The Rise and Fall of Islamism: pt.2

Say, what's in this drink?

Last time we went over the history of Islam and explained the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Our story picks up again in Colorado in 1948, and buddy, strap in, because this is gonna be a wild ride:

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian teacher, was sent by the Egyptian government to the United States to study the American education system. In keeping with the spirit of the age I mentioned last time, the Arab nations wanted to learn from the Western powers so they could modernize and develop. Qutb was a voracious reader and intellectual who was familiar with Western literature and philosophy, but this trip to the US was his first journey outside of the Muslim world. He spent most of his 2 years in the US in Colorado, while also visiting California, Washington DC, and other major cities. He came back to Egypt a changed man, he was appalled and disgusted by what he saw in America. Qutb explained his feelings in a 1951 essay he wrote upon his return to Egypt titled, “The America I Have Seen.”

Qutb wrote that Americans had “reached the peak of growth and elevation in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of the senses, feelings, and behavior.” They had an “enduring desire for wealth by any means,” dating back from the colonial era when the land was settled by “adventurers and groups of criminals.” Americans lacked culture and religion, and only cared about “applied science” and “sensual pleasure,” in a way that “reminds one of the days when man lived in jungles and caves!” Western sexuality disgusted him: the American woman was “well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity” (this was ‘48, mind you: it's your grandmother Ethel he’s talking about). He found the food disgusting, the sports barbaric, and the movies to be bland (except Gone with the Wind, which was “brilliant”). He criticized Americans’ religious beliefs as shallow and insincere. He didn’t have a problem with them being non-Muslims, but he said that, “they go to church for carousal and enjoyment, or as they call it in their language, ‘fun’...each church races to advertise itself with lit, colored signs on the doors…The minister does not feel that his job is any different from that of a theater manager, or that of a merchant.” Qutb attended a church in Colorado, and was appalled by what happened after the service: the teens started dancing! “The dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists…the atmosphere was full of desire.” The minister of the church encouraged the young people to dance, further appalling Qutb. And then, this next section I want to quote in its entirety, because it’s too good not to:

“He chose a famous American song called ‘But Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’ which is composed of a dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late, and her mother was waiting, but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with this line: but baby, it's cold outside!”

Now, we have a lot of fun here and I like to generate some chuckles, but I want to pause here and emphasize something: It is a straight line from Sayyid Qutb watching some kids in 1948 slow-dancing in a church basement while “Baby it’s cold outside,” was playing to the planes hitting the World Trade Center and ISIS’s genocidal rampage through the Middle East.

Qutb, who I guess nowadays we’d call an “incel” (he never married), came home and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, reaching the high ranks of the organization. Reminder from last time: this was a group of disaffected Muslim intellectuals who wanted to reject modern secular culture and go back to the days of the caliphs. Meanwhile, a secular, socialist strongman named Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1952. Nasser initially seemed close to the Brotherhood and met extensively with Qutb. The Brotherhood thought Nasser might be on their side, but he wasn’t interested in Islamism and was most likely meeting with them so he could understand their agenda better and undercut them. Nasser accused the Brotherhood of plotting to assassinate him, and had Qutb arrested in 1954. In prison Qutb continued to write; his book Milestones laid out a theory of Islamism: the Quran and the traditions of Islam contained a complete instruction manual for human life, any attempt to deviate from these perfect instructions would lead to discord and spiritual destruction. Socialism, nationalism, and any other non-Islamic ideologies were distractions, the goal should be to revert back to the early days of Islam and unite all believers under a caliphate. The real Islamic community had been “extinct for a few centuries” and followers had reverted to a state of pre-Islamic ignorance, corrupted by the ways of the West. Existing political leaders needed to be violently overthrown by a group of enlightened Muslims who would lead the way to the restoration of the caliphate.

Now, if you’re aware of the history of Communism, it may occur to you that this is all strikingly similar to the Leninist principle of a vanguard party leading the masses and establishing a worker’s state. The West may have been hopeless and corrupt, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a clear model for Qutb: as an intellectual he was familiar with Marxist theory. Just as there was once (pre-Stalin) a sense that socialism would transcend national boundaries, (“The working men have no country...The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them [nations] to vanish still faster.” -Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto) Islamism would also be an international movement, with true-believer Muslims taking the place of the proletariat. But Qutb would never live to see his ideas come to fruition, he was executed in 1966.

Sayyid Qutb in prison. 

As they say, you can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea. Nasser’s crackdown on the Brotherhood didn’t stamp out their ideology, and although Islamists were still an underground minority, Qutb’s writings circulated widely.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who was just a boy when Qutb was executed, drifted toward Islamism in his teenage years and became convinced of the correctness of Qutb’s ideology. He formed a group called Egyptian Islamic Jihad with the goal of putting these ideas into action by overthrowing the Egyptian state and establishing a caliphate. In 1981 Egyptian Islamic Jihad succeeded in assassinating the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. al-Zawahiri and hundreds of others were arrested. Around this time the Brotherhood publicly rejected Qutb’s anti-government ideas, partly to ensure their own survival, but the cat was out of the bag and those ideas had already spread across the Arab world. After being released from prison, al-Zawahiri soon met another man influenced by Qutb’s writings: Osama bin Laden.

Ayman al-Zawahiri under arrest in Egypt, 1981

But before we get to him, let's talk about the 70s a little bit. 1968 is probably the last year that anyone truly believed in their heart that state socialism was the way of the future (sorry Bernie bros). The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that year soured the opinions of the last remaining Westerners who thought Communism was a good idea, and it became apparent that the Soviet higher echelons only really cared about maintaining their grip on power. In China, the Cultural Revolution was at peak frenzy in ‘68, which would lead the successors of Mao to say, “holy shit this was a terrible idea,” and instead focus on competent governance and free-market economics. War was raging in Vietnam, but I will always maintain that the “American War” as they call it in Hanoi was an anti-imperialist struggle led by nationalists rather than communists. And in the Arab world, it was becoming clear that secular nationalism led by quasi-socialist strongmen wasn’t living up to expectations. Much of the Arab world had governments that were socialist at least on paper, but instead of leading to higher standards of living, these systems just installed a corrupt caste of self-serving officials who ran their countries like feudal lords. Add to this the humiliation of Israel being established in the heart of the Middle East, with the far-outnumbered Israelis beating the Arab armies soundly in multiple wars. Mustachioed-strongman nationalism and socialism were discredited in the Muslim world, so there was a vacuum for a new ideology to enter the arena. 

It was in this setting that the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was established, as I explained in a previous article. The Iranians were Shia, so they weren’t keen on establishing a caliphate, but they were inspired by Qutb’s writings and their motivations came from the same place: the West is corrupt, our leaders have led us down the wrong path, Islam is the solution. Iran’s revolution was not destined to spread to the Sunni Arab world, but it showed people what was possible, as I analogized my Iran article: it was like the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Before 1917, communism was all talk and endless committee meetings, but after that, it was a real tangible force in the world. Same thing with the idea of Islamic revolution after 1979. And in that same fateful year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. 

The reasons why the Soviets invaded are not really worth talking about, but in 1979 a ten-year-long war began that pitted the godless Russkies against the Afghan people. This inspired thousands of Muslims from around the world to go to Afghanistan and fight against the Soviets, one of whom was a young man from a rich Saudi family named Osama bin Laden. Ayman al-Zawahiri met bin Laden on one of his trips home from the battlefield, and al-Zawahiri was inspired to start helping to funnel fighters into Afghanistan. The Egyptian was the brains who ran the logistics of the operation, while bin Laden was the charismatic front man. The US was extremely supportive of the Afghan cause, they gave tons of weapons and money to the Afghan fighters, but no evidence has ever emerged to show that they gave training or money directly to bin Laden or al-Zawahiri. A fair amount of US money did go to local Afghan warlords who would end up fighting the Americans 30 years later, though. The Arab war-tourists were amateurs anyway, most of them didn’t do much actual fighting. Apparently there were guys who would carry you over the border and take pics of you firing off an AK at an empty hillside so you could have jihadi cred back home, in a sort of 80s version of fake Instagram influencers. Human nature, man. It’s always the same.

Bin Laden in Afghanistan, 1980s

The war in Afghanistan was extremely bloody, much deadlier than the one the Americans were involved in later. About 20,000 Russkies went home in boxes, and something like 3 million Afghans died. But the Russians were pushed out in 1989, and then shortly thereafter, something no one predicted happened: the Soviet Union collapsed. From the point of view of the Islamists, they had gone to fight in a holy war, and in the process they had defeated a satanic superpower and caused its utter destruction. It stood to reason that if they could take out one, they could take out the other. al-Zawahiri and bin Laden decided to form a new organization, al-Qaeda, dedicated to taking their struggle worldwide. 

Meanwhile other things were happening elsewhere. An Islamist party won an election in Algeria, but the ruling socialist/military elite refused to hand over power and started a brutal civil war to suppress them. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict ground on endlessly, providing a perpetual motivation for Islamists. Afghanistan devolved into civil war after kicking out the Soviets, with one of the factions being an Islamist-inspired group called the Taliban (meaning “students”, i.e. Quranic scholars). And in 1990, Saddam Hussein, a classic secular nationalist quasi-socialist mustachioed Arab strongman invaded Kuwait. During the Gulf War that pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, US and other Western troops used Saudi Arabia as a base and staging area. They were out in the desert by the Iraqi border, it’s not like they were camped out in Mecca, but seeing infidels in the holy land infuriated bin Laden. After the war ended, the US kept bases in Saudi and maintained no-fly-zones over Iraq. As a result of all this, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri decided to turn their attention to the United States.

On February 23rd 1998 they issued a call to arms, titled “World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders”. Nice touch there, “the Jews”, not “Israel” or “the Israeli government.” Antisemitism was a big part of this going back to Qutb. Anyway, they announced that:

“For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples…the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there…All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims…we issue the following fatwa [order] to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

Someone should have taken notice of this. But in February 1998 in America, no one was paying attention:

We’ll continue the story next time.

Part 3: So it's us v. them. Over and over again

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