A Quiet Revolution (12 page)

Washington in those days had no quarrel with the Muslim Broth- ers or with Islamists. When the Saudi-based League had begun funding Islamist groups in the
1960
s in Egypt and elsewhere, the United States had viewed that development approvingly, as it was eager to encourage

trends that undermined the “godless empire” of the Soviet Union and its allies.
3

The Sadat government allowed the Brotherhood to resume its so- cial activism on the condition that it confine its activities to the nonpo- litical domains of
da‘wa
(religious outreach), education, charity, and religious teaching. Committed as ever to the goal of Islamizing society, the Brotherhood accepted those terms, which enabled it to operate as a legitimate organization, and the Brothers poured their energies into providing alternative educational, medical, and social services.
4
Thus, reemerging after the Nasser era as an organization that was now on cor- dial terms with the government, the Brotherhood would also become a changed organization in outlook and approach. Most importantly, its leadership would now explicitly renounce violence, committing the organization to using only legal means to express its opposition.
5
This decision would alienate the more radical members and bring about breakaway militant groups.
6

The leadership’s position against violence was the result, in part, of a debate that had developed within the Brotherhood and other Is- lamist groups during the years of Nasser’s persecutions, during which Brothers had undergone imprisonment and torture while members of its leadership had been executed, among them the Brotherhood’s lead- ing intellectual, Sayyid Qutb. In his books, and in particular in
Mile- stones,
a book written mainly in prison, Qutb asserted that the societies of the so-called Muslim world were not in fact Islamic but rather were
jahiliyya
societies: societies that were no longer observing the laws of Islam or living in ways that acknowledged the sovereignty of God.

Jahiliyya was an important term to Qutb, and it remains impor- tant in the Islamist vocabulary. It was a term that Qutb himself had bor- rowed, as he acknowledged, from Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan, a parallel organization to the Muslim Brotherhood founded in India in
1940
. From the root word
jahl
(ignorance), jahiliyya is a term that occurs in the Quran with reference to the condition of “ig- norance” that characterized Arabian society prior to the Islamic revela-

tions.
7
Before Qutb’s adoption of the word,
jahiliyya
was in common usage as a term simply denoting the pre-Islamic era in Arabia. Through Qutb’s work, however, and applied to contemporary times, the word would come to connote a condition more “sinister” than the “naïve” ig- norance of ancient Arabia, for today jahiliyya was a condition that had been “willfully created by men who usurp the role of God.”
8
“Today we are in a similar or darker jahiliyyah,” as Qutb wrote, “than that contem- poraneous to early Islam.” All that surrounds us, he continued, “is jahiliyyah”: “People’s visions, beliefs, their habits and customs, their sources of knowledge, art, literature, rules and laws, even what we con- sider as Islamic education, Islamic sources, Islamic philosophy and Is- lamic thought—all of it is the product of the jahiliyyah.”
9

Because of these conditions, “true Islamic values,” Qutb main- tained, are unknown in the so-called Muslim World (let alone else- where), and consequently they “never enter our hearts,” nor are our minds “illuminated by Islamic concepts.”
10

In such times it was essential, Qutb wrote, for a Muslim “vanguard” consisting of a “coalition of committed individuals” whose “total exis- tence” was “focused on the mission” of reviving Islam to set forth on this momentous and essential task.
Milestones
, written in the early
1960
s—

the height of the Cold War—was a book that Qutb wrote specifically to counter and rebut both communism and capitalism, and to promote the revival of Islam as the only viable third way. Islam alone, according to Qutb, was capable of addressing man’s needs for both bread and spiri- tual meaning, and of anchoring man in the reality of God and in the moral universe that God had decreed. The Islamic system, grounded in social justice and binding Muslims to obedience only to God, simulta- neously liberated them, Qutb argued, from subservience to any human being. Islam “provides us,” wrote Qutb, “with the bread that commu-

nism provides, and frees us from economic and social disparity, realiz- ing a balanced society while sustaining us spiritually.”
11

The Muslim confession of faith, “La illaha illa Allah” (there is no God but God), as Qutb understood it, was a revolutionary teaching, a teaching against all human sovereignty and usurpation of powers, whether by princes, governments, or priests. It was a teaching that was altogether against the oppression of one individual by another. “There is no gover- nance except for God,” Qutb wrote. “No legislation but from God, no sovereignty of one [person] over another because all sovereignty belongs to God.”

Because Islam alone—not socialism or capitalism—was capable of providing for all of man’s basic needs, the revival of Islam was essential. Indeed, Qutb maintained, Islam’s eventual hegemony over the entire world was inevitable, because Islam alone was grounded in the truth of God’s revelation. However, he said, the revival and eventual world hege- mony of Islam could be realized only through the dedicated and selfless labor and struggle—jihad—of the vanguard of committed Muslims.

The term jihad is from the root word
jahada,
meaning to strive or exert oneself. In the sense of engaging in exertion or jihad to further Islam, the term was defined by classical Islamic jurists as referring to four types of religious obligation. First was the jihad of the heart, which was “concerned with combating the devil and evil things.” This form of jihad was regarded by the prophet as the “greater jihad.” Second and third were the jihad of the tongue and hand, which pertained to the obligation of “enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong” in society. The fourth meaning of jihad, the jihad of the sword, was that of “fighting unbeliev- ers and enemies of the faith.”
12

Jihad of the sword was not considered by classical jurists to be one of the five pillars—that is, one of the five fundamental obligations—re- quired of all Muslims. The jurists did, however, consider it to be a duty of all Muslims when the Muslim community and faith were under attack. Qutb and militant Islamists would depart from this understanding, how- ever, and define jihad as one of the foundational pillars of Islam and thus an obligation of all Muslims. Over the decades since Qutb’s death, rad- ical Islamists have read Qutb’s books, particularly
Milestones,
as advo- cating jihad in the sense of armed and violent struggle. They believe that

it constitutes a legitimate strategy against unbelievers of all stripes, in- cluding those “heathen,” jahiliyya peoples, and most particularly their illegitimate and heathen rulers in the so-called Muslim lands.

While some of Qutb’s ideas clearly had their antecedents in ideas that al-Banna had enunciated and that had emerged in the early years of the Brotherhood—such as the notion of the Muslim Brothers as a band of “awakened” souls and as a vanguard—he took such ideas much fur- ther, in a dramatically more radical direction.

In the
1960
s, the more militant younger members of the Brotherhood embraced Qutb’s ideas and argued for the use of violence to bring down the Nasser regime. Qutb, who had been released from prison in
1964
, was again arrested in
1965
, along with other Brotherhood members, on charges of plotting to assassinate Nasser. On the almost exclusive evi- dence of his writings, and in particular of
Milestones,
passages of which were quoted at his trial, Qutb was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed on August
29
,
1966
.

Qutb’s execution elevated him to the rank of martyr in the eyes of many Islamists, a fact that made it difficult for those in the Islamist lead- ership who opposed his views, especially in relation to the legitimacy of

violence, to openly criticize him. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood leader Hasan al-Hudaybi in
1969
published
Du‘a,la Qudah
(Preachers, Not Judges). Arguing in this book that the proper role of Islamists was that of teaching and preaching true Islam, and not that of judging or con-

demning the Islam of others, al-Hudaybi was implicitly refuting Qutb’s ideas.
13

In the
1970
s the leadership explicitly repudiated the idea of using vi-

olence to achieve the Islamist goal of establishing an Islamic state ruled by a government grounded in the laws of sharia. In repudiating violence altogether the Brotherhood leadership was now committed to pursuing its objectives through peaceful means and a gradualist approach.
14

Not everyone in the organization embraced these commitments made by the Brotherhood leadership, however. Although the broad ma- jority and mainstream membership accepted them, some members on the more militant fringes wholly rejected them, and some among these broke away to found alternative Islamist groups.
15

The leadership’s commitment to a gradualist approach entailed, above all, a commitment to transforming society from the ground up, through steadfast collective efforts of outreach and charity work and, most important, education. The gradualist approach was seen as essen- tial to bringing about an Islamic society governed by sharia, in that the first step was to undertake the work of the Islamic education or reedu- cation of the population. It was necessary, they maintained, to educate the general population before people would abandon the forms of belief and practice that the majority society now followed—forms and prac- tices that the Brotherhood regarded as those of lapsed and passive or “dormant” Muslims. Simultaneously, the population needed to be per- suaded to replace their beliefs and practices with the committed, activist form of Islam and its accompanying prescriptions and rituals (among them the hijab for women) as preached and practiced by the Brother- hood.

By means of this process of Islamic reeducation, society would be made ready for the eventual institution of Islamic government ruled by the laws of sharia. For, as the Brotherhood leadership reasoned, once people had become Islamically educated they would readily accept Is- lamic government and sharia out of their own convictions. The key, therefore, was to work steadily to build up and educate the population, generation by generation, until the Brotherhood’s views and teachings had become the beliefs and norms of the broad majority and of wider society. Once more the project of the education of souls and the work of da‘wa, of calling people to the Brotherhood understanding of Islam, be- came a central mission for the organization.

According to Zainab al-Ghazali, the “unsung mother” of the Broth- erhood, the decision to pursue this nonviolent, educational approach was arrived at by a core group of the Brotherhood’s leadership—a group that included al-Ghazali herself, as well as Sayyid Qutb, whom al-Ghaz- ali consulted during his imprisonment through regular contact with his sisters. Other prominent Brotherhood figures whom al-Ghazali con- sulted with included al-Hudaybi, who had succeeded al-Banna as the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, and Abdel-Fattah Ismail, a prominent figure in the Brotherhood whom she met during a pilgrimage to Mecca in the mid-fifties. As al-Ghazali wrote in her memoir, it was during those

critical years of Nasserite persecution that this core group concluded that “preparing our youth for da‘wa” was the one strategically essential task. “It was of paramount importance,” she wrote, “that we prepare future generations in the persons of these youth who would hopefully become teachers of education and training in their own right for subsequent gen- erations.”
16
This core group decided, al-Ghazali wrote, that they would keep at the task of the Islamic training of “youth, elders, women and children” for thirteen years—thirteen being the number of years that the first Muslim community, under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad, had practiced da‘wa and endeavored to convert the hea- then in Mecca. After thirteen years the leadership would survey the sit- uation. If by then
75
percent of the people believed that “Islam was a complete way of life” they would call for the establishment of an Islamic state. If the percentage was less, she continued, they would continue their efforts “for another thirteen years, and so on, until the ummah [com- munity] is ripe to accept Islamic rule.”
17

Put simply, as one activist explained to a researcher, “I won’t go to the government now and say this is wrong and this is right. I will go to those around me and build them up, teach them. Then when we are
90
percent of society, then those who I have brought up will go to the gov- ernment, not me.”
18

During the mid-
1960
s, the years of Nasser’s worst persecutions, ac- cording to Gilles Kepel, a noted student of Islamist movements, young activists favored the use of violence to bring down Nasser; al-Ghazali, on the other hand, held fast to the idea that the only path forward for the Brotherhood lay in the commitment to tirelessly working for the educa- tion of one generation after another.
19

Among the Brotherhood leadership the emphasis remained on ed- ucation and on a gradualist approach including with regard to the mat- ter of the imposition of sharia. Omar Tilmesani, for instance, who took the leadership of the Brotherhood in
1973
, maintained that social and

economic justice must first of all be established in society before sharia could be instituted. In the absence of such conditions, he argued, im- posing sharia could lead to its being put to “illegal use,” resulting in in- justice. Furthermore, he declared, prior to imposing sharia, careful studies needed to be undertaken with the object of “unifying and syn-