by Ian Buruma
It was only after his return to Egypt from the United States that Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood and worked hard to develop an Islamist ideology that would confront the major ideologies of the West. In traditional Islam, Jews and Christians, as people of the book, were not regarded as idolaters. But the new jahiliyya was different. Even religious Christians and Jews had hopelessly compromised their faith by allowing worldly rulers to encroach on the realm of God. The great worldwide clash, then, was between the culture of Islam, in the service of God, and the culture of jahiliyya, in the service of bodily needs that degrade human beings to the level of beasts. All that is valued in jahiliyya culture is food, drink, sex, and creature comforts, things fit for animals. Indeed, jahiliyya is the culture of animals—sophisticated animals, but still animals. In fact, jahiliyya is worse even than that: it is the culture of supremely arrogant animals who try to play God.
Jahiliyya, in Qutb’s view, is not limited to Western countries. Indians and Japanese are worshipers of the same beastly idols. It can even be seen—and this was perhaps the most important thing for Qutb—in countries that claim to be Islamic, to him a sign of the rankest hypocrisy. But the center of the new jahiliyya, its Rome, as it were, is clearly located in the West. That is where all corruption came from. The idea of the West as less than human is what makes Qutb a high priest of Occidentalism.
Qutb was much influenced by the theories of the Pakistani ideologue Abu-l-A’la Maududi, who came up with the idea of the new jahiliyya and promoted the Muslim state ruled under Sharia law. Maududi was active as a journalist in the 1920s, when India was still under British rule. An alumnus of Dar ul-Ulum, an Indian seminary that was almost as important as Egypt’s Al-Azhar, Maududi advocated a revolutionary Islam. Unlike Qutb, he had little knowledge of Western culture. Maududi taught himself English only because he needed it for his journalistic work, but had no further use for it. His ultimate aim was a form of religious cleansing. Muslim society had to be purged of Western influence, and Maududi set himself the task of exposing the new jahiliyya and immunizing educated Muslims against the influence of Western agents.
After 1937, he became active in Islamic politics. As he saw it, a secular Indian state was as much of a threat to pure Islam as British colonial rule was. Democracy, that brave ideal of the Indian nationalists, to Maududi was just a way to sneak in Gandhi’s version of Hinduism through the back door and impose it on the Muslims. His goal was to reestablish God’s sovereignty on earth by reviving the Caliphate. Popular sovereignty was wicked because it denied God’s rule. That is what he meant when he told Pakistani Muslims in 1948 that to participate in the maintenance of a “nationalist democracy” was to “be a traitor to the Prophet and his God.” Muslim nationalism was as contradictory a term to him as “a chaste prostitute.” It was a “dirty, rotten system.”6 This is close, by the way, to beliefs held by some ultra-orthodox Jews, who refuse to recognize the state of Israel as a secular and nationalistic entity rather than a religious one.
In 1941, Maududi founded the Jamaat I-Islami, a militant religious party, which, despite its otherworldly goals, borrowed much of its organization from Leninism. After the birth of Pakistan in 1947, Maududi, as the leader of the Jamaat, tried his best to “struggle against the enemies of Islam.” And he did so in a way that can only be described as Manichaeistic, for he claimed that the Qur’an recognized only two parties: the party of God, consisting of true Muslims, and the party of Satan, which included everyone else.7
The point is not, however, Maududi’s positive vision of the pristine religious state, but rather his negative idea of the West as captured in his notion of idolatry, the new jahiliyya, emanating from the West. So in Taleqani, Qutb, and Maududi we have three powerful ideologues of political Islam, coming from different Muslim traditions (Sunni and Shi’a) and different countries (Pakistan, Egypt, Iran), who still shared a similar view of the world. They saw the West in the same terms as the source of the new jahiliyya, the hotbed of idolatry, the basest mode of existence, which should be eradicated from the face of this earth.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE A CRITIC OF THE WEST FROM A Muslim perspective, and especially of Western colonialism and secularism, without resorting to Occidentalism? Indeed, it is. There is a doctrine, often linked to the idea of jahiliyya in radical Islamist thinking, called tawhid, or Unity of God. It is quite possible to derive one’s political ideals from this doctrine without being an Occidentalist.
One man who did was Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), the poet, philosopher, and social reformer, considered by many the spiritual father of Pakistan. He can be seen as a tawhid thinker, who took the communitarian idea of the Unity of God as the basis of his politics. In this view, the unity and harmony of human society, based on justice, equality, and solidarity, should mirror the Unity of God. Iqbal was a practical man, who did not insist on a pure Islamic state. He was even prepared to live with secular governments, as long as Islamic values were respected. Even materialism was not bad per se. Indeed, a degree of materialism helped to counter “mullah-craft” and “sufi-craft.”8
Iqbal’s main criticism of the West concerned what he saw as economic exploitation. Speaking to the All-India Muslim Conference in 1932, he said, “The peoples of Asia are bound to rise against the acquisitive economy which the West has developed and imposed on nations of the East. . . . The faith you represent recognizes the worth of the individual, and disciplines him to give away his all to the service of God and man. . . . This superb idealism of your faith, however, needs emancipation from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists.”9
This shows not only Iqbal’s willingness to see merit in modern reforms, but also his preoccupation with the idea of the self, or khudi. He saw the full development of the self as a human goal. Iqbal’s motto was the Qur’anic verse “Verily God will not change the condition of the people till they change what is in themselves.” Whatever one makes of this, Iqbal’s ideas on the self were close to what is stereotypically seen as the Western concern with the individual. How, then, did he reconcile the tension that naturally occurs when both God and the human self are placed in the center of life? In fact, Iqbal did not see a contradiction, so long as the Unity of God doctrine was properly understood. In his view, an Islamic state, ruled by Sharia law, provided the ideal conditions for individual development. But if this is what he truly believed, in what way was he different from the radical Islamists whose understanding of the Unity of God is utterly hostile to the West? What is it, in short, that makes Ibal a critic of the West and Sayyid Qutb an Occidentalist?
The difference is not just a question of style, although style does count. Bitterness and resentment are matters of style. And there is no question that Qutb was full of resentment while Iqbal was free of bitter feelings. Iqbal’s encounter with the West was in fact quite favorable. His teacher in India was Sir Thomas Arnold, a well-known scholar of Islam. From Government College in Lahore, Iqbal went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and from there to Munich, where he wrote his dissertation on metaphysics in Persia. So his personal experiences of the West were quite different from Qutb’s. But the distinction between a critic and an Occidentalist is more than biographical.
Iqbal never dehumanized the West. His idea of the Unity of God, as he found it in Islam, was not an exclusionary ideal. He was convinced that “all men and not Muslims alone are meant for the Kingdom of God on earth, provided they say goodbye to their idols of race and nationality and treat one another as personalities.”10 Islam, in Iqbal’s view, is the best way to assert the Unity of God and develop the self, but he concedes that there may be other ways. Those who deviate from Iqbal’s way may be mistaken, but this doesn’t make them something less than human.
Radical Islamists take a more exclusive view of the Unity of God, which they see as the unity of the community of believers, the Umma. To be sure, every human being can become a believer in the Unity of God, and join the Umma. The world community of Islam is defined by faith, not race or nationalit
y. But, from a radical perspective, anyone outside the religious community is an enemy. Qutb is quite clear about this: “Any society that is not Muslim is jahiliyya . . . as is any society in which something other than God is worshipped.”11
Nominal Islam won’t do for Islamists such as Qutb. For him, even countries that define themselves as Islamic are in a state of idolatry. Radical Islamists no longer believe in the traditional Muslim division of the world between the peaceful domain of Islam and the war-filled domain of infidels. To them the whole world is now the domain of war. There is hardly any country where God’s sovereignty has not been usurped by worldly regimes. If God’s sovereignty is to be restored, a state must be entirely governed by religious law. So everyone may be invited to be a believer, but it is an offer that no one can refuse with impunity.
The aim of holy war, of jihad, in Qutb’s words, is “to confer authority upon divine law alone and eliminate the laws created by man.” The declaration of war is not just metaphorical, for “all this will not be done through sermons or discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of word alone.” 12 Qutb’s call, now adopted by all radical Islamists, is for a violent revolution. This must be taken seriously, because it is about more than a fantasy of religious purity, going back to the ideal Muslim state in Medina at the time of the Prophet. The revolutionaries speak to real anxieties, not only about the future of the Islamic community of believers, but about family life and male-female relations.
The West is the main target of the enemies of idolatry, even though Islamist political activism is often directed at the oppressive regimes in nominally Muslim countries. One reason for this is the idea of arrogance, manifested in Western imperialism, that is seen as an infringement of the rule of God. The other is about the breaking of sexual taboos—that is, about the West as the main corruptor of sexual morality. So the immediate political targets of radical Islamism may be regimes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but pride and promiscuity, those corrupting forces in the service of human degradation, are the twin reasons that the West is still seen as the prime source of idolatry.
PROTESTANTISM STARTED THE RETREAT OF RELIGION to the private domain, but only after a fierce battle. Religion does not evacuate the public domain lightly. Indeed, Calvinist Geneva was particularly zealous in enforcing public morality. But in predominantly Protestant countries, or countries inspired by Protestantism, such as the United States, the retreat of religion to the private sphere meant that people began to view the public sphere as the domain of politics, and religion became a matter of “individual conscience.” A good citizen had to be religious at home and secular in public. Morality, too, was up to the “individual conscience”; there would be no collectively enforced morality.
This distinction between private and public shaped many liberal countries in the West, but is as alien to Islam as it is to Orthodox Judaism. The main difference between contemporary Islam and Protestantism is not that the former is more political, but that it insists on a greater moral regulation of the public sphere by religious authority. The role of the Islamic ruler is to impose collective morality in the public space. Rules of sexual modesty are not for the individual to decide, but should be imposed on the public by a higher authority. Even today, with the resurgence of Islam, most devout Muslims are not political Islamists so much as advocates of enforcing public morality. They yearn for what they see as the traditional way of life, which they identify with Islam. Even if they have little idea what the ideal Islamic state should look like, they care deeply about sexual mores, corruption, and traditional family life. Islam, to the believers, is the only source and guardian of traditional collective morality. And sexual morality is largely about women, about regulating female behavior. This is so because a man’s honor is dependent on the behavior of the women related to him. The issue of women is not marginal; it lies at the heart of Islamic Occidentalism.
It has often been observed in discussions about modern Islam that the term “fundamentalism” is misleading, because it suggests an analogy with Christian fundamentalism in its Protestant form. A similar confusion surrounds the word “radicalism.” Fundamentalism, a return, as it were, to the foundations, and radicalism, a return to the roots, seem to come from pretty much the same metaphor. But one could still draw a distinction in radical Islam between political Islamists and Islamic puritans. The political Islamists, who are interested in power and want to establish an Islamic state, are clearly radicals. The puritans, who wish only to enforce collective morality, are fundamentalists. In their general outlook they may not differ from Christian fundamentalists, even though they differ greatly in details. What we are witnessing now, however, is a convergence between Islamic political radicals and puritanical fundamentalists. All political Islamists were puritans, but not all puritans were political Islamists. Even though that distinction has faded, one difference remains. For political Islamists, the West is the main enemy, because it supports oppressive “idolatrous” regimes, and stands in the way of creating Islamic states. Puritans hate the Western way of life, because it offends their moral sensibilities, especially when it comes to the treatment of women.
“When the Easterner travels West, or the Westerner travels East, each is sharply conscious of having crossed a social frontier, which is more real than geographical boundaries or distinctions of language, nationality, or race. The social systems of the East and West are established on diametrically different principles. The pivotal difference is the position of women.” The writer is Ruth Woodsmall, an American missionary who spent many years in Turkey and wrote a remarkable book in 1936 entitled Moslem Women Enter the New World.13
Woodsmall traveled extensively in the Islamic world, including India, and the book is a combination of travel description and analysis.
She was of course not the first to observe the different attitudes to women in East and West. Almost all travel books by Western visitors mention it. All stress the separation of the sexes (before they were called genders) and the seclusion of women in Muslim societies. Henry Harris Jessup, a nineteenth-century missionary in Syria, goes as far as to say that “Mohammedans cannot and do not deny that women have souls, but their brutal treatment of women has naturally led to this view.” What troubled him most was the harsh practice of husbands’ beating their wives. Yet it is quite clear from his account that his Christian neighbors in Syria indulged as much in this practice as the benighted “Mohammedans.”
Ruth Woodsmall was shrewd enough to realize that the veil, and not wife beating, should be her actual barometer of social change. And she noticed that even in the strictest purdah system in India, where women in their “Halloween costumes” were completely secluded from the public space, there were some slight but noticeable changes afoot. If purdah literally means “curtain,” it seemed to Woodsmall that the curtain was about to be raised, slowly but surely. Judging by the veil barometer today, it is hard to say that East and West are about to meet, even asymptotically.
Islam did not invent the veil. The earliest depiction of veiled women comes from Palmyra (northeast of Damascus), as early as the first century. It was then commonly used in the Byzantine Empire, and Muslims probably adopted the custom from the Byzantines. Whatever its origin, however, the veil is now identified with Islam. But it is a complicated custom, sending complicated messages, not all of which are of religious significance. For instance, the veil is also a sign of status. A veiled woman does not do physical labor. The veil performs the same function as Victorian corsets did, or the tiny shoes on the bound feet of Chinese women. These uncomfortable items of dress indicate that those who wear them are not engaged in menial work. They are signs of “inconspicuous consumption.”14
In Algeria and Morocco, after the wars of independence, the veil spread to new classes, aspiring to a higher status. But especially as it was adopted by the North African urban bourgeoisie, the veil also sent a signal of Islam-ba
sed nationalism, in opposition to France. Since France represented the West, the veil became a symbol of resistance to the West.
Veils come in different styles. The Iranian veil merely disguises the contours of the body. The Taliban veil made the woman’s body disappear altogether. Behind this lies a rather unflattering notion of male sexuality. A man is like a wolf with women. Left on their own, men and women are bound to be engaged in sex. Only the veil protects the woman and gives her a spiritual dimension. This grim view would not surprise an ultra-orthodox Jew, who is haunted by similar fears of male lust and female seduction. The veil, then, belongs to the Manichaean idea that flesh and the spirit are in a constant state of tension.
The exposed women of the West are the very negation of this idea, which is why they are regarded by devout Muslims, or indeed ultra-orthodox Jews, as whores and their men as pimps. To put it hyperbolically, Western women (and their “Westernized” counterparts everywhere) are the temple prostitutes in the service of Western materialism. The sexual morality of the West, or rather the lack of it, makes Western life look depraved, even animal-like. Sayyid Qutb makes this point: “In all modern jahili societies, the meaning of ‘morality’ is limited to such an extent, that all those aspects which distinguish man from animal are considered beyond its sphere. In these societies, illegitimate sexual relationships, and even homosexuality, are not considered immoral. The meaning of ethics is limited to economic affairs or sometimes political affairs, which fall into the category of ‘government interests.’ ”
There is not much sense in pinning down what the Muslim, or the orthodox Jewish, attitude to women really is. In Islam such a question would lead to a battle of quotations from canonical texts, which then results in further battles of interpretation and misinterpretation. Verse 223, from the chapter The Cow in the Qur’an, which states that “women are your fields; go, then, into your fields as you please,” was read by some as permission for husbands to choose freely their favorite kind of sex, and impose it on their wives. But there is nothing as infuriating as outsiders invading your intimate texts and telling you what they are supposed to mean to you. The interpretation of verse 223 is such an intrusion. The point here is not the status of women in Islam, however, but the way Islamic Occidentalists view the women of the West, and by implication the men of the West.
