A Quiet Revolution (16 page)

T

exploration of the

1970

s and of the forces and elements at work

in Egypt that were important to this movement. I consider, for example, Saudi Arabia’s contributions to fostering in a variety of ways, some quite unexpected, a climate that would nurture and galvanize the Resurgence, and I explore how Saudi Arabian interests intersected and combined with those of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This decade in Egypt would prove to be the crucible of the first ex- perimentation with and forceful practical expressions of Qutb’s explosive ideas, which were interpreted as legitimizing violence and endorsing a religious obligation on Islamists to free nominally Muslim societies from their “illegitimate” and “heathen” rulers—rulers who claimed to be Muslim but who were not viewed as Muslim under Qutb’s and other Is-

lamists’ definition of Islam. Sadat would be assassinated in
1981
by a

young man who was a member of Islamic Jihad, a group that espoused these views. Another member of this same group, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is today well known as Osama bin Laden’s second in command.

I conclude this chapter with a brief recapitulation of aspects of Qutb’s life and thought, and I summarize his views on women and their place in his ideal Muslim society. I pair this sketch of Qutb with

one of Zainab al-Ghazali, the “unsung mother” of the Muslim Broth- erhood.

A number of factors converged in Egypt in the
1970
s to create the con- ditions that would bring into being and dynamically energize the Islamic Resurgence.

Toward the end of the war of
1973
, as the tide had begun to turn

against the Arabs, the oil-producing states imposed an oil embargo on countries supplying Israel with military equipment, a move that would send oil prices soaring and that consequently proved very profitable for the oil-producing states. Prices would remain high, ensuring that Saudi Arabia would henceforth have vast means for pursuing its “ancient am- bition” of establishing hegemony over the Muslim world and of spread- ing its Wahhabi Islam to the world.
1

After
1973
the activities of the Muslim World League grew expo-

nentially. Founded in the early sixties to counter Nasser’s Arab national- ism and promote Islam in its place as ground of identity and community, in the
1970
s the League was opening offices across the Muslim world and indeed across the globe—wherever Muslims lived. Managed by mem- bers of the Saudi religious establishment and their coworkers and sup- porters, the League financed the building of mosques and supported their religious staff and workers across the world. It also established Is- lamic publishing houses and oversaw the widespread distribution of free Qurans, as well as of books and tapes promoting the Wahhabi doctrine, including the writings of the twelfth-century scholar Ibn Taymiya, as well as the writings of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The League also supported Islamist associations in the West as well as in the Muslim world. As already noted, the people manning and directing many of the League’s projects and missions often were members of the Muslim Brotherhood or were members of other Islamist organizations, particu- larly the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan.

Wahhabi Islam follows a school of belief and practice founded by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who lived in Najd, in central Arabia, in the eigh- teenth century. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (
1703
–
92
) was a zealous religious re- former who sought to cleanse Islam from what he called blasphemous “innovations,” practices that had crept into Islamic usage over the cen-

turies and needed to be purged in order to bring about a return to Islam’s pure, original beliefs and practices. Three well-known incidents, one re- lating to the felling of a sacred tree, another to the destruction of the tomb of a revered Muslim, and the third relating to the stoning of an adulteress, are described as encapsulating Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s posi- tions.

The first incident occurred in relation to a number of trees that people in the town of al-Uyaynah in Najd regarded as sacred and on which they hung objects, offering prayers and petitions for relief and for cures or blessings. This practice, seemingly indicating that people be- lieved that there were forces with the power to bless or intercede with God, represented to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab a profound violation of the Muslim affirmation of
tawhid,
the oneness of God—an affirmation that implied that God alone had power to bless and respond to prayers. To Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, such practices were blasphemy. When his warnings to people to desist from them were ignored, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in- structed his supporters to cut down the trees. He himself took on the task of cutting down the most revered of the trees.
2

Similarly, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab destroyed a popular monument over the tomb of Zayd Ibn al-Khattab, a Companion of the Prophet, because it venerated a human being. According to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, in the “true” form of Islam, only God was to be venerated. To Ibn Abd al-Wah- hab, all of these actions smacked of
shirk
—polytheism—which was not tolerated in Islam.

The third incident, the stoning of the adulteress, occurred when a woman informed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab that she was committing adultery, then refused to obey his instructions to desist. She returned repeatedly, so the narrative goes, to inform him that she was not desisting. The ston- ing penalty for adultery is not in the Quran, which, in fact, specifies a different punishment—fifty lashes. However, it does figure in the
ha- dith,
or sayings of the Prophet. Ordinarily in Islamic law the Quran, the word of God, trumps the sayings of the Prophet, but not in this case for Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and for some other Islamic jurists.

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s views and actions won him the enmity of some tribal leaders in Arabia and the support of others. In
1744
, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab forged an alliance with one of these diverse tribal leaders,

Muhammad Ibn Saud. Ibn Saud adopted Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teach- ings and committed himself to cleansing Arabia of blasphemous “in- novations” and returning it to the practice of a “purified” Islam freed of such distortions. He set out to become the dominant tribal leader in Arabia, a goal he achieved. In
1802
, Ibn Saud’s descendants captured the cities of Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam, from the Ottomans

—who at this point were the masters of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, whose territories included much of the Middle East and land beyond. Mecca and Medina were recaptured by the Ottomans in
1818
. Eventu- ally, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the European Pow- ers’ establishment of new nations in the Middle East out of the Ottoman Empire’s former territories, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be es- tablished in
1932
as an independent kingdom under the rule of the Saud dynasty.

Mecca and Medina were now in the territory of the newly estab- lished Saudi Arabia. Among the first acts carried out by King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud was the destruction of the tombs of the imams and other revered figures of early Islam in Mecca and Medina. He wanted to cleanse Islam of idolatry and “false superstitions” in accordance with Wahhabi doctrine.

Wahhabis considered both Sufis and Shi’is to be heretics and zeal- ously opposed their beliefs and practices and strove to eradicate them. Among the first tombs to be smashed in Medina following the estab- lishment of the state of Saudi Arabia had been the tomb of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and an especially revered figure among Shi’is.

Prior to the
1960
s, Wahhabi Islam had been confined to Saudi Ara-

bia. Religious piety and practice across the Muslim world were rooted in Muslim traditions of learning and practice and at the same time they were rooted to some extent in local traditions and practices. Within the enormously diverse area where Islam was practiced, extending from China and Indonesia through India, Africa, and Europe, forms of folk piety and practice differed. Even at the level of the theological positions espoused by the ulama, the scholars of Islam (whose understandings of Islam may differ from those of the common people), there were differ- ences within the Muslim world—different schools of Islamic law were

followed in different regions, for instance. Until Saudi Arabia’s rise to economic power, Wahhabi Islam had not been particularly well regarded in any of the world’s major centers of Islamic learning, such as those in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, India, and Indonesia.

After
1973
, as Gilles Kepel, an expert on contemporary Islamist

movements writes, Saudi zeal “now embraced the entire world.” Saudi goals were to reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world and into the “heart of the West where Muslim immigrant populations were the special target.” The Saudi objective, Kepel observes, was to “Wahhabize” Islam, thereby reducing the “multitude of voices within the religion” to the “single creed” of Saudi Arabia. Simultaneously, they promoted the ideal of Islam as transcending national divisions. “All Muslims,” wrote Kepel, “were offered a new identity that emphasized their religious commonality while downplaying differences of language, ethnicity, and nationality.”
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As a result of the Saudis’ energetic and well-funded activities, for the first time since the rise of Islam the “same books (as well as cassettes) could be found from one end of the Umma [the community of Mus- lims] to the other”—whether in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the United States. All emanated from the “same Saudi distribution circuits . . . [and] all hewed to the same doctrinal line and excluded other currents of thought that had formerly been part of a pluralist Islam.”
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Across the world there now were clear and visible signs—the grow- ing number of mosques, the changing architecture on the skyline, the increasing commonness of the hijab—of the gains that Wahhabi Is- lamism was making, thanks in important degree to the vast economic resources of Saudi Arabia.

And everywhere the building of mosques was accompanied by the distribution of texts and teachings promoting Wahhabi Islam. At the same time, though, the Wahhabi Islam that was being disseminated across the world was significantly inflected with the teachings, ideals, and ideologies of the Islamist movement more broadly, and most particu- larly with the ideas and ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mem- bers were essential to the spread and advancement of Saudi Arabia’s global projects. It was, above all, through the Muslim Brotherhood and its personnel, know-how, networks, and organizations, as well as those

of other Islamist organizations such as the Jamaat-i Islami, that the League was able to pursue and implement its projects.

As Kepel describes it, “The Muslim Brothers grafted their political interests onto the Saudi oil pipeline. . . . Muslim Brothers, residing in Saudi Arabia, rose to international influence alongside the dynasty by adding intellectual value to Islamist thought at a time when Wahhabism was not exportable. Through the international organizations they ran for the dynasty and those they controlled directly, the Brothers quietly carried out their own program of global expansion.” Their programs and outreach efforts were directed both at Muslims within the Muslim world, whom they hoped to influence and win over to their form of religious be- lief, practice, and commitments, and at Muslims in the West, as they were eager to “win the hearts of young Muslim immigrants who had set- tled there.”
5

There were certainly differences between the teachings, outlook, and doctrines of Wahhabism and those of the Brotherhood. For exam- ple, the Brotherhood, at least initially, had not shared the Wahhabis’ relentless opposition to Sufism. Al-Banna had himself been initiated into a Sufi order, and he regarded Sufism as a genuine expression of popular piety, a piety that he trusted and honored as embodying essen- tial elements of Islam. Furthermore, the Brothers’ message of social jus- tice and their commitment to working for social justice were not shared by the Wahhabis. Consequently, despite their close alliance with the Saudis, the Muslim Brothers agreed not to operate and proselytize within Saudi Arabia.
6

Furthermore, while Wahhabism was anchored in Ibn Abd al-Wah- hab’s eighteenth-century interpretations of earlier theological texts, the Brotherhood’s ideology tended to favor and advocate contemporary interpretations of sacred texts—interpretations that directly addressed the needs of contemporary Muslims. Al-Banna himself stressed that “interpretations and meanings of the Glorious Quran must be linked ‘scientifically, socially and morally’ to aspects of modern life,” and that “modern theories and ways of thinking” must be employed in response to the needs of the modern age and its specific problems. Similarly, al- Banna had early on rejected the idea that it was important to meticu- lously study and follow the enormous literary legacy of Islamic thought

and tradition, and had even questioned the usefulness of the Islamic legal schools.
7

Al-Banna had been educated in the modern secular institutions of Egypt, institutions that had been set up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rival and supersede the country’s traditional reli- gious educational establishments. His father had hoped that he would attend the al-Azhar, the center of religious training, but al-Banna chose to attend a primary teacher-training school in Damanhour, going on to attend Dar al-Ulum, the premier secular modern teacher-training college in Cairo.

Many Muslim Brothers also were graduates of the secular educa- tional system. Often they majored in the sciences, with many of them becoming engineers, chemists, pharmacists, and doctors. Brotherhood members typically were not trained in traditional Islamic learning and scholarship—a fact which in the early days earned them the opposition of the traditionally trained religious elite and religious scholars, such as the ulama of al-Azhar.

This lack of traditional religious training was not viewed within Is- lamist circles as a drawback. On the contrary, secular and scientific train- ing was viewed as particularly apt in that it equipped leaders to draw on the tools of modernity to interpret Islam in ways that addressed the “prac- tical and mundane problems of modern Muslims” as it propelled the Is- lamist movement in its goal of widespread Islamic activism and renewal. In fact, leadership emanating from secularly trained intellectuals rather than from traditionally and Islamically trained scholars has been the hallmark, as Olivier Roy has observed, of twentieth-century Islamist movements. This fact is recognized among Islamists and is endorsed by a variety of Islamist intellectuals and religious leaders. Ismail al-Faruqi, for example, a leading Islamist thinker based in America, observed that “Muslim social science researchers are the ulema of today.” Similarly, Hasan Turabi commented that “because all knowledge is divine and re- ligious, a chemist, an engineer, an economist or a jurist are all ‘ulemas.’” And Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i Islami, remarked that “whoever devotes his time and energy to the study of the Quran and the Sunna and becomes well versed in Islamic learning is entitled to speak as an ex-