Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free Page B

lot currently in power.” A completely different approach was needed, and many of the revolutionaries found it in the “Islamist” thought of an Egyptian writer, scholar and poet called Sayyid Qutb.
    Qutb, born in a small village in upper Egypt in 1906, worked in Cairo as a senior official in the ministry of education but was also a successful literary figure who moved in high political and intellectual circles. Like many Egyptian men of his generation, he held deeply conservative social views, but there was nothing radical about him until he went on a two-and-a-half-year study tour in the United States in 1948–51 to study American educational methods. There he observed and was appalled by American ways, decided that he hated “Western civilization,” and committed himself fully to an austere and fundamentalist version of Islam. He described churches as “entertainment centres and sexual playgrounds” and was particularly dismayed by the freedoms enjoyed by American women, writing that: “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and inthe shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.” (It need hardly be mentioned that Qutb never married because he could not find a woman of sufficient “moral purity and discretion.”) 3
    On his return to Egypt Qutb quit the civil service and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was itself then turning from peaceful agitation to violence, and became the chief of its propaganda section. In 1952 he began writing his eight-volume work, In the Shadow of the Qur’an . It was a strongly fundamentalist commentary on the holy book that emphasized the institution of jihad and depicted Jews, Christians and even those Muslims who did not fully obey the rules of Shari’ah (Islamic religious law)—including almost all of the dictators and kings who ruled the Arab countries but failed to impose Shari’ah law—as enemies of God. Qutb had no explicit views on what form of governance should follow once the rulers were overthrown—he has even been accused of “anarcho-Islamism”—but he was definitely anti-nationalist. There was only one Umma (the community of Muslim believers), and it must not be divided by national borders.
    Where the military rulers and conservative monarchs of the Arab world peddled the fading vision of powerful Arab national states on the European model (but still Muslim, of course), Sayyid Qutb offered a return to the glorious Golden Age of the undivided caliphate. The revived caliphate would be very powerful too, of course—indeed, one day it would encompass the whole world—buthe was largely silent on the physical sources of its power. Would it be heavily industrialized, urbanized, organized for efficient production? He didn’t say, but one gets the impression that he thought not. Would it be democratic? Certainly not: it would function in accordance with God’s laws as interpreted by Islamic scholars, not in response to the whims of mere men.
    For many young Arabs who were deeply disillusioned by the failures of the existing order, it was an entrancing vision, but to those then in power it was clearly a mortal threat, and they responded accordingly. In 1954 Nasser ordered the arrest of Qutb and many other members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb spent the next ten years in prison but after a few years was allowed to resume writing, and he managed to finish In the Shadow of the Qur’an . He was released in 1964, but rearrested in 1965 after an assassination attempt against Nasser by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. During his time at liberty he wrote his Islamist manifesto, Milestones , which argued that the corrupt, Westernized regimes of the Muslim world had to be overthrown in order for the world’s Muslims to live as God intended. This