into an indictment of all those Western ideologies – whether nationalism, liberalism or socialism – that banished religion and morality from the realm of politics, and exalted human reason above God.
‘Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means,’ Gandhi wrote in the last pages of his autobiography. Qutb, who greatly admired Rabindranath Tagore for his emphasis on spirituality, would no doubt have concurred. Qutb’s ideological heirs, the Sunni Islamic radicals who in recent decades have tried to topple secular dictatorships in Egypt
, Syria and Algeria, were motivated by the same desire to reinstate Islam’s centrality in human life.
However, the radical implications of Qutb’s critique of Western secularism were nowhere as clearly worked out as in Shiite Iran. As Ayatollah Khomeini wrote, using words seemingly borrowed from Qutb (or, with some modifications, Liang Qichao and Tagore):
For the solution of social problems and the relief of human misery require foundation in faith and morals; merely acquiring material power and wealth, conquering nature and space, have no effect in this regard. They must be supplemented by and balanced with, the faith, the conviction, and the morality of Islam, in order to truly serve humanity, instead of endangering it … So as soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something, we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world and the hereafter.50
Khomeini was referring to the most ambitious programme to catch up with the West since Muhammad Ali’s nineteenth-century reforms in Egypt. This was the shah’s ‘White Revolution’ of 1963. Not surprisingly, it was also Iran that hosted what Michel Foucault called the ‘first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’. According to Foucault, ‘Islam, which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization – has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men.’51 The Iranian Islamic Revolution became the prime example of how, in the absence of any democratic politics, Muslims could use Islamic themes of sacrifice and martyrdom to challenge despotic and corrupt rulers who claimed legitimacy both domestically and in the West as modernizers and secularizers.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 31