AT WAR: Treason of the Cleric:The spiritual father of bin Ladenism

National Review, Nov 19, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

The September 11 terrorists lived for a long period with the certain knowledge that they were preparing their own deaths. Nineteenth-century nihilists and bomb-throwers and Bolsheviks also planned long term to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They moved in circles of poverty and desperation. It is the use of leisure time that separates out today's Islamic extremists from their predecessors in fanaticism and terror.

For a start the September 11 terrorists had plenty of other people's money and credit cards for the easy life. They hired cars and traveled. They bought expensive gadgets and communications systems. As Muslims, they were forbidden alcohol, but they frequented bars, and stood drinks all round. Again as Muslims, they were also supposed not to run after women, but they resorted to call girls and strip joints. A Florida lap dancer, the gorgeous Samantha, informs us that she displayed her charms a few inches from one terrorist, but the fellow then tipped her a lousy twenty bucks. What makes these men particular is that they were about to destroy what they were evidently enjoying.

This ambivalence feeds the hatred of the United States felt by Islamic extremists. In the Islamic world, religion and custom combine to provide strict codes of conduct in public and private life. Like all things human, respect for these codes varies according to time and place. It was the West that introduced Muslims to quite other codes of conduct affecting issues great and small in their society. The challenge seemed all the greater because the West had the power of its science and technology, and the social organization to make the most of this power. Western codes of behavior liberated, even as they alienated, Muslims.

Between the wars, Muslims began to rebuild their traditional code of conduct into systematic resistance to the West. Hassan al-Banna was born in 1906 in Egypt. He became a schoolteacher. The Western way of life, he taught, was materialistic, based on products, with nothing to offer man except "sin, passion, drink, women, noisy gatherings, and showy attractions." Democracy to him only spread degeneracy. As pressure to adopt or imitate Western codes of conduct mounted, al-Banna came to believe that the West intended to destroy Islam "in the hearts of the faithful." What made Muslims special, in his thinking, was their religion, and they had to turn it into a weapon for offense and defense. For that purpose, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant and conspiratorial group that by 1940 or so claimed to have 40,000 members. Al-Banna was shot dead in 1949, probably by the Egyptian secret police, but branches of the Muslim Brotherhood exist today in every Arab country. Some of these branches have joined the establishment, others are still revolutionary; and the secret police keep close watch on them all.

Sayyid Qutb was also born in Egypt in 1906, and he took over and extended the fanaticization of Islam as preached by al-Banna. In the 20th century probably no other Muslim intellectual was so influential. Nothing in his early life seems to explain his development. Intelligent, said to have been unfailingly polite, he spoke good English and passed as cosmopolitan. At Cairo University he studied literature, and afterwards became a modernist critic commenting on books of the day. He had strong opinions about the role of the state in education, and accordingly was sent by the government to the United States to write a report on American education.

From 1948 to 1950 he lived and traveled in America. It would be fascinating to reconstruct his life here. Like the al-Qaeda terrorists today, he seems to have had an enjoyable time, but this only hardened his view that he had discovered the source of all evil. Seventeenth- century Puritans had that cast of mind: Their concentration on rooting out the sins of the flesh acknowledges the almost irresistible force of the temptation they felt. Did some other gorgeous Samantha tantalize Qutb? Was he put down, or patronized? His inquiring politeness, at any rate, transformed into anger and enmity.

Fellow Muslims in America, he said, apologized for themselves "as though they were defendants on trial." He on the contrary was determined to speak out and polemicize. Radical Islam, a pioneering study by Emmanuel Sivan, describes the conclusions to which Qutb came. Christianity with its notions of sin and redemption "made no sense at all." Capitalism was "predicated on monopoly and interest-taking, money-grubbing, and exploitation." American individualism "lacks any sense of solidarity and social responsibility other than that laid down by the law." He attacked "that crass and materialistic perception of life, that animal freedom which is called permissiveness, that slave market dubbed 'women's liberation.'"

Returning to Egypt, he resigned his government job, and became a full- time writer, rising through the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood to become head of its propaganda section. As Islam revealed itself helpless against both American capitalism and Soviet communism, his outlook grew more and more pessimistic and violent. He expounded a doctrine that the whole world was in a state of jahiliyya, an Arabic word denoting pagan barbarity. Pagan barbarians came in three sorts: Westerners (and that included the Soviets), Muslims who had adopted Western ideas, and the Jews who were always conspiring.