Mick Hartley

Tim Black at Spiked on Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood after the First World War:

In Europe, the collapse of the pre-war liberal order fuelled radical vanguardism, be it Communist, fascist or modernist. The colonial metropoles witnessed a similar political and cultural insurgency, refracted through a more explicitly anti-Western, anti-imperial lens and framed in national, cultural terms. Nowhere more so than in Cairo, in British-occupied Egypt, where young and young-ish radicals challenged the status quo. It was in this context that Islam was effectively and implicitly repurposed as an ideology – indeed, as an –ism to sit alongside the others that were flourishing in Europe and elsewhere during this period.

This was not Islam as a set of devotional practices. This was Islam as a revolutionary solution to the perceived failure of Western, liberal modernity. Its advocates no longer measured their faith against Christianity. They pitched it into battle against liberalism and capitalism, as a revolutionary challenge to the liberal order to rival that of fascism or Communism – the latter being a political creed that Islamists dismissed as just another outgrowth of godless Western rationalism.

The creation of the Society of Muslim Brothers (otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood) in Cairo in 1928 is the key moment. Its founder, a then 22-year-old teacher called Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), gave Islamism its first organisational form. But it is in the later work of Banna’s contemporary, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian teacher and civil servant, that Islamism gained arguably its most influential and explosive articulation. In the multi-volume In the Shade of the Koran (1951-1965) and, above all, in Milestones (1964), Qutb presented Islam as a political order (Nizam), indeed, as ‘the only system’ capable of rescuing mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’.

Since the goal of the radical left has long been, similarly, to rescue mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’, the current red-green alliance becomes easier to understand. The enemy of my enemy….

Though wrought from the scenery, symbolism and parables of the Koran, Qutb’s Islam was also modern and revolutionary. He reimagined the first Muslims as professional, vanguardist revolutionaries. He reapplied the ancient era of ‘Jahiliyyah’, the pre-Islamic ‘age of ignorance’, to the present-day world. And he recast the ‘crusaders’ of America and Europe – and, above all, ‘Zionists’ and ‘world Jewry’ – as Islam’s cosmic, evil-doing enemies. He drew Manichean battle lines and pledged war on the unbelievers. As political scientist Bassam Tibi has it in Islamism and Islam (2012), Qutb is ‘the rector spiritus of political Islam’, the figure ‘who first interpreted jihad as an “Islamic world revolution” in the pursuit of an Islamic world order’.

And here we are.

Much has been written of Qutb’s immersion in the Koran, and of his affinity with the spiritual richness of his rural upbringing (captured in his 1946 work, A Child from the Village). But Qutb’s worldview was also nourished by Western cultural sources. Like al-Ayadd, he drew deep on the social protests of Romanticism, and its appeal to more authentic sources of experience. Like many of his generation, he also inhaled the darker, reactionary fumes of the later anti-Enlightenment turn among many European thinkers, writers and artists, from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. He saw something valuable in their critiques of reason, autonomy and universalism in the name of feeling, crowd psychology and cultural particularism. He was familiar with Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1922), and above all Alexis Carrel’s Man the Unknown (1935), a jeremiad about the deadening effects of Western rationalism on man, which he quotes at length in his work. All this captures something important about the development of Islamism – it drew just as much on a distinctly Western counter-Enlightenment tradition, especially its radically reactionary descent, as it did on Egyptian or Islamic sources. Indeed, the affinity of large parts of today’s degenerate Western left with Islamism rests partially on the extent to which they both draw intellectually from the same reactionary well.…

And now Islamism’s toxic combination of anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism seems to have seduced swathes of the Western left, too.