The unexpected virtures of reading Sayyid Qutb today

A draft that had been gathering dust…

One of the texts assigned to students in the introduction to Western religion course I TAed this spring is an excerpt from Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones.  My first reaction as someone committed to reform (and not the "reforms" of old-style revivalist movements) upon seeing this in the syllabus in January was frustration, as I worried that his inclusion would confuse students about the nature of contemporary Islamic thought and ultimately only close their minds to the tricky nuances essential to understanding modern Islam.

After some discussions, though, I think Qutb is a perversely good introduction to the issues involved in reform, at least with the proper guidance.  Despite his justifiably fierce reputation and his odious ideological legacy–whatever his own intentions may have been, it is with good reason that he is frequently described as the ideological father of modern Jihadi movements (though, lest we forget,it should be remembered that the USA and Saudi Arabia were the enthusiastic midwives of the fateful transformation of this fringe ideology into a armed, organized and worldwide movement)–reading him today with even the most superficial awareness of how utopian and destructive his ideas has proven to be in practice, one have has no choice but to stop and interrogate his many problematic assumptions, vague slogans and misappropriations of Islamic terminology.

Today, it seems to me that a close reading of his white-hot rhetoric can be quite instructive to the would-be student of reform, as it distills  into their purest, clearest form many of the wrongheaded ideas, fateful philosophical errors, and misconceptions that until recently bedeviled most political Islamic movements to one degree or another, and which to this day dumb down most popular debates about shariah in Islamic societies.

These philosophical and methodological missteps practically jump off the page and demand of the reader, "Look at me!  Look at my cheap emotional appeals and how I pass off literalism and modern political values as strict fidelity to Islamic tradition!"

I should quickly note that I’m far less interested in Qutb’s actual ideas than in how they’ve been received and applied over the last half century. I’ve heard it argued by a traditionally trained scholar with impeccably moderate political leanings that Seyyid Qutb has been grossly misunderstood by followers and contemporary political scientists alike. I don’t know enough to take a position on that question and it’s ultimately besides the point for these purposes. As far as I can tell, his net influence has been overwhelmingly negative for the cause of religious reform and healthy political development in Islamic societies.

For an example of what I’m about when I say that he forces you to consider the role of religious rhetoric,consider his strictures against "man-made theories" in our day of widespread revulsion among Muslim and non-Muslim alike at Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, and with awareness that orthodox Islamic establishment has unambiguously repudiated the claim to doctrinal legitimacy being made by such "Islamic" movements (whose hallmark is, a la Qutb, a neurotic opposition to what they consider man-made forms of governance in favor of a supposed return to pure obedience to Divine Sovereignty).

With all this in mind, it is simply no longer possible to take such claims at face value.  You can’t preach like this with a straight face now that the intensely ideological nature of these early Islamist movements has become painfully obvious.  Far from appearing to descend from the heavens, such utopian rhetoric today bears conspicuous marks of human authorship, as we’ve heard that tune so many times so many times, not to mention seen the disasters to which they inexorably lead.

I think Qutb, in hindsight, also provides a salutary introduction to the pernicious phenomenon of fundamentalist double-talk (a problem found in many religions) and the resulting need of modern Muslims to examine ideas in light of their content as opposed to their ostensibly "Islamic" packaging.  In the West, scoundrels wrap themselves in the flag; in Islamic societies, their refuge of choice is religious Tradition.   Hence the curious modern phenomenon of the most benighted and religiously ignorant actors in Islamic societies distinguishing themselves by loudly calling for devotion to Tawhid and other timeless Islamic values, sometimes more loudly than anybody else.

To be a Muslim is to bear witness–in principle if not always in practice–to God’s perfect unity and the sacred moral authority of His Message in one’s life. But today Qutb’s naive slogans remind us, I think, of the need for a measure of intellectual distance, if not outright scepticism,  when dealing with self-righteous "Islamic" rhetoric that divides the world into simple black and white categories and which dismisses complex fields of human knowledge (e.g., political science) with airy slogans.

This next quote reminds me of Marxist propaganda, and for good reason. 

Only in the Islamic way of life do all men become free from the servititude of some men to others and devote themselves to the worship of Allah alone, deriving guidance from Him alone, and bowing before Him alone.

Now, it’s hard for a Muslim to argue with this claim, that is until he notices how maddeningly elastic these concepts are and how consistently Qutb’s ideological descendants and fellow travelers have passionately opposed meaningful freedom and personal choice in practice.  Instead of making an intellectually honest case for its worldview and hermeneutic approach, this type of fundamentalist slogan cynically invokes universal human values that it ultimately rejects in order to manipulate the listener into allowing an ideology into his life that they would otherwise rightly reject out of hand for its self-evident immoderation and impracticality.

Eventually, such rhetoric deconstructs itself in grisly, Rousseauian fashion. I’m sure the Taliban leaders who imposed abject religious tyranny on Afghanistan approved of Qutb’s sentiments on "man-made" law and fancied themselves to be similarly "freeing" their people from the bondage of imperfect submission to God.

The days of this sort of wooly rhetoric and pseudo-historical analysis wielding wide influence are behind us–just as utopian theorizing about the "dictatorship of the Proletariat" is now painfully out of fashion in the erstwhile Eastern Europe–so I don’t think Qutb is much of a threat today. Anyone so suggestible as to fall under his sway today, given the last half century of history, would been easy pickings for any other intellectual fad, anyway.

To the contrary, I think a bit of Qutb should be required reading today among students of Islamic reform, as the profusion of now discredited (and often ironically modern) political theories artfully packaged in nearly irresistible religious sentiments forces you to grapple with the fact that the genre of religious literature is inherently and notably prone to manipulation by virtue of the ease with which an author may conceal his or her own agenda behind ostensibly objective and unquestionable appeals to sacred authority.

Without that epiphany about the hidden complexities of religious discourse–which seems at first blush highly counterintuitive to many, traditionally minded religionists most of all–one is ill-equipped, in my view, for understanding modern Islamic thought, much less contributing constructively to important reform efforts. Or, more simply put, until you realize that ostensibly traditional religious works can be–but aren’t necessarily, I hasten to add–as much a vehicle for propaganda as anything else, you have no way to protect yourself from manipulation and cooption.

Every once in a while, the person piously intoning salawat the most frequently (and loudly) is, in the final analysis, the least traditional in his outlook.