Hegel broke this intellectual logjam by doing the impossible. He came up with a philosophy of history, and he did this by eliminating contingency:
The sole aim of philosophy is to eliminate the contingent. Contingency is the same as external necessity, that is, a necessity which originates in causes which are themselves no more than external circumstances. In history we must look for a general design, the ultimate end of the world, and not a particular end of the subjective spirit or mind; and we must comprehend it by means of reason, which cannot concern itself with particular and finite ends but only with the absolute.
Reason is not contingent. Reason is necessary. Reason is self-sufficient. Reason brings itself into existence and carries itself into effect. Thought must become conscious of this end of reason. The history of the world is a rational process whose author is God. If creation is a manifestation of God’s creative power in space, then history is a manifestation of God’s creative power in time:
the divine wisdom is one and the same in great things and small. It is the same in plants and insects as in the destinies of entire nations and empires, and we must not imagine that God is not powerful enough to apply his wisdom to things of great moment. To believe that God’s wisdom is not active in everything is to show humility towards the material rather than towards the divine wisdom itself. Besides, nature is a theater of secondary importance compared with that of world history. Nature is a field in which the divine Idea operates in a non-conceptual medium.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Philosophy of Salafism: The Islamic Image of Neo-Conservatism
In his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly sees a connection between the voluntarism of the Ash’arite school of Islamic thought, the voluntarism of modern western philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche, and the voluntarism which underpins the philosophy of Salafism, which is the ideological driving force behind Islamic terrorism. According to Tony Corn: “In the past thirty years, one particular brand — pan-Islamic Salafism — has been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the failure of pan-Arab Socialism and, in the process, to marginalize the more enlightened forms of Islam to the point where Salafism now occupies a quasi-hegemonic position in the Muslim world.”
The main proponent of Salafism is Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist and poet, who was convicted of plotting the execution of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and executed by hanging. Qutb’s writings expressed what can be called without exaggeration, hatred of the United States as obsessed with materialism, violence and sexual pleasure, a hatred which Qutb’s brother Muhammed conveyed to Osama bin Laden, who was his student at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The Islamism that Qutb promoted is based, according to Reilly, “upon a deformed ideology that nonetheless shares in the classical ideological conflation of heaven and earth into one realm.” The goal of Islamism is “to reestablish the Kingdom of God upon earth” or “to create a new world.” In spite of his aversion to Marxism, Qutb was influenced by its teaching, something which caused the Islamists to mix the totalitarian program of the Communists with the Ash’arite interpretation of Islam. Reilly sees a “nearly complete ideological affinity” between the Nazi or Communist revolutionary points of view and the Islamism of Qutb. His logic in linking the three, however, is less than persuasive because the ideology of race, which is common to Nazism and Zionism, is absent from Islam and Communism.
In his analysis of the closing of the Muslim mind, Reilly fails to see that Sayyid Qutb is the uncanny ideological Doppelgaenger of Leo Strauss, and that Salafism is not only the Islamic world’s mirror image of Neoconservatism, it is also a creation of Neoconservatism. If there had been no Neoconservatism, Qutb would have languished in the journals of Middle East Studies departments. Because of the Neoconservative takeover of American foreign policy during the Reagan Administration, and in particular because of Bill Casey’s mobilization of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Qutb’s ideas became the marching orders for America’s proxies in the war to topple the Soviet Union. After the successful conclusion of that war, Qutb’s ideas, spread by American assets like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, would become the basis of Islamist terrorism campaigns throughout the Arab world. Whenever Qutb’s Islamism was in danger of failing because of its penchant for murder, terror, and violent wretched excess against Muslims, the Neoconservatives would rehabilitate it to act as a tool of American foreign policy, as in Afghanistan, Libya, and then Syria, or as a foil that made their efforts seem necessary for America’s survival.
After his stay in America, Qutb returned to Egypt, and after supporting the revolt of Gamal Abdul Nasser against the English, ended in prison where he was tortured by Egyptian secret police who were trained by the CIA. In a series of books written in prison, Qutb called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up and overthrow the leaders who had allowed their people to be infected with Jahilya, which is to say, libido dominandi — the use of sexual liberation as a form of political control. Qutb justified the murder of secular Islamic leaders by arguing that they had become so secular that they were no longer Muslim. In 1966 Qutb was put on trial for treason. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and on August 29, 1966, Qutb was executed. But his ideas lived on because of Imam Zawahari, who was to become the mentor of Osama bin Laden.
One year after Qutb’s death, the social order collapsed in America in a series of riots in places like Detroit and Newark which called the entire liberal agenda, epitomized by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and his Civil Rights Act into question. This collapse lent new power to Leo Strauss’s ideas. In the early ’70s Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected policy makers in Washington who were determined to find out why the liberal policies of the Great Society had failed. Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama had been taught Leo Strauss’s ideas at the University of Chicago. Irving Kristol’s son William had studied Strauss’s theories at Harvard. This group became known as the Neoconservatives.
In the place of the liberal ideas which had failed, the Neoconservatives proposed “myths” about the threat of a common enemy which would stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedom had unleashed. American foreign policy, they averred, needed to break with the pragmatism of Henry Kissinger, and return to the Manichean scenario of good vs. evil which had motivated America during the anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s. The Neoconservatives allied themselves with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, President Ford’s chief of staff, and hired Harvard historian Richard Pipes to concoct a scenario which would explain how the now moribund Soviet Union constituted a clear and present danger to America. The cadre which worked under Pipes came to be known as Team B, and their findings were published by a neocon front operation known as the Committee on the Present Danger.
At the same time that the Neoconservatives were beating the drum for the resumption of the anti-Communist crusade in America, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a medical doctor from a prosperous elite family in Cairo, was spreading Qutb’s ideas via an underground Islamic cell he had created in Egypt. Qutb’s ideas were spreading rapidly, especially among the student population, because they exposed the real corruption in Egyptian society, which the millionaire elite bankers tried to conceal behind the facade of westernization, at the hands of western banks and social engineering campaigns like birth control. Zawahiri, who had imbibed Marxist revolutionary ideas from his mentor Qutb, was convinced that a vanguard could rise up and overthrow the corrupt Sadat regime.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, another Rockefeller puppet, in 1979, Zawahiri began to feel that his dream of establishing an Islamist state was possible. Khomeini put forward the idea of an Islamist state that was remarkably similar to Qutb’s idea. He acknowledged this by putting Qutb’s face on one of the postage stamps of the new Islamic republic. “Yes,” Khomeini told the West, “we are reactionaries and you are Enlightenment intellectuals.”
Anwar Sadat w
as appalled by Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. “This is disgraceful,” he told one reporter. “This is a crime against Islam.” He then went on to say that his airplane was ready to fly at a moment’s notice to Tehran and bring the Shah to Egypt. Neither leader, however, survived the Islamist ferment that was destined to bring down every secular regime in Islam. The Shah died of cancer in exile in the United States in 1980, and Sadat fell dead one year later under a hail of bullets fired by soldiers who belonged to the secret organization Zawahiri had founded on Qutb’s principles known as Islamic Jihad. The assassination was successful, but it failed to cause the revolution it was intended to create. That night Cairo remained calm; the masses failed to rise up. Zawahiri was arrested and put on trial, footage of which shows Zawahiri shouting from his cage in English: “Who are we? We are Muslims who believe in their religion.”
Zawahiri was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Like Sayyid Qutb, Zawahiri was tortured, and under torture he began to interpret Qutb’s theories in a far more radical way. Zawahiri concluded that the masses didn’t rise up in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination because selfish individualism had corrupted them as completely as it had corrupted their leader. Like Lenin and Trotsky, Zawahiri concluded that only a revolutionary avant garde could do for the masses what the masses were incapable of doing for themselves.
The Neoconservatives had come to the same conclusion in America, and it was they who would play the role of avant garde in the newly elected Reagan Administration, which had come to power by exploiting Jimmy Carter’s weakness in dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis.
The Neoconservatives got key appointments in the Reagan Administration. Paul Wolfowitz became head of the State Department policy staff, and his close friend Richard Perle became Assistant Secretary of Defense. Once their ally William Casey was appointed head of the CIA, the Neoconservatives believed that they had the power to implement their vision of America’s revolutionary destiny. After reading The Terror Network (1981) by Claire Sterling, a piece of journalism confected from black propaganda which the CIA had invented to smear the Soviet Union, Casey persuaded Reagan in 1983 to sign a secret document that fundamentally changed American foreign policy. The country would now fight covert wars to push back the hidden Soviet threat around the world.
It was a triumph for the Neoconservatives. Their fictions had triumphed over reality. The CIA knew that the terror network Claire Sterling described in her book didn’t exist because they themselves had made it up. None of this mattered to the Neoconservatives, who now found themselves joining forces with the Islamists in Afghanistan, where together they would fight an epic battle against the Soviet Union. Both the Islamists and the Neoconservatives came out of Afghanistan believing that they had defeated the Soviet empire and were thus in possession of the power to transform the world. The Neoconservatives saw themselves as revolutionaries, not conservatives. As Richard Perle put it: “We’re closer to being revolutionaries than conservatives because we want to change some deeply entrenched notions about the role of American power in the world.”
After Casey concluded a pact with the Northern Alliance, American money and weapons began to pour across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan, and CIA agents began training the Afghans in the techniques of assassination and terror, including car bombing. In order to supply the manpower necessary to defeat the Soviet Union, governments throughout the Islamic world began emptying their prisons of their inmates and sending them off to the jihad in Afghanistan. One of those inmates was Ayman Zawahiri, the man behind the murder of Anwar Sadat. Zawahiri set up the headquarters of the newly revived Islamic Jihad in Peshwar, Pakistan, where he met a Saudi who shared his views by the name of Osama bin Laden. Zawahiri convinced bin Laden only violent revolution could succeed in purging western decadence from the Arab world. He also persuaded him to use the considerable financial resources at his disposal to create violent revolutions in Algeria and Egypt.
In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Osama bin Laden became convinced that an armed vanguard could reproduce the Islamist victory in Afghanistan in every secular Islamic state in the world. At around the same time, the Neoconservatives came, mutatis mutandis, to the same conclusion. The same Neoconservatism which had driven the Soviets out of Afghanistan could now drive secular Islamic leaders like Saddam Hussein, who had been America’s proxy during the 1980-87 war with Iran, from their thrones and establish a purer form of Islam in their place.
After the successful conclusion of the war to liberate Kuwait, Neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz wanted to press on to Baghdad to bring about a transformation of the Middle East. They were furious when George Bush senior and Council on Foreign Relation types like Brent Scowcroft refused, and at this point they called down political fire upon their own position and worked for the defeat of George Bush, Sr.
The Islamist counterparts to the Neoconservatives would go into eclipse during the 1990s as well, but largely as a result of the negative effect their terrorist campaigns had on the masses in countries like Algeria and Egypt, which were subjected to a campaign of terrorist bombings which turned the masses against them. In the early ’90s Algeria and other Islamic countries were being torn apart by a vicious wave of Islamist terror.
Jihadists who had returned from Afghanistan were trying to topple the regimes. The revolutionaries soon found that the masses did not rise up and follow them. The regimes stayed in power and the radical Islamists were hunted down. The refusal to rise up showed that the masses too had become corrupted. In Algeria this logic went completely out of control. The Islamists killed thousands of civilians because they believed all of these people had become corrupted. By 1997 the Islamist revolution was failing.
In Algeria they started to kill each other. By 1997 Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan. Now they were facing failure. All attempts to topple regimes in the Arab world had not succeeded. The people had turned against them because of the horrific violence, and Afghanistan was the only place they had left to go.
This is when they started this new strategy. In May 1998, bin Laden and Zawahiri announced a new Jihad, which focused on attacks against America itself.
In 1998 the Neoconservatives found themselves in the same situation as the Islamists. The attempt to mobilize the Christian right to gain power via a moral revolution in America had failed and they had become marginalized in both domestic and foreign policy. What saved both groups from political oblivion was the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. In their response to the 9-11 attacks, the Neoconservatives would transform the failing Islamist movement into the revolutionary force that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. After the American invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, an invasion which wiped out the last remnants of the jihadists who had fought against the Soviet Union, the Neoconservatives reconstructed the failed Islamist movement as a phantom enemy which would consolidate the neocon hold on power during the administration of George W. Bush.
Osama bin Laden had no formal organization until the Americans invented one for him during the trial of the blind sheik who was responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. There is no evidence that bin Laden used the term al Qaeda to refer to the existence of a group until after September 11, when he realized this was the term that Americans had given it. The 9-11 attacks brought the Neoconservatives back to power in America because this proved that what they had been predicting throughout the 1990s was correct. Now they saw this new war on terror in the same epic terms as the anti-Communist crusade under Ronald Reagan. Or as Richard Perle put it: “it’s a war on terrorists who want to impose an intolerant tyranny on all mankind. An Islamic universe in which we are all compelled to accept their beliefs and live by their lights. And in that sense this is a battle between good and evil.” The Neoconservatives took a failing movement which had lost mass support and began to reconstruct it in the image of a powerful network of evil control
led from the center by bin Laden in his lair in Afghanistan.
As part of his attempt to explain the contemporary political situation in the world, Robert Reilly tries to associate Islamism, Communism, and Nazism, but the triad which really explains world politics in the wake of the jihad to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union was Communism, Neoconservatism, and Islamism. The deep structure which underpins all three is the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Unlike David Horowitz, who has discussed this topic at length, Reilly fails to see that Communism’s attempt to destroy and re-build the social order is a manifestation of the Jewish penchant to create heaven on earth, as epitomized by the saying tikkun olam. As Horowitz wrote:
Marx was a rabbi after all. The revolutionary idea is a religious consolation for earthly defeat. For the Jews of our Sunnyside heritage, it is the consolation for internal exile; the comfort and support for marginal life. A passage home. Belief in the Idea is the deception of self that made people like my father and you and me feel real (David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future (1998)).
Marxism is revolutionary because it is Jewish. As Horowitz puts it:
Islam and Logos Page 7
