The New York Times Magazine had this long, interesting piece, The Philosopher of Islamic Terror (non NYT source as they now charge for the same story), on a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb who wrote a very influential radical islamic book called ‘Milestones’. Here is a long passage from the article that provides the most meat:
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Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man’s inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ”to a level lower than the beasts.” Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness — this wretched split between man’s truest nature and modern life?
A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason — an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.
Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion, Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every sphere of life — how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at one with God. This could be done by obeying a system of divinely mandated laws, the code of Moses. In Qutb’s view, however, Judaism withered into what he called ”a system of rigid and lifeless ritual.”
God sent another prophet, though. That prophet, in Qutb’s Muslim way of thinking, was Jesus, who proposed a few useful reforms — lifting some no-longer necessary restrictions in the Jewish dietary code, for example — and also an admirable new spirituality. But something terrible occurred. The relation between Jesus’ followers and the Jews took, in Qutb’s view, ”a deplorable course.” Jesus’ followers squabbled with the old-line Jews, and amid the mutual recriminations, Jesus’ message ended up being diluted and even perverted. Jesus’ disciples and followers were persecuted, which meant that, in their sufferings, the disciples were never able to provide an adequate or systematic exposition of Jesus’ message.
Who but Sayyid Qutb, from his miserable prison in Nasser’s Egypt, could have zeroed in so plausibly on the difficulties encountered by Jesus’ disciples in getting out the word? Qutb figured that, as a result, the Christian Gospels were badly garbled, and should not be regarded as accurate or reliable. The Gospels declared Jesus to be divine, but in Qutb’s Muslim account, Jesus was a mere human — a prophet of God, not a messiah. The larger catastrophe, however, was this: Jesus’ disciples, owing to what Qutb called ”this unpleasant separation of the two parties,” went too far in rejecting the Jewish teachings.
Jesus’ disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus’ divine message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism’s legal system, the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life. Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of the Greeks — the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from physical life, a zone of pure spirit.
In the fourth century of the Christian era, Emperor Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But Constantine, in Qutb’s interpretation, did this in a spirit of pagan hypocrisy, dominated by scenes of wantonness, half-naked girls, gems and precious metals. Christianity, having abandoned the Mosaic code, could put up no defense. And so, in their horror at Roman morals, the Christians did as best they could and countered the imperial debaucheries with a cult of monastic asceticism.
But this was no good at all. Monastic asceticism stands at odds with the physical quality of human nature. In this manner, in Qutb’s view, Christianity lost touch with the physical world. The old code of Moses, with its laws for diet, dress, marriage, sex and everything else, had enfolded the divine and the worldly into a single concept, which was the worship of God. But Christianity divided these things into two, the sacred and the secular. Christianity said, ”Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Christianity put the physical world in one corner and the spiritual world in another corner: Constantine’s debauches over here, monastic renunciation over there. In Qutb’s view there was a ”hideous schizophrenia” in this approach to life. And things got worse.
A series of Christian religious councils adopted what Qutb thought to be irrational principles on Christianity’s behalf — principles regarding the nature of Jesus, the Eucharist, transubstantiation and other questions, all of which were, in Qutb’s view, ”absolutely incomprehensible, inconceivable and incredible.” Church teachings froze the irrational principles into dogma. And then the ultimate crisis struck.
Qutb’s story now shifts to Arabia. In the seventh century, God delivered a new revelation to his prophet Muhammad, who established the correct, nondistorted relation to human nature that had always eluded the Christians. Muhammad dictated a strict new legal code, which put religion once more at ease in the physical world, except in a better way than ever before. Muhammad’s prophecies, in the Koran, instructed man to be God’s ”vice regent” on earth — to take charge of the physical world, and not simply to see it as something alien to spirituality or as a way station on the road to a Christian afterlife. Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages took this instruction seriously and went about inquiring into the nature of physical reality. And, in the Islamic universities of Andalusia and the East, the Muslim scientists, deepening their inquiry, hit upon the inductive or scientific method — which opened the door to all further scientific and technological progress. In this and many other ways, Islam seized the leadership of mankind. Unfortunately, the Muslims came under attack from Crusaders, Mongols and other enemies. And, because the Muslims proved not faithful enough to Muhammad’s revelations, they were unable to fend off these attacks. They were unable to capitalize on their brilliant discovery of the scientific method.
The Muslim discoveries were exported instead into Christian Europe. And there, in Europe in the 16th century, Islam’s scientific method began to generate results, and modern science emerged. But Christianity, with its insistence on putting the physical world and the spiritual world in different corners, could not cope with scientific progress. And so Christianity’s inability to acknowledge or respect the physical quality of daily life spread into the realm of culture and shaped society’s attitude toward science.
As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity’s influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.
Europe’s scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ”hideous schizophrenia” on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery — the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe’s leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition — a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb’s account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the experience doubly painful — an alienation that was also a humiliation.
That was Qutb’s analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past — the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated — a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.
Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, surrounded by criminals and composing his Koranic commentaries with Nasser’s speeches blaring in the background on the infuriating tape recorder, Qutb knew whom to blame. He blamed the early Christians. He blamed Christianity’s modern legacy, which was the liberal idea that religion should stay in one corner and secular life in another corner. He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb’s Koranic commentary — their perfidy, greed, hatefulness, diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.
And Qutb blamed one other party. He blamed the Muslims who had gone along with Christianity’s errors — the treacherous Muslims who had inflicted Christianity’s ”schizophrenia” on the world of Islam. And, because he was willing to blame, Qutb was able to recommend a course of action too — a revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure of modern life and was going to put man at ease with the natural world and with God.
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