Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (4 page)

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 in
the 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—but
he 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 policy could actually make it a religious duty for true Muslims to kill their “apostate” rulers and those who support them, a proposition that he defended in his last trial and which was used to justify his death sentence. He was not directly involved in the plot to kill Nasser, but he was tortured, given a show trial, and hanged in August 1966.

There were other prominent philosophers of the nascent Islamist movement like Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna and Maulana Mawdudi, but Sayyid Qutb was the most influential and the one most willing, despite his own rather meek and shy persona, to espouse and justify the use of violence in the construction of an Islamic state (or, as it is now called, “Islamic State”). After his death, his brother Muhammad Qutb moved to Saudi Arabia, where he became a professor of Islamic Studies at King Abdulaziz University and did much to publish and promote Sayyid Qutb’s work. It is reported by a college friend of Osama bin Laden’s that the founder of al Qaeda regularly attended Muhammad Qutb’s weekly public lectures and read Sayyid Qutb’s works.

So there you have it: why it is Arabs and not Indonesians or Turks or other Muslims who carry out most of terrorist attacks; why many Arabs are so very cross—and how a few Arab intellectuals rationalized not only the turn to violence but the killing of fellow Sunni Muslims. (Sayyid Qutb and his colleagues didn’t actually work out justifications for killing Shia Muslims, because there were virtually no Shias in positions of power in Egypt and the nearby Arab countries they were mostly concerned with, but that was easily done when it became tactically desirable to start killing Shias.)

CHAPTER 2

IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU

War is merely the continuation of politics by other means
.

– Carl von Clausewitz,
On War
, 1832

S
o is terrorism.

The enduring delusion that distorts and ultimately dooms Western responses to Islamist terrorism is the belief that the West is the main and most important target of Islamist attacks. Amidst such ignorance, absurd conclusions like George W. Bush’s explanation for 9/11—“they hate our values”—can sound plausible and even convincing to the general Western public. Islamist terrorists do regard Western “values” as sinful, by and large, but they are not in the business of reforming the West. Their focus is on gaining power in their own countries. A complex paramilitary operation like 9/11 is a major undertaking for an Islamist revolutionary group like al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s people needed a concrete return on their investment of time, money and manpower. They got it. When Western armies plunged into the Middle East to “fight terrorism,” the initial al Qaeda investment (nineteen men, some flying lessons, a few box-cutters) was repaid a thousandfold. So it would
help a great deal if we could finally get it through our thick heads that it is not always about us.

Military strategy is a means to an end, not the end itself. Terrorism has its own strategies, and they too are means to an end. In the case of terrorism, the ultimate goal is usually revolution, and those being attacked are often members or supporters of the regime the revolutionaries wish to overthrow. But not always. Sometimes, the revolutionaries will direct their terrorism at third parties, in the hope that those outside forces will react in ways that help the revolutionary cause. And sometimes, too, those third parties are completely bewildered by these attacks.

This has been the case time after time in the response of the West to terrorist attacks by Islamist revolutionaries. It is hard enough for Westerners to recognize that their attackers actually have a coherent strategy and are not simply mad fanatics motivated by hatred. To accept that these terrorist attacks are not really about Western countries at all, but merely an attempt to use the overreaction of Western countries as a stepping-stone to the seizure of power in the terrorists’ own countries, is just too demeaning to bear. For a generation of Americans who take pride in belonging to “the greatest power on Earth,” being the unwitting tool in somebody else’s strategy is inconceivable, so the United States (and other Western countries) generally fall back on simple-minded explanations like “they hate our values” to explain the attacks.

The first generation of Islamist revolutionaries in the
Arab world emerged in the late 1970s in response to the abject failure of the military regimes to keep their promises about delivering economic growth, military might, rising living standards and the defeat of Israel. In this situation it was inevitable that many younger people would turn to thoughts of revolution, but it was not going to be a Marxist revolution: that particular ideology had been thoroughly discredited by the dictators for whom it had been the guiding star. Instead, large numbers of the young revolutionaries turned to Islamism, which proposed an entirely different route to the same goals of prosperity, military security, social justice (and the ultimate defeat of Israel).

Islamist ideology argued that the patterns of development that had worked for the infidel West were completely inappropriate for Muslim societies. Instead, the right course of action was to ensure that everybody strictly observed all the rules laid down by God (in the rather extremist interpretation of Islam favoured by the Islamists) for the behaviour of good Muslims. And once everybody in the society had stopped smoking, stopped drinking alcohol, stopped listening to music, stopped the disgusting mixing of the sexes in social and work situations; once the men had stopped trimming their beards, and once everybody was living as true Muslims had done in the time of the Prophet, 1,300 years ago—then God would ensure that people in the Muslim countries had the power, prosperity and respect they longed for.

It was magical thinking, of course, but a significant minority of Arab Muslims were desperate enough to be seduced by it. To make revolution a reality, however, they needed bigger numbers. So the first task of any Islamist was to start in his own country and build a popular base of support that would one day be able to put tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, risking their lives to bring the old regime down.

The strategy, as in most revolutionary situations, was terrorism. Partly, terrorism is simply “propaganda of the deed”: a way to make yourself and your ideas known to the population when the public media are under government control. But terrorism also creates significant possibilities for pushing the regime into a policy of extreme repression that alienates the public and drives new recruits into the ranks of the Islamists.

Terrorism in the modern style is not an Islamist invention. It is a technique that has been around for at least a century, and revolutionaries of every imaginable variety—the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Shining Path in Peru, the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany—have availed themselves of terrorist strategies. Generally they have failed, since terrorism’s tactics are far from foolproof. But when you are hopelessly outmatched by the military, political and financial resources of the governments you seek to overthrow, you employ the strategy that’s available to you.
Viewed in that context, the Islamist revolutionary movements have made quite effective use of the technique.

Not all Islamist revolutionary movements turned immediately to violence. At the end of the 1980s, for example, many of the Algerian Islamists persuaded themselves that they might actually win power through the ballot box (although they did not believe that democracy was compatible with Islam, and were unforthcoming on their longer-term plans for the Algerian state—a policy caricatured by their critics as “one man, one vote, one time”). Similarly, the main Egyptian Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, avoided violence during this period and was rewarded by being allowed some marginal participation in the Egyptian political system (through the election to parliament of “independent” candidates who were not permitted to publicly proclaim their membership in the Brotherhood). Extreme violence in Egypt was the domain of two much smaller Islamist groups, Islamic Jihad, which organized the assassination of Egypt’s president Anwar Assad in 1981, and the Islamic Group, which waged an insurgency against the Egyptian government in 1992–98 that killed almost eight hundred people. The primary targets of the latter group were Egyptian military and political figures, but towards the end of its campaign it also branched out into killing foreign tourists: seventeen Greek tourists outside their Cairo hotel in 1997, and fifty-eight Western and Japanese tourists in Hatshepsut’s temple in Luxor later the same year.

The strategic rationale behind these attacks was much the same as in terrorist campaigns anywhere else in the world. First, they drew the attention of the public to the existence and ideas of the revolutionary organization, in a media environment where it was otherwise very difficult to get the message out. Second, in countries that depended heavily on tourism—more than 5 percent of Egyptian GDP in the late 1990s—attacks on foreign tourists could create great economic hardship by damaging the tourism industry. In terrorism theory, at least, those who lose their jobs because tourists are afraid to come will blame the government for their misfortune rather than the terrorists, and so will be readier to withdraw their consent from the regime and support the revolutionaries.