Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (8 page)

The search for an Islamic road to modernity placed Qutb alongside al-Afghani and al-Banna as predecessors.

Qutb returned from America in 1951, the year the Society of Muslim Brothers was legalized. An active member of the antimonarchical Wafd Party when he left for America, Qutb began cooperating with the society immediately on his return. After the 1952 revolution, Qutb was appointed cultural adviser to the Revolutionary Council and was the only civilian allowed to attend its meetings. Imprisoned by Nasser in 1954, Qutb had his letters smuggled out by his sisters and distributed widely. Published as
Signposts Along the Road—
also translated as
Milestones
—this collection of letters has achieved the status of a manifesto of contemporary radical political Islam. Released from jail in 1964, Qutb was rearrested and executed in 1966, reportedly at the insistence of Nasser.

Qutb elaborated Mawdudi’s thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization. Qutb also made a sharp distinction between science and ideology, arguing that modernity is made up of two types of sciences, physical and philosophical. The pursuit of material progress and the mastery of practical sciences are a divine
command and a “collective obligation” on Muslims. Modernization through the natural sciences was fine but not through the westernizing philosophical sciences.

Qutb’s reformulation of jihad resonated with contemporary Marxism-Leninism, both Maoist and Leninist. Echoing the Maoist distinction between ways of handling contradictions among the people and with the enemy, Qutb argued that jihad involves both persuasion and coercion, the former appropriate among friends but the latter suited to enemies. In the final analysis, only physical force will remove the political, social, and economic obstacles to the establishment of the Islamic community. The use of force to realize freedom is not a contradiction for Qutb—as, indeed, it is not for America. Islam has not only the right but also the obligation to exercise force to end slavery and realize human freedom.

Islam is a declaration of the freedom of every man or woman from servitude to other humans. It seeks to abolish all those systems and governments that are based on the rule of some men over others, or the servitude of some to others. When Islam liberates people from these external pressures and invites them to its spiritual message, it appeals to their reason, and gives them complete freedom to accept or reject it.

Indeed, “Islam does not force people to accept its belief, but it wants to provide a free environment in which they will have the choice to believe.”

Here there is more than just a passing resemblance to the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism. Qutb argued that jihad is a process beginning with the organization of a vanguard, followed by a withdrawal that would make possible both study and organization
and then a return to struggle. Here, Qutb echoed a key dictum of Leninism: “How to initiate the revival of Islam? A vanguard must set out with this determination and then keep going, marching through the vast ocean of
jahaliyyah
which encompasses the entire world…. I have written
Milestones
for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.”

The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi’a identity as the identity of the oppressed, as a project for a humane and just Islamic society. The struggle in revolutionary Iran did not pit just the clergy against non-Islamic intellectuals but also Islamists who were secular against those who were not. Recognizing the threat to the authority of the ulama from an autonomous intellectual reinterpretation of Islam, the nonsecular clergy transformed Shi’ism. In an effort to reorganize the ulama as an institutional hierarchy, Ayatollah Khomeini created an entirely new institution,
vilayat-i-faqih
, government by jurists. Acting as a trustee of the sovereignty of God, this institution was to function in parallel to civil government, accountable only to the ulama, of whom there were almost one hundred thousand in Iran at the time.

In the history of the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Sayyid Qutb is identified with the ascendancy of radical Islam in contrast to Hassan al-Banna’s moderation. The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. Had fifteen years of hard labor in Nasser’s camps convinced Qutb that religious and secular intellectuals could not live at peace in the same society? To what extent
was his renunciation of reform through coexistence—and the conviction of the need for a vanguard to wage a fight to the finish—an echo of other contemporary schools of political thought, such as Marxism-Leninism?

In their preoccupation with political identity and political power, Islamist intellectuals were like other intellectuals, whether religious or not. Islamist intellectuals crafted their ideologies through encounters not only with the ulama but also with these secular intellectuals who ignored the Islamic tradition and drew on other intellectual sources, such as Marxism or Western liberalism. Through this double encounter, they developed political Islam in multiple directions, both emancipatory and authoritarian. Just as it is historically inaccurate to equate political Islam with religious fundamentalism, it also makes little sense to equate every shade of political Islam with political terrorism. Of the four Islamist intellectuals written about here—Mohamed Iqbal, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Abdul A’la Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb—only Mawdudi was an unabashed advocate of creating an ideological Islamic state as the true subject of history. In contrast, Qutb’s thought was more society centered. Iqbal sought to constitute the Islamic umma beyond the nation-state as a broad, borderless cultural community. Finally, Jinnah was a secular Muslim, for whom Islam had become a political identity in colonial India; he pursued a secular, not an Islamic, state ideal, one that would safeguard the democratic rights of both the Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minoritie.

The single conviction that unites radical Islamist intellectuals is the preoccupation with taking power. They are convinced that the historical moment defined by the collapse of Communism is the moment Muslims must seize to advance Islam as a universal ideology of emancipation. This is how Sayyid Qutb opened his 1963 manifesto of radical political Islam,
Milestones:

Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital values for its healthy development and real progress…. Democracy in the West has become sterile to such an extent that its intellectuals borrow from the systems of the Eastern bloc, especially in the economic sphere, under the name of socialism…. Marxism stands intellectually defeated and it is not an exaggeration to say that in practice not a single nation in the world is truly Marxist…. The era dominated by the resurgence of science has also come to an end…. All the nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies that have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories derived from them, have also lost their vitality. In short, all man-made theories, both individualistic and collectivist, have proved to be failures. At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived because it has the needed values.

The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of
sharia
(Islamic law) and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances and, therefore, different points of view. It makes for a substantive body of law constantly changing in response to changing conditions. The attitude toward ijtihad is the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered—and progressive from reactionary—Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern Islamic society,
state-centered Islamists are determined that the “gates of ijtihad” remain forever closed. Iqbal called for the modernization and democratization of ijtihad, so the law could be interpreted by a body elected by the community of Muslims, the umma, and not just the religious ulama. The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and distinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement.

The question we face today is not just why a radical state-centered train of thought emerged in political Islam but how this thought was able to leap from the word to the deed, thereby moving from the intellectual fringe to the mainstream of politics in large parts of the Islamic world. Culture Talk cannot answer this question, nor can even the best of its cultural critics, such as Karen Armstrong. Culture Talk sees a clash of civilizations as the driving force behind global conflicts; its critics point to the cultural clash inside civilizations as being more important than the clash between them. Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity—that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of
political
terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the
political
encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.

To distinguish cultural from political Islam, I shall place political Islam in the context of the the Cold War. My aim is to question the widely held presumption—even among critics of Culture Talk—that extremist religious tendencies can be equated with political terrorism. Terrorism is not a necessary effect of religious
tendencies, whether fundamentalist or secular. Rather, terrorism is born of a
political
encounter. When it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, terrorism needs to be understood as a modern political movement at the service of a modern power. As such, the genesis of the form of political terrorism responsible for the tragedy of 9/11 can be traced to the late Cold War.

Chapter Two
T
HE
C
OLD
W
AR
A
FTER
I
NDOCHINA

I
was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania in 1975. It was a momentous year in the decolonization of the world as we knew it: 1975 was the year of the American defeat in Indochina, and of the collapse of Portuguese rule in the colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea, the last European empire in Africa. In retrospect, it was the year that the focal point of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa. The strategic question was this: Who would pick up the pieces of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the United States or the Soviet Union? With a shift in the focal point of the Cold War, there was a corresponding shift in U.S. strategy. Two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed that shift. One was drawn by the president of the United States, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment.

Two Contrasting Paradigms: Laos and Vietnam

The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.” It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of U.S. involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weighed the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos. The contrast could not have been sharper. With a free hand in Vietnam, the United States had decided to wage the war in a more traditional fashion, introducing hundreds of thousands of troops to fight a ground war against local Communist guerrillas. But when it came to Laos, the United States found its hands tied by a 1962 treaty with Moscow, which disallowed the introduction of ground troops in that country, and was forced to improvise.

The Vietnam War began in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two U.S. destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin. As the media painted a picture of national humiliation and demanded a response, President Johnson launched reprisal bombings against North Vietnam. He called on Congress to pass a resolution that would allow him to send U.S. ground troops to Vietnam. Later, the crews of the destroyers said the attack stories had been fabricated. A joint resolution of both houses of Congress, passed soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964, gave the president the endorsement needed in Vietnam. Armed with war powers that amounted to a blank check, President Johnson and his advisers took to a rapid “Americanization” of the war. In the course of a year, 1964, the number of U.S. “military advisers” increased from sixteen thousand to twenty-three thousand men. With still no discernible progress, the United States ordered sustained bombing of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder—in the expectation that the destruction of power plants and industrial facilities would
force the north to surrender. When this failed to produce the expected results, Johnson decided to commit enough combat troops to take over the running of the counterinsurgency war from the South Vietnamese. Each failure led to a bolder initiative, which in turn led to a greater failure. The first of these was the strategic-hamlet program, which aimed to herd village populations into government-controlled areas; then followed search-and-destroy operations, each concluding with a public announcement of a grisly “body count” of the number of Vietnamese Communists killed; and then came the pacification program, designed to go beyond targeting one village at a time to controlling the civilian population as a whole. When the pacification program, too, was found wanting, it was supplemented by Operation Phoenix, “a CIA-inspired South Vietnamese campaign aimed at identifying and liquidating the Viet Cong political apparatus in the villages.” Each successive failure led to a more ambitious effort, and finally the Tet offensive in 1968. After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, “Americanization” gave way to “Vietnamization.”