Gandhi was both a warrior and a sage. He was the most philosophical of politicians and the most political of philosophers. In addition to his theories of truth, violence and asceticism, Gandhi rethought the whole relation between ends and means in politics. He always insisted that violence and non-violence were not two means to the same end – say, Indian independence. He well understood that the resort to violence creates a very different future from the use of non-violence. First, each of us shapes our own character by what we choose to do or to suffer. If we choose violence, then we will become violent. How can true peace be created by violent people? Second, as a chivalric warrior, Gandhi always looked forward to reconciliation and friendship with his opponents. By fighting with the sword of love and the armour of truth, he created the basis for harmony with his former enemies. Third, Gandhi well appreciated the uncertainties of politics: we can be sure only of our present choices. So sacrificing the good that can be done today for an uncertain future made no sense to him. Our means become our ends: only peaceful means can lead to true peace. For Gandhi, non-violence was not only a policy but also an ethical creed.
Gandhi argued that his creed of non-violent resistance was both universally applicable and morally pure. The logic of non-violent resistance is to punish oneself for the crime of one’s oppressor, so as to rebuke his conscience. If one’s oppressor has no conscience, then the non-violent appeal to that conscience will fail. Nation-states do not generally have a conscience, so pacifism between states usually means appeasement of aggressors: even Gandhi denounced the appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938. In Nazi and communist regimes, vicious ideologies have wholly or partly occluded the humane conscience of the agents of those regimes. Non-violent resistance cannot check evil where no appeal to a humane conscience is possible. General Smuts might be moved, but not Heinrich Himmler. Moreover, Gandhian politics depends upon free communication for the co-ordination of direct action. If all the leaders of non-violent resistance were suddenly to disappear, what hope would there be for any collective action? For these reasons, Gandhian politics only works in countries enjoying basic civil liberties. When asked about the Jews in Nazi Germany, all Gandhi could suggest was mass suicide.
If not universally applicable, is Gandhian non-violence morally pure? Unfortunately, collective action always victimizes innocent third parties. Gandhi’s boycotts against the government in India caused the sacking of sympathetic textile workers in Lancashire. Boycotts and strikes always impose harms and costs upon many people who are not party to the conflict. Moreover, Gandhi’s own self-punishing fasts appeared to many of his contemporaries as a form of moral blackmail. In those ‘fasts unto death’, he threatened his opponents: ‘unless you stop what you are doing, I’ll starve myself’. This may not be as coercive as killing, but it is still coercive. Politics is impossible without coercion of some kind. Gandhi’s non-violent coercion is often both more effective and morally superior to violent coercion, but even a non-violent politics cannot be morally pure.
Gandhi’s genius was to show, however, that ascetic discipline can help to sustain a heroic politics of non-violent resistance. His most famous successor was the Revd Dr Martin Luther King, who trained his followers in the techniques of non-violent protest and patient suffering. King’s non-violent politics aimed to remove the laws enforcing racial segregation in the American south: he succeeded because of the existence of basic civil liberties in the United States, and because the conscience of most American southerners was not deaf to the appeal of racial justice. Perhaps the most dramatic successes of Gandhian politics were achieved in Eastern Europe in 1989. Massive protest crowds patiently endured actual and threatened violence for months, bringing down communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany and the Baltic states. If a large enough mass of people decides not to co-operate with evil, no regime can survive. Political scientists are discovering that non-violent protests are usually the most effective means of removing oppressive regimes.
Gandhian politics does not work everywhere, and it is not morally pure. But, in most cases, it offers a better path to social and political justice than violence does. In his day, Gandhi’s politics was often denounced by progressives as medieval and reactionary. Yet the future seems likely to belong to this monk and warrior for peace.
24
Sayyid Qutb: The Jihadist
In 1948, an idealistic teacher of modern literature seeking professional training travelled from his home in Cairo, Egypt, to the small, conservative, dry, rural town of Greeley, Colorado, in the American West, to study at the Colorado State Teachers College. This teacher, Sayyid Qutb, certainly received an education in Greeley – and at other American campuses he visited – but not one he was expecting. He wrote letters home from the US expressing his horror at what he considered the shameless sexual promiscuity, the obsession with brutal sports and the worship of the almighty dollar. Like most travellers, Qutb learned more about his own country and beliefs than about the country he was visiting: the shock of American co-education (‘the animal-like mixing of the sexes’), American materialism and racism turned Qutb from a moderate to a radical Islamist. Greeley, Colorado, thus may be viewed as the improbable birthplace of modern militant Islam.
Soon after returning from the US, Qutb joined the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt. He supported Gamal Nasser’s military coup but soon fell out with the more secular general. Gaoled by Nasser, Qutb was repeatedly tortured but still managed to write a six-volume commentary on the Qur’an while in prison before he was hanged in 1966 – making him the first great martyr of modern political Islam. Many Westerners often assume that militant Islam is primarily directed against Christians or Jews, but Qutb’s life, thought and death show that modern Islamic radicalism is directed primarily against the governments of Muslim countries – and Westerners who support those governments. It is impossible to begin to understand religiously motivated violence without first understanding that Christians have mainly killed other Christians, Jews other Jews and Muslims other Muslims. Religious violence is primarily fraternal, as we saw with the assassination of Gandhi by a fellow Hindu.
Like many devout Christians, Jews and Muslims, Qutb was deeply disturbed by the secularism of modern life, in which religion had retreated to occasional services on the Sabbath. In his view, modern people act like mere animals during the working week by eating, sleeping, shopping, earning and procreating with no thought of God, becoming spiritual beings only during Sabbath worship. Qutb rejected this division of human beings into everyday materialists who become spiritual only at the mosque. True happiness is possible only by integrating the whole of life into devotion to God, so that every meal, every job, every friendship, every act of parenting becomes a kind of prayer to the Holy One. Qutb’s ideal of a truly Islamic society is not an ascetic world of constant self-denial but an integrated world in which all the pleasures of life are fully enjoyed within the moderate and humane bounds of Islamic law. Islam, he says, demands our whole lives, not merely Sabbath worship. We shall never be happy until our material and our spiritual pursuits are fully integrated. Islam, he says, is not a religion; it is a whole way of life.
Militant Islam is often accused of being medieval and reactionary. Qutb routinely appealed to a vision of the first generation of Muslims as the standard by which to judge the subsequent corruption of Islam. But Qutbian Islam, like other fundamentalisms, is thoroughly modern. In traditional Islam, the Qur’an is studied in the light of various traditions of interpretation and schools of jurisprudence. Qutb rejects all of these, calling for a return to the pure Qur’anic text – as interpreted by himself. In traditional Muslim societies, there are many intermediaries between Islamic law and individual Muslims, including ethnic customs, tribal elders, jurists and kings. Qutb wants to sweep all of them away so that each individual Muslim can be ruled by Islamic law alone. In place of traditional social and religious hierarchies, he offers radical equality; in place
of traditional political authorities, he offers radical freedom from human domination. According to Qutb, the modern ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity are possible only through the submission of every individual person to God alone.
Qutb’s vision of divine sovereignty cannot be understood apart from the biblical and Qur’anic portrait of a jealous God, who insists that we are loyal to Him alone: ‘You shall have no gods besides me’. The Abrahamic religions are committed not merely to divine monotheism but also to divine monogamy: God does not tolerate infidelity – that is, worshipping other gods. Qutb insists that when human beings put their trust in wealth, military power, technology or human governments, we are guilty of that same infidelity. Divine sovereignty means that we must not submit to any human power but only to God. Qutb is certainly right that modern theories of political sovereignty are incompatible with divine sovereignty. If a human government is sovereign, then God cannot be sovereign; if God is sovereign, then no government can be sovereign. Sovereignty by definition is indivisible. All modern governments claim to be sovereign, thus denying God’s sovereignty. Qutb rejects the idea that God somehow appoints earthly rulers and shares his sovereignty with them: God is a jealous God who demands complete loyalty. ‘No god but God’ means no sovereignty but God’s, no law but God’s and no authority but God’s.
Because there is only one God, there is also only one people. Traditionally, Islam has had a special relationship to Arabia, to the Arabic language and to the larger Arab nation. Qutb insists, however, that all of these national and cultural distinctions must be swept away into a global community of Islam. He attacks Judaism for being merely a tribal religion and Christianity for being a merely spiritual one. Islam alone, he says, is universal and holistic, providing a guide to personal, familial, economic, social and political life for every human being.
The word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’, and Qutb argues that true freedom is possible only by total submission to God. When we obey human beings, he says, we sink into servitude because we become subject to an arbitrary human will. Obedience to God means submission to a perfectly rational and just will. This kind of submission creates true human freedom. According to Rousseau, submission to any particular human will is servitude while submission to ‘the general will’ is freedom. Qutb agrees with Rousseau, although he argues that the only truly general will is the divine will, not the popular will.
Qutb’s ideal Islamic ruler, a caliph or imam, has no independent authority and no power to legislate. He is merely God’s deputy – responsible for interpreting, applying and enforcing Islamic law. Qutb’s ideal regime is the rule of God (literally, a theocracy). But since theocracy has come to mean the rule of priests, Qutb denies that Islam could be a theocracy since it has no priests. The Islamic ruler lacks the sacred authority of priests or holy men; the caliph is merely a first among equals. Each caliph should be chosen by the Muslim people. So long as the caliph enforces Islamic law and only Islamic law, the people are obliged to obey him.
Qutb is most notorious for his theory of jihad. He has been called ‘the philosopher of Islamic terror’ – even though he insists that women and children may never be attacked. Jihad for Qutb begins with a spiritual fight against temptation. He argues that no one can fight effectively for social justice who has not conquered injustice within himself. Although preaching, testifying and witnessing to one’s faith are kinds of jihad, Qutb is clear that jihad also means ‘kill and be killed’. He defends jihad as a kind of holy war against those who are ignorant of God, pointing out that it is endorsed by the Old Testament and was practised by Christians during the Crusades. Traditionally, jihad was justified first to eliminate paganism from Arabia and then to defend the Muslim homelands from invading non-believers. Qutb’s innovation is to transform this defensive (and tribal) jihad into a global struggle to establish Islam. He pioneers a jihad directed primarily against the Muslim rulers of Islamic societies.
Qutbian jihad is a natural consequence of his religious holism. If Islam means a complete way of life, then Muslims must fight for control over every aspect of personal, social, religious and political activity. Islam cannot be a private religious belief or practice segregated from the rest of economic and political life. ‘Freedom of religion’ for Muslims, he says, is meaningless unless Muslims can live out their religion in every aspect of life. Significantly, this means that Muslims can tolerate Christian and Jewish minorities within an Islamic polity, but Muslims cannot live their faith as a minority within a non-Muslim polity.
How is jihad compatible with religious liberty for all? According to Qutb, the Qur’an endorses both principles: ‘fight them until there is no more oppression and all submission is to God alone’ and ‘there shall be no compulsion in religion’. So long as Muslims live in a society that does not conform in every aspect to Islam, they are religiously oppressed, even by Muslim rulers. But a truly Islamic polity tolerates the religious liberty of Jewish and Christian minorities, who can fully practise their religions. Once an Islamic polity is established, then jihad takes the form of preaching and witnessing to the faith, which will one day win over most Jews and Christians. Hence, jihad creates the conditions for universal and true religious liberty.
Many Westerners argue that Islam needs to experience a reformation in order to become compatible with modern liberalism. But militant Islam already is a would-be Reformation. Like the early Lutherans and Calvinists of the Protestant Reformation, Qutb denounces the corruption of the clergy, the theologians and the jurists. Luther’s slogan was ‘Scripture alone’ while Qutb’s is ‘Qur’an alone’. Just as the Calvinists sought to restore the pristine purity of ‘primitive’ Christianity, so Qutb advocates a return to the pure Islam of the first generation of Muslims. Over the centuries Islam, like Catholic Christianity, had acquired many religious customs not found in Scripture, such as forms of mysticism, liturgies, veneration of martyrs and shrines, processions and religious music and art. Militant Islam is just as iconoclastic as Calvinism: all of these traditional religious customs and forms of art are violently attacked as mere idolatry. The Puritans created political communities governed by biblical law alone, just as Qutb seeks a world ruled by Qur’anic law alone.
Qutb believed that human beings are religious animals more than economic animals. If Marx claimed that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’, then Qutb claims that both Marxism and capitalism are the true opiates of the masses. Modern politicians ‘drug’ people with ever greater material resources when what people really want is more spiritual meaning. Many people today are surprised that twentieth-century secular revolutions in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel, India and Pakistan have provoked religious counter-revolutions in all those nations. Qutb would not be. If human nature yearns for knowledge of the one God, then no amount of economic or technological progress will answer those yearnings. In retrospect, it is the secular progressivists of the mid-twentieth century who appear naïve about human nature. According to Qutb, all political conflict is theological conflict at the root. Western imperialism is not about economic or political power but about Christian hegemony. Our only choice in politics is whether to honour the true God or some false idol of our own making.
As Westerners discovered during the Protestant Reformation, nothing is so revolutionary as a return to the past. Qutb’s return to the Qur’an promises an equally dramatic transformation of our world. Earlier in this book, we noted that the first Islamic political philosopher, Al-Farabi, was confident that Islam could incorporate the best of Western philosophy and science. Qutb, by contrast, is fearful that Islam will become fatally contaminated by the very same Western arts and sciences. The fate of the world now largely depends on which of these two contrasting forms of Islam prevails.
25
Hannah Arendt: The Pariah
Hannah Arendt narrowly escaped from the Nazis twice. In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and held for eight days. After her release she promptly fled to Paris, where, as a
Jew, she was later stripped of her German citizenship. (She would remain a stateless person until she became a US citizen after the war.) The Nazis caught up with her again when they invaded France in 1940. She was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ in a camp near the Spanish border. Luckily, in the chaos caused by the fall of France that summer, Arendt was allowed to leave the camp. She lay low until the new puppet government installed by the Nazis briefly relaxed its exit permit policy, when Arendt and her husband made their escape to America. When she arrived in the US in 1941 (she was 35), she had just $25 in her pocket and only a limited knowledge of English. All of the works for which she became well known had yet to be written. But her background as a persecuted victim of a totalitarian regime forced into exile (twice) had by then indelibly shaped her outlook on politics. So it was that Arendt began to write the book that would first bring her to public notice, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
How to Think Politically Page 17