AL ; wat zegt de koran over ”erfgenamen van de aarde”.?
AI-overzicht
De Koran gebruikt de term ‘erfgenamen van de aarde’ in verschillende contexten om te verwijzen naar degenen aan wie God macht, leiderschap of het bezit van het land schenkt. De interpretatie hiervan kan variëren, maar er zijn twee prominente betekenissen:
De gelovigen als rechtvaardige opvolgers: Dit verwijst naar de belofte dat God degenen die geloven, rechtschapen handelen en Zijn wetten volgen, de autoriteit zal geven om de aarde te bewonen en te beheren na de vernietiging van onrechtvaardige en onderdrukkende volkeren. Een belangrijk vers in dit verband is:
Soera 21, Vers 105: “En Wij hebben reeds in de Psalmen geschreven, na de Vermaning, dat Mijn rechtvaardige dienaren de aarde zullen beërven” [1].
Dit wordt vaak gezien als een morele en spirituele erfenis, waarbij de gelovigen de morele leiding over de wereld krijgen [1].
De mensheid als rentmeesters (Khalifa’s): De Koran benadrukt ook dat de mensheid in het algemeen is aangesteld als rentmeester of ‘khalifa’ op aarde, met de verantwoordelijkheid om deze te onderhouden en er rechtvaardig mee om te gaan [1].
Kortom, de Koran ziet de rechtvaardige dienaren van God als de uiteindelijke erfgenamen van de aarde, die de verantwoordelijkheid hebben om deze te beheren in overeenstemming met goddelijke principes.
I once saw a digitally altered image floating around Facebook — it showed a bearded man with a dark, penetrating gaze and
raised placard bearing the words, “Behead those who call Islam violent.” I laughed myself sore at what then seemed an elegant — if
bracing — statement of a stark reality, only the laughter caught in my throat months later when, without warning, I found my own
portrait making the rounds, together with the words, “Wanted dead.”
A talk I gave in Cairo on June 4, 2013, discussing religious fascism in Egypt, had, it turned out, prompted this call for my
murder. My argument in the talk had been that a fascist mentality had made its way into Islam long before the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, that it was a product of the religion’s early history — early Islam had brought Arab religious pluralism to an end,
demanding total obedience from its followers, brooking no dis- senting opinion, and hungry for world domination. With this mind- set being early Islam’s predominant feature, outweighing all other aspects of the faith, I argued we could talk about such a thing as “Islamofascism.”
Footage of the talk was posted online, its more provocative ideas prompting heated debate. Soon afterward, a group of Islamic scholars formed to refute my arguments on live TV. Citing endless passages from the Qur’an and life of the Prophet that supposedly proved Islam embraced pluralism and dissenting ideas, they then debated how best I ought to be punished for defaming it, quickly and unanimously agreeing that I should be killed — the disagreement was about how to arrange this and who ought to carry out my execution.
One scholar, an apparent moderate, said I should be offered the chance the show remorse and turn back to Islam, stressing I was to be killed only if I refused. Both the leader of terrorist group al- Gama’a al-Islamiyya and a professor from the esteemed al-Azhar University, meanwhile, demanded my immediate death, clarifying that since my talk defamed not just Islam but its prophet as well, remorse would be no good — nor would anyone need official dispensation to shoot me. In support of this view, the scholar from the university offered a story from Muhammad’s life.
One day, the story goes, the Prophet found a woman put to death outside his mosque. When he asked those praying inside which of them had killed her, a blind man got to his feet and replied, “Messenger of God, it was I. This woman was my slave, and my two children by her are like precious pearls to me, but yesterday she insulted you, Messenger of God. I begged her not to slander you again, but she repeated her words. I slew her, unable to bear it.” At this, Muhammad told the mosque’s other congregants: “Bear witness, all of you: this woman’s blood was justly spilled.” Islamists regularly cite this story to legitimize the murder — without a trial or the right to a defense — of those who insult their prophet.
Before long, influential Egyptian Salafist (ultraconservative preacher who believes all Muslims should live and act exactly the
same way as the Prophet Muhammad and his first community had lived fourteen hundred years ago) Abu Ishaq al-Heweny weighed in on my wrongdoings during a television appearance. (Al-Heweny sojourns frequently in Germany while instructing the country’s Salafists, and one of his pupils is the convert Pierre Vogel.) From that moment on, he proclaimed, the principle of blood vengeance would be in effect between the two of us. These scholars move in such closed ideological circles that it never occurred to them that their interventions would only strengthen my arguments; worshipping their great leader Muhammad so devoutly, they feel moved to kill those who attack him — even if only verbally. They believe in killing others simply for disagreeing with them about things they consider sacrosanct. What does their worldview deserve to be called if not Islamic fascism?
Even under Egyptian law, the men who called for my death ought ordinarily to have been arrested immediately, but they were
the very fundamentalists Mohamed Morsi — the country’s then president— relied on to keep his opponents in a state of fear. The same professor from al-Azhar University who demanded I be put to death had called a few weeks earlier for the murder of opposition politician Mohamed ElBaradei, and no action was taken against him on that occasion, either . 1
Calls for my own death mounted online at frightening speed. In Tunisia, Islamists took advantage of the footage of my talk, exploiting it to smear the country’s entire secular opposition, putting my words in all their critics’ mouths to silence them. “Every righteous Muslim must rise up against those who equate Islam with fascism,” an added caption read. The aftermath of that talk in Cairo forced me to enter hiding for several weeks. Since returning to Germany, I now live under police protection. Even in this country, fanatics long to see me dead. Germany’s then-current foreign minister Guido Westerwelle condemned incitements to my murder at a press conference, calling on the Egyptian government to ensure my safety; yet only a week later, Morsi invited AssemAbdel Maged, one of the ringleaders in demands for my death, to a state function, embracing him while cameras looked on. Wester- welle would later speak of a “democratic fightback” when Egypt’s army deposed Morsi, and if democracy meant simply the holding of free elections, the former minister would have been right — but democracy means far more than that. Democracy is a political culture, a state of mind from which both Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood were and still are light-years removed.
After his removal from power, in any case, warrants were issued for the arrest of two of the ringleaders who called for my death. All three television stations that had broadcast their incitement to murder were shut down on the army’s orders, and Assem Abdel Maged’s picture appeared — not entirely unironically — in state newspaper Al-Ahram beneath the word “Wanted .” 2
I still receive death threats to this day. Pleasant as it would be if fanatics were only a threat while in power, beleaguered Islamists who see themselves as victims are both more dangerous and less predictable. My fears for myself are minimal, and I continue to write and give talks — I worry only for my Egyptian family members, who are now deluged with threats and abuse themselves.
Fanatics may be able to restrict my movements, but they can never garrote my ideas. The smear campaign mounted against me has swelled my readership in Egypt and in other Arab states, and I receive a great deal of support and solidarity in circles previously closed to me. People from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria have sent me e-mails expressing solidarity; some even give me refuge in their homes. Of all the messages from Egypt that reach me on Facebook, one raised my spirits especially. “My thanks go to the terrorists for introducing me to you and your ideas,” one man wrote. “Please keep at it!”
This book is one of my main attempts to do just that, even if it means pressing down further on the hornet’s nest my talks on Islam and fascism put my foot in. Indeed, the more violent reactions to it get, the more the masks of supposed Islamic moderates will slip, along with their pretense of a worldview compatible with democracy.
In Islamic Fascism, I compare Islamism’s totalitarian aspects with those of fascism. One chapter concentrates on the Muslim Brotherhood’s origins and evolution, highlighting its ideological and programmatic ties to European fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. As well as Islamists, those permanently stuck in Europe’s past may take umbrage at the comparison, perhaps offended by it; plenty of anti-Islamistsand anti-fascists might also object, perceiving the comparison either to relativize history or to exaggerate today’s phenomenon. So it was in mid-1980s Germany when historian Ernst Nolte questioned the Holocaust’s uniqueness, calling its concentration camps and Final Solution a response to the Soviet Union’s gulags and exterminations. 3
The philosopher Jurgen Habermas was one of those who lam- basted Nolte’s comparison most harshly, calling it a “revisionist” attempt at restoring German “national consciousness” and shaking off the “amoralized past.” 4 Most theories of totalitarianism are based on comparisons of Stalinism and Nazism. When it comes to these two totalitarian regimes’ power structures and mass exterminations, obvious overlaps exist — but comparison need not mean equation.
If at first it seems less than straightforward to project the structures and core ideas of fascism — a young politics by comparison — onto a 1,400-year-old religion, it may help to note that movements for political Islam emerged nearly simultaneously with European fascism, building an outlook on both its cultural past and its political present accordingly. Neither in Italy nor in Germany did fascism emerge in a vacuum, its roots stretching back hundreds of years, as do Islamism’s roots in Islam. One chapter of this book focuses on Islam’s historic origins, exploring the influence this early history still exerts today on politics in the Islamic world and focusing on key thinkers from Islam’s history, as well as periods when they found especially sympathetic ears.
Other chapters address the concept of jihad, its relationship with Islamic sexual morality, terrorism, Shiite fascism, and Islamism within Europe — but the first examines political Islam’s first principles, all of them reminiscent of fascism in its earliest form.
AN ODD COUPLE? FASCISM AND ISLAMISM IN RECENT HISTORY
Fascism, in some ways, is a political religion. Its followers believe they possess absolute truth; a charismatic, infallible leader stands atop its hierarchy, armed with a divine mission to unify the nation and crush its foes. Fascism’s ideology corrupts its followers with hatred and resentment, partitioning the world into friends and enemies and threatening those who oppose it with retributions. It opposes modernism, Enlightenment values, Marxism, and Jews, while glorifying militarism and self-sacrifice — even martyrdom.
Modem Islamism shares all these qualities, having emerged simultaneously with fascism in the 1920s. Islamism and fascism
alike emerged from feelings of abject subjugation, united by empire-building goals with world domination, a manifest virtue, and their enemies’ annihilation a prerequisite. One movement believes in Aryan racial supremacy, the other in Muslim moral supremacy over the vast, unbelieving bulk of humanity.
When Benito Mussolini founded his fascist movement in Italy, he dreamed of capturing the Roman Empire’s glory days. Only a few years after Mussolini’s rise, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood with similar yearnings, also invoking the memory of a glorious bygone era of Islam. Tunisian-French author Abdelwahab Meddeb considers the Islamic world’s central problem to be its own anxiety about no longer acting as the leading geopolitical power it was in the Middle Ages. He sees the dissonance between a proud past and the harsh present reality as a major source of anti-Western resentment. In Meddeb ’s view, it is a chronic sickness bom from feelings of being cheated by history and the world. Together with an idealized past, this sickness constitutes one of Islamic fascism’s driving forces.
THE PILLARS OF NASCENT FASCISM
In his book Five Moral Pieces , Italian philosopher, semiotician, and man of letters Umberto Eco lists fourteen distinct features of “ur-fascism,” or fascism in its earliest form . 1 Among them is the “cult of tradition,” decreeing truth to have been revealed in times past from on high, denying the possibility of intellectual advances today. Truth can be found, the cult of tradition dictates, only instrict adherence to revelation — certainly not, at any rate, by means of independent thought or study.
The same cult of tradition is a central part of Islamic thought, where the Qur’an, in its inviolability, is said to contain all there is to know. Political Islam considers its mission divine, a call to be answered in every time and place, regardless of reality. Salafists and jihadists alike demonize those who interpret Islamic texts in keeping with the times, the word of God not being humanity’s to reconstrue: to them, it matters not a bit that a Muslim who takes scripture literally is likely to struggle making his way in an
ever-changing modem world ambivalent to him. To Islamists, modernity is simply a sign of how far people can stray from the true faith; for Eco, meanwhile, rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment — tied to a tendency toward irrationalism — is another feature of fledgling fascism; others include rejection of critical reasoning, xenophobia, sexism, and machismo.
Fascism, Eco writes, feeds on people’s obsessive belief that “others” have drawn plans against them, a persecution complex accompanied by a fixed sense of having been humiliatingly short- changed and a subsequent thirst for retribution. Fascism’s fol- lowers live to fight more than they fight to live, the “struggle” being an end rather than a means. Word for word, the same applies to the Islamic concept of jihad, functioning not as a means of self- defense but as a duty unto God for all eternity. Come the end of days, the idea goes, the new world order will witness its enemies — humanity’s unbelievers — convert or die.
To outline a further parallel, fascism and Islamism alike are maladies of “belated nations,” societies fondly recalling glorious histories while in a process of decay. Before broadening its horizons in other European states, fascism first asserted itself in Italy. Why Italy, of all places? At the time, the country was in the midst of an incomplete unification process, political parties were mauling each other, feelings of being shortchanged in the Paris Peace Treaties ran high, the economy was depressed, and fears of a Bolshevist revolution were looming. To top it all, Italy was devoutly Catholic, with its influential church’s core ideas including principles like honor, hierarchy, unity, charismatic leadership, and absolute truth — elements that would also find their way into fascism.
In the nationalist surge at the turn of the nineteenth century, nationalist and fascist movements did emerge in countries like England and France, which had long histories of national unity under a single state to look back on. In the political sphere, however, they achieved only marginal relevance. Historian Ernst Nolte views Action Franfaise, the militant Catholic movement founded in France in 1898, as a forerunner to fascist movements that would later emerge in Italy and Germany. It hoped to put a stop to modernism in the Catholic Church, returning to a conser- vative Christian social order, yet never managed to gamer mass support, losing for good what relevance it had when the Nazi Weh- rmacht occupied France.
Three years after the hammer blow of 1929 ’s Wall Street crash, Oswald Mosley founded the Britain Union of Fascists. According to its own figures, the party boasted fifty thousand members, 2 with Mosley touring Italy to study fascism, later commissioning a black party uniform to match that of Adolf Hitler’s SS. In the wake of the Night of the Long Knives, however, and certainly during the Second World War, his movement hemorrhaged support.
Only in the belated German and Italian nations did fascism take hold, its supporters seizing the reins of power and leading the public astray. Italian fascism could be seen as the endpoint of the Italian unification process Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi had begun in the nineteenth century. The Italian word fascio stems from the Latin fasces, meaning “bunch” or “bundle,” referring originally to the bundle of rods carried in front of Roman emperors, first by imperial bodyguards and later by civil servants and officials. A symbol of power, it served both as a sign of unity and a potential instrument of corporal punishment for dissenters and criminals. When Mussolini founded his first association, Fasci di Combattimento, in 1919, he was invoking memories of the Roman Empire as a world power — not least because he hoped to rebuild it.
German fascism also emerged in a period of deterioration. To name only a handful of factors, economic fragility, established parties’ weakness, and the Treaty — or, in Germany, Travesty — of Versailles offered National Socialism a fertile breeding ground. The movement seemed to promise that the Wilhelmine empire’s scotched dream of a “place in the sun” for Germany could be revived, the nation bom again to strike back at powers that had debased it in the recent past, its ignominious defeat in the First World War forgotten. Crudely mixed, both impotence and the dream of omnipotence created the perfect climate for the Nazis’ rise to power.
Islamists exhibit just the same mixture of beliefs in their own impotence and omnipotence. Having come upon the world stage
only six centuries later than Christianity, Islam could be called a belated religion, still in its own middle ages today: using Islamic dating, in fact, the year 1436 matches 2015. Most Muslim countries could themselves be called belated nations in the same vein as 1920s Germany or Italy, unable since the Ottoman Empire’s fall (and later the end of colonial rule) to decide between the modem nation-state and the pull of ancient tribal structures and theocracy, leaving most Islamic states at a standstill for decades, governed under a contradictory blend of these regimes. In states with (military) dictatorships or those that dare to cautiously approximate modernity, Islamists come to form a political alternative.
The twentieth century witnessed a violent backlash against modernity and the values of the Enlightenment: after Bolshevism and fascism, both historian Ernst Nolte and philosopher Ernest Gellner view Islamism as a third antimodemist movement. All three have certainly availed themselves of modernity’s techno- logical innovations, yet they vehemently resist the cornerstones of the Enlightenment. Reason, personal liberty, freedom of thought, individuality, human rights, and human bodily autonomy, as well as freedom of expression and the press — all three movements view these as threats.
In particular, these movements have always perceived the tran- sition from rural to urban social organization to spell the end of communities based around shared backgrounds and/or ideology, a mainstay of all totalitarian regimes. The near-mystical exaltation of the rural sphere is often the root of efforts to preserve these communities, and an anti-urban discourse distinguishes all three movements. For the Bolsheviks, the city was the site of the proletariat’s exploitation; for the Nazis, Berlin symbolized the downfall of traditional morals in the roaring twenties; and for Islamists, too, the city is a place of sin and moral decline.
Wherever fascists, communists, and Islamists have taken power throughout their histories, societies have become open-air prisons whose inmates — their own citizens — have been monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pluralism has been and still is regarded as a threat, while societal consensus is artificially enforced through violence and intimidation. There is one and only one true ideology, with dissidents branded turncoats and traitors at best, eliminated outright at worst.
To stifle internal criticism, totalitarians stoke fear, constructing a scenario of imminent danger, the country and its people struggling against some real or imagined foe. The Nazis went about this with a degree of creativity, the German people threatened first by their country’s Jews and communists, then later by the external threat of the Allied forces. The Soviet Union’s external enemies also changed several times during its history, led at first by the Nazis and then by the democratic West. Dissidents inside the com- munist bloc served as the enemy within, supposedly collaborating with the West to undermine solidarity across society.
Islamists, by contrast, have always spoken of the same three foes: the West on the other side of the world, Israel close to home, and heretics, reformists, and secular thinkers and politicians the enemy within, deemed universally to act as an extension of the West. Wherever Islamic fascism has taken hold, as it has in Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Gaza, brutal dictatorships have emerged, refusing to this day to relinquish their grip on power; wherever Islamists have been ousted from government, they and their supporters have shape-shifted into terrorists, inflicting acts of devastating violence on their own countries, as in Algeria, Afghan- istan, Mali, and Libya — a fate that now threatens Egypt and Syria as well.
Yet for a broad swathe of the populace in Muslim countries, political Islam constitutes a beacon of hope. One factor among others is that neither the public nor the political elite in the relevant countries are prepared to admit their own failure — specifically, their inability to date to forge their own alternative to Western democracy. Above all, wounded pride has hamstrung all reappraisal of the Arab world’s history and fruitful relations with the West, with many Arab states settling firmly into their own victim mentality, encouraging collective cultivation of anti-Western hatred. Both secular dictatorships and their Islamist rivals have fed on this hatred, a lost, frustrated, and above all angry generation resulting.
Some find a means of venting their anger in rebellion against the ruling elite, while others find shelter and solace among Islamists.
It was in this manner that the once-peaceful mass movement behind the Arab Spring dissolved into infighting between two equally implacable blocs, a confrontation I choose to describe as an internal clash of civilizations — not the much-debated clash of the West with the Islamic world, but an intra- Arabian, intra-Islamic power struggle. The Islamic world can be viewed as an onion-layered multiple dictatorship: the dictatorship of political dynasties like the Mubarak, Gaddafi, Hussein, Ben Ali, and Assad families forms its first layer; the dictatorship of the military, the next; after that, the dictatorship of religion, which determines how children are raised and educated; and finally, the dictatorship of society, which impacts life within families through archaic gender roles.
Each onion layer is a high wall separating the Islamic world from the rest of the globe, supposedly so as to safeguard its identity. Young people demonstrating on the Arab world’s streets today have managed to peel one layer away, only to find themselves confronted with the next. It may be that in the end, only the onion’s core — religion — remains. It is still debatable, if so, whether the courage of youth will suffice, rocking it from its position of power. Should they succeed, what next occurs to them will be that the onion itself was only ever a product of fear — and that beneath all its multiple layers, there was never anything worth guarding. Only then can we refer to a “revolution” — and until then, Islam’s ancient totalitarian features will go on making their mark, spreading even to areas where religion formerly played only a minor role.
22 CHAPTER 2 REFORMISTS OR FASCIST ISLAMISTS?
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN EGYPT
To he Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Middle East’s most influential Sunnite groups, is sometimes presented by experts on Islam as a “reformist social movement” that renounced violence in its distant past. These are the same experts who fawn over “moderate Islamism,” claiming it to be compatible with democracy. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s incumbent president, is mentioned constantly in conjunction with this so-called moderate Islamism — so are Rachid al-Ghannushi and his Ennahda party in Tunisia, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
When all three parties were exposed as antidemocratic and corrupt, these experts steadfastly refused to relinquish their faith that somewhere in the world, moderate Islamism definitely did exist — ignoring that Islamists, whatever their colors and camouflage, only enter politics with one goal: enforcement of an Islamic social order under sharia law, not precluding world domination in the long term.
Deep down, Islamists despise democracy and consider it little more than a route to power. Having witnessed his mentor Necmettin Erbakan fail to a establish theocracy by bypassing Turkey’s institutions, Erdogan chose to infiltrate them instead, styling himself early in his career as a secular, pro- Western candidate desperate to fight corruption and reform Turkey’s economy. Only a few years after being elected head of state — once his country’s institutions had been subverted from within, its military neutralized — did he reveal authoritarian, imperialist, and anti-Western views.
When a corruption scandal rocked Erdogan’s government in December 2013, Minister for Economic Affairs Zafer (^aglayan had only conspiracy theories to offer, describing a “squalid plot against the government, the party, and Turkey itself.” 1 Foreign intelligence agencies were, ^aglayan claimed, behind the scandal. Diverting attention reflexively from real-world problems with cospiracy theories of this kind is, in itself, a feature of developing fascism.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s history includes several attempts to take power in Egypt by force, at one point deeming democratic elections blasphemous since sovereignty lay with God rather than with the people. Brute force never allowed them to achieve their goals, however, and so the group’s stance on elections — if not democracy itself — changed over time. The Brotherhood won Egypt’s elections in 2012, yet failed miserably after only a year in government. Once again, the government blamed Islam’s enemies at home and abroad instead of holding itself to account.
In December 2013, key figures from the Muslim Brotherhood finally stood trial, accused of ordering demonstrators’ deaths. Its methods, the same ones fascism historically employed, are now all too familiar — critics, dissidents, and apostates were considered one more enemy within to be eliminated.
The Brotherhood’s trajectory has been a fascist one ever since its founding in 1928, and like any fascist movement it trades in two currencies: rage and blood. Throughout the group’s eighty-eight- year existence, its members have never come up with any real plans for Egypt’s future, nor any answers to the country’s problems or those of any other Muslim state — yet they remain determined to rule over the countries in question. Those willing to work along- side the Brotherhood are required to adopt its slogan, “Allah is our objective; the Qur’an is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for Allah’s sake is our highest goal.”
Whatever supposedly moderate form the group’s politics take, these five pillars are enough to unmask it as a fascist organization. With its members’ conviction that all those not with them are their enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood can also be seen as founders of Islamist terrorism, al-Qaeda being one of the group’s immediate descendants. The Brotherhood’s entire history is a product of the same mentality as National Socialism and its horrific results — a mind-set whose roots stretch far back into history. The First World War’s conclusion spelled the end for many superpowers. The royal houses of Habsburg-Lorraine and Russia were beaten, Germany and Austria Hungary’simperialist dreams were in ruin, Russia’s czar and his family had been murdered, and the country’s monarchy was supplanted with communist revolutionaries. The long-beleaguered Ottoman Empire finally fell in 1924; the caliphate that had held countless Islamic states and peoples together for four centuries, its governmental system legitimized by Islam, died with it.
In all these fallen empires, new regimes that held distinctive ideologies followed hot on monarchism’s heels. Fascism spread in Italy and Germany, the latter’s National Socialists taking power after the historical interlude of the Weimar Republic, while communism became Russia’s new religion. Following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, people in the Islamic world found themselves hovering like lost children, orphaned and unsure where to turn.
Three ideologies competed for their approval — Islamism, nationalism, and pan-Arabism. The modem democratic nationstate had garnered a bad reputation, and most Muslim countries at the time were still under British or French colonial rule, their people feeling exploited and oppressed. Communism, by contrast, curried favor quickly with intellectuals, most notably in Syria and Egypt, yet remained off the table for the Muslim majority due to its wholesale rejection of religion.
During this tense period of reorientation, two groups emerged independently of one another that aimed to restore the Islamic caliphate. In India, the scholar Abul Ala Maududi founded a movement in 1924 that would also revive jihadist ideology. Maududi wished first to shake off the yoke of British rule and then unite the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community. “Come out and join the struggle,” Maududi declared, calling its members to an armed conflict. 2 “Eliminate all those who reject God. … If you accept the truth of Islam, all that remains for you to do is to put all your strength into establishing Islamic rule on Earth.” Maududi’s ideas spread rapidly, first in India and later in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his understanding of Islam serving as the main basis of the Taliban’s ideology today.
Four years later, in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood formed in the provincial city of Ismai’lia, located on the Suez Canal. Hassan al-Banna, then a twenty-two-year-old teacher of Arabic, established two goals for his new movement. First, Islamic society was to be cleansed of all things un-Islamic; second, the caliphate was to be restored. His philosophy caught on quickly in Syria and Egypt, and today the group boasts representatives in more than seventy states worldwide, with Muslim Brotherhoods active both politi- cally and financially in Europe and the United States.
Neither Maududi’s nor al-Banna’s group took power anywhere early on, but numerous militant organizations that have been responsible in recent decades for countless terror attacks in the Islamic world, Asia, Europe, and the Unites States spawned from them. Globalization brought both movements to each other’s attention, with children and grandchildren of al-Banna and Maududi meeting in 1 980s Afghanistan to fight Russia with Saudi money and Western bullets. Rather than laying down their guns when Soviet rule ended in Afghanistan, they founded a movement devoted to fulfilling both men’s dreams through long-term jihad. Today, that group is known as al-Qaeda.
I digress — at this point, we might do well to examine the Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with National Socialism.
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND THE NAZIS: A LOVE AFFAIR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
In 1946, Hassan al-Banna delivered a eulogy for Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem. Wanted as a war criminal and Nazi collaborator after the Second World War, al-Husseini had sought asylum in Egypt after a brief spell in a French prison, finding refuge with al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood.
“The Mufti is worth a whole nation to me,” al-Banna declared in his speech, “for the Mufti is Palestine and Palestine its Mufti. O
Amin, what a great, indomitable, incredible man you truly were. Hitler and Mussolini’s defeat did not rile you. What a hero you were — what a miracle of a man. Pray, what could Arab youth ever do — what could cabinet ministers, the wealthy, the princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and Tripoli ever do — to deserve a hero like you, who challenged an empire, battling Zionism with Hitler’s help? Hitler and Germany may be no more, but Amin al-Husseini will fight on.” 3
Al-Banna and al-Husseini had been friends long before the latter’s flight from Germany, where al-Husseini resided as Hitler’s personal guest during the war, following a failed pro-German putsch in Iran in 1941. A 1927 letter in which al-Banna (still a young teacher at the time) informs al-Husseini of his intent to found a “Muslim brotherhood” is proof enough of correspondence between the two much earlier. 4 Al-Husseini reacted excitedly, giving this plan his blessing, and an old photo from the Muslim Brotherhood’s archives shows the two getting along famously. 5
Amin al-Husseini ’s relationship with the Nazi regime is thoroughly documented, with the grand mufti debating the “Final Solution to the Jewish question” with Ministers Joachim von Rib- bentrop and Adolf Eichmann and hoping to solicit Hitler’s support for an Arab state in Palestine modeled on Nazi Germany — the list of associations goes on. Yet there are precious few signs al-Banna had friends in such places at the time. While British foreign ministry documents attest to correspondence between Nazi intelligence and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (who planned to weaken Britain’s grip on North Africa during the Second World War), the extent of this collaboration remains unclear. 6
What can be proven beyond doubt is that Hassan al-Banna admired both Mussolini and Hitler, viewing them as effective leaders who led their countries into a new era. Whenever he mentioned either, he honored them with their Italian and German titles, “II Duce” and “der Fuhrer.” 7 Al-Banna, for his own part, pronounced himself not just an imam or qaid (“commander”), as Arab religious and political leaders most commonly did, but a “murshid” or “guide.” Later, Ayatollah Khomeini would adopt the same title.
In one of his many articles, al-Banna appears besotted with a speech of Mussolini’s from 1935 that committed Italy to everlasting war. “Every Italian man between eight and fifty-five must be gripped by a militarist spirit,” the dictator had said atop a tank. 8 “Militarism is a new idea, something no one has succeeded in realizing throughout human history, and there is reason enough why such an idea is hard
for other peoples to enforce. On historical and moral grounds, no people except Italy’s is well placed to become a nation of soldiers.”
Al-Banna goes on to list reasons past nations had fallen, taking the Roman Empire as one example. “Early empires perished,” he writes, “on striving for prosperity and comfort, neglecting the spirit of conflict, for close to them other nations came on the scene that were less civilized, but consequently stronger and more battle-ready.” 9
The most interesting and most telling point is that al-Banna corrects Mussolini, pointing out the idea of society’s total militarization had begun not under fascism but thirteen centuries before- hand, early on in Islamic history. Islam, al-Banna argues, revered the same spirit of militarism as Mussolini, seeking to implant it in every Muslim’s soul. “There is barely a surah in the Qur’an in which the Muslim is not summoned to show courage, endurance and militance, pursuing jihad in the name of God.” 10
In his conclusion, al-Banna cited numerous verses from the Qur’an and statements of the Prophet to prove Islam a militarist religion — with one small but decisive difference from fascism. Whereas the goals fascists pursue through armed conflict are ultimately worldly ones, he writes, “Islam is geared toward preserving God’s legacy on earth.” 11
The notion of armed conflict was enshrined in al-Banna’s own movement from day one, as is clear — if on no other grounds — from the emblem he personally designed: two crossed swords beneath a Qur’an, the opening words of one verse — “And prepare” — underneath both. The verse, from Surah 8, reads, “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows. And whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged.”
Accounts of this emblem’s derivation are contradictory, some even claiming it as an Islamic version of the swastika, yet the opening lines of the Brotherhood’s first manifesto are indisputable, a clear call to armed conflict still in use today, only its context changing with the times. “Allah is our objective; the Qur’an is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for Allah’s sake is our highest goal.”
Originally, this call to arms referred to British colonial rule as well as the forces of democracy in Egypt, which installed a secular
constitution in 1922. While Egypt had achieved independence on paper earlier that year, it remained a British mandate. A group of Western-educated Egyptian lawyers and politicians had passed a constitution far too liberal and democratic for the Muslim Brotherhood’s liking — certainly one more progressive by far than any that followed in Egypt, as it protected among other things equal rights for men and women and unequivocal freedom of the press, of thought, and of belief.
One member of the commission behind this constitution was Youssef Qattawi, a Jew who would serve later as the country’s minister for finance and found the Arab world’s first bank. At the time of the Brotherhood’s founding, Wissa Wassef — a Copt — similarly presided over Egypt’s parliament. The Muslim Brother- hood opposed the right of Copts and Jews to hold key offices in their country, only affording Muslims the right to rule their fellow Muslims — with the obligation, of course, to secure their subjects’ loyalty by enforcing sharia. Qattawi ’s grandchildren today are living in exile, while Wassef’s can have no doubt about whether a Copt will serve as Egypt’s next head of state or government — only about when fundamentalists will next attack one of their churches or bomb a Christian school.
Notably, and despite initial skepticism about the notion of democracy, Egypt held elections in this period that liberal and left wing parties were able to win, as radical nationalists and Islamists failed to mobilize voters. In the 1930s, King Farouk moved to curb
his country’s democratization, scaling back parliament’s powers when it announced plans to strip him of some of his own. The leftists and liberals formed a majority in parliament, fighting back against the power-conscious Farouk, with hordes of workers and students taking to the streets to demonstrate against Egypt’s monarch for the first time in history. The Muslim Brotherhood sensed its chance.
Not yet officially a political party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s members joined with the ultranationalists of Misr al-Fatah (Young Egypt), founded in October 1933 and modeled on the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Misr al-Fatah even used the Hitler salute as its party greeting. Two young officers in this party, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, would go on to shape Egypt’s destiny, both endorsing collaboration with the Brotherhood at this point.
Both Misr al-Fatah and the Muslim Brotherhood developed paramilitary wings modeled on those of fascist groups in Italy and Germany, gathering arms and training troops in secret camps. From this point on, the Muslim Brotherhood’s youth division dressed in brown shirts, chanting during their training, “Struggle, obedience, silence!” — a borrowing from Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Supporters of the Young Egypt party, meanwhile, dressed in green shirts, parading through Cairo’s streets with torches and cries of “Egypt first,” an echo of “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles .”
While the Second World War was being fought, Anwar Sadat was arrested and jailed for maintaining contact with Germany’s
secret service and possessing German communication equipment. Egypt’s army was unwilling to wade into the war, yet King Farouk considered himself closer to the Axis powers of Berlin and Rome than to London, eagerly attempting to contact the Nazi regime. Hitler, knowing what Egypt meant to Britain, gratefully accepted King Farouk’s attempts to cozy up, which were supported by Young Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Muslim Brotherhood’s support base had remained negligible. When Nazi propaganda was circulated in Egypt, and anti-Semitic sentiment in the Nile region was mounting, this changed. Hassan al-Banna kept the spark of anti-Semitism alight, writing in a journal that the Axis nations of Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo were already quasi- Islamic, and he called on the religious al-Azhar Institution to send Islamic scholars to the inspiring countries in question, educating them more intensively about Islam and discovering more in return about their strict social organization and its underlying ideology. 12
In other publications, Muslim Brotherhood members encouraged rumors that Hitler had converted, making a secret pilgrimage to Mecca and taking the new name Hajj Mohamed Hitler — clearly doing all they could to stir up Nazi sympathies in Egypt’s populace, principally to weaken the British. Were Hitler to attack Egypt, they assured readers, only British structures would be severely
affected; mosques and Islamic structures would be spared by the god-fearing fuhrer.
Whether the Brotherhood mounted this propaganda campaign for the Nazis on King Farouk’s orders, following contact with
Germany, or simply on its own initiative remains unclear. Former minister of education Taha Hussein, one of Egypt’s foremost literary scholars, publicly criticized both Farouk and the Brotherhood for their pro-German stance, while Abbas el- Akkad, another author and member of parliament, accused the Brotherhood of accepting secret payment from Nazi intelligence to sow fascism’s seeds in Egypt. In his 2009 book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf backs el-Akkad’s claims, arguing that the Nazis saw the Muslim Brotherhood as more than a potential military ally — indeed, as a means of spreading their core anti-Semitic ideas worldwide. 13
CHAPTER 3
ISLAMIC FASCISM’S HISTORIC ROOTS FROM ABRAHAM TO SAYYID QUTB
Each year, Muslims worldwide celebrate Eid, commemorating the story of Abraham and his son as detailed in both the Bible and the Qur’an. Abraham, supposed forefather of all Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is said to have seen himself sacrificing his son to God in a dream. In the Qur’an’s version, Abraham wakes the next morning, retrieves a knife immediately, and makes a rush for his son, informing him of the dream . 1 “My son!” Abraham declares. “I have seen in a vision that I offer thee in sacrifice: now see what is thy view.” His son replies, “Father, do as thou art commanded: thou willst find me, if Allah so wills, one of the steadfast!”
“When they had both submitted to [the will of God] and he had laid him prostrate on his forehead,” the Qur’an continues,
“[God] called out to him ‘O Abraham! Thou hast already fulfilled the vision!’ Thus indeed do We reward those who do right. For this was obviously a trial, and We ransomed him with a momentous sacrifice: and We left this blessing for him among generations to come in later times: ‘Peace and salutation to Abraham! ’ Thus indeed do We reward those who do right. For he was one of Our believing Servants.” In the end, then, God stops Abraham from sacrificing his son, praising his righteousness and intention to carry
out the deed, and takes an animal in the boy’s place.
Several aspects of the story ought to raise eyebrows today. Abraham willingly obeys his fuhrer’s orders — that is to say, God’s — without pausing to question their rationality or morality, even when they require him to sacrifice his own son. Unquestioning obedience and self-sacrifice are both core features of a fascist worldview, but Abraham’s actions — indeed his eagerness to display both these traits — are just as illustrative of Islam’s core principles. (The very term Islam is derived from the Arabic verb aslama, meaning “to submit or surrender oneself to another.”)
Despite his son being a child with no knowledge of God or sacrifices made to him, Abraham consults him on the matter of his prospective death. Fascists employ this tactic, too, offering the public only the illusion of choice where decisions have long since been made for them — a sleight of hand Joseph Goebbels used in all its perfidy in his infamous speech at Berlin’s Sportpalast, the German people roaring “da!” when he asked them, “Do you want total war?” As the war he spoke of steadily proved impossible to win, it was the people who were held to blame, their insufficient commitment to it ostensibly bringing German defeats about.
In some respects, fascism could be called a distant cousin of monotheism. Religions that revere a multitude of gods are, by and large, more tolerant and adaptable than the three great monotheistic faiths: among polytheists, responsibilities are shared between different gods, individual deities governing life, death, fertility, famine and so on. These deities are complementary and interdependent, and believers are able to decide which ones to turn to based on circumstance. The god of Abraham, by contrast, has always been jealous, allowing no other gods beside himself.
The notion a single creator god determines all that happens in our lives — a god who monitors us twenty-four hours a day, eavesdropping on our thoughts and dreams, policing our lives with shalts and shalt-nots and punishing transgressions with torment in hell — is the basis for the dictatorship of religion, which in its turn is the basis for all other forms of dictatorship. Atop every dictatorship stands a proprietor of absolute truth, offering to show others the way and asking in return only that they surrender their autonomy and common sense, becoming unquestioning followers. Salvation, the claim goes, is only attainable by the one true path.
ABRAHAM, MUHAMMAD, AND THE THREAT OF DISSENT
Abraham’s search for the one true god is said to have been a lengthy one. After his religious awakening, the Bible tells how he parted ways with his original tribe, setting out to revere this new god and let others know of him; in the Qur’an, meanwhile, Abraham remains with his tribe, quarrelling with his father, Azar — a devotee of the old gods — and smashing his religious idols. On being told to desert their gods, the angry mob cast Abraham into a fire for defaming them — only for God to cool the flames, saving Abraham by a miracle.
As a young merchant traveling to Damascus and back, Muhammad would have met plenty of Christians and Jews, discovering biblical narratives. Muhammad named his only son Ibrahim, the Arabic form of Abraham, with tales of the man proving central to the philosophy he later called Islam. In hopes of enticing Christians and Jews, Muhammad claimed Abraham as a forefather just as they did, though with one slight difference.
Poring over the biblical account of Abraham, Muhammad came across Ishmael, his little-discussed first son by the Egyptian slave woman Hagar. All we learn of Ishmael and his mother in the Bible is that Abraham abandons them in the desert when his wife, Sarah, has grown jealous of Hagar. Muhammad claimed Ishmael, rather than Sarah’s son Isaac, to have served as Abraham’s would- be sacrifice — and that Ishmael’s line, accordingly, were Abraham’s true heirs. In an inspired move on Muhammad’s part, the Qur’an subsequently tells of Abraham and Ishmael constructing Mecca’s Kaaba as a site of pilgrimage for their descendants — pilgrimage, not by chance, being the oldest pagan tradition of the Arab tribes Muhammad hoped to win over to his cause.
With its surrounding town situated on the principal trading route between Damascus and Yemen, the Kaaba served at the time as Arabia’s religious hub. Before the advent of Islam, tribes were allowed to honor their various deities in or near the Kaaba — a central site for polytheists — with Christians even permitted to hang icons of Jesus and Mary inside. At the time, the Kaaba was a meeting point for all Arabia’s traders, and this settlement was a show of much-needed pragmatism — nonetheless, such tolerance was to vanish after Islam’s triumph.
When Muhammad first set out in Mecca, intent on preaching his new philosophy, its townspeople allowed him to do so outside the Kaaba. At first, Muhammad styled himself as open-minded, declaring in the Qur’an, “For you is your religion, for me is my religion .” 2 Only when he set out to ban all deities except his own in the Kaaba’s vicinity did a conflict arise between him and other tribes’ leaders, who feared for their custom with good reason.
Pre-Islamic Arabia was a hotbed of tribal conflicts and disputes, stoked by the superpowers on either side of its borders — the Byzantineand Sasanian Empires, specifically, both of whom knew exactly how to use Arabia’s tribes as pawns in proxy wars throughout the region. Muhammad dreamed, meanwhile, of a greater Arab empire, with the Kaaba as its religious nerve center — a dream, it seems, that ran in his family. Muhammad’s grandfather Qusai ibn Kilab tried to close ranks with Medina in hopes of unifying Arabia’s warring tribes. Qusai was destined to die before his ambition could be realized, but Muhammad would reap the profits of his grandfather’s alliances with Medina, still known at the time as Yathrib.
For thirteen years, Muhammad preached in the streets of Mecca to no appreciable avail, only a few hundred people — most of them slaves — opted to follow him. Only when he and his fol- lowers moved to Medina did Muhammad’s breakthrough come, as he mediated between the warring Aws and Khazraj tribes and was ultimately appointed Medina’s civic leader.
Muhammad tried initially to cozy up to Medina’s Jews, whose traditions he found appealing, working Jewish obligations and pro- scriptions such as ritual cleansing, prayer, fasting, and avoidance of pork into his movement — even establishing Jerusalem as the city Muslims faced to pray. Muhammad called these shalts and shalt-nots sharia, a direct translation of the Jewish term halakha, the name of Judaism’s juristic tradition and behavioral code; both words, Hebrew and Arabic, mean “the path.”
Muhammad went so far as to draft a fifty-two-point constitution, clarifying how Jews and Muslims ought to coexist. It guaranteed freedom of belief yet jeopardized Jewish neutrality in several fields, requiring Jews to lend Muhammad military support and avoid all future trade with pagan Meccans. Invoking Abraham and integrating biblical narratives and prophets into the Qur’an, Muhammad hoped Jews and Christians would adopt his new relgion, yet the majority of those from different faiths kept their distance, with Medina’s Jews in particularreluctant to risk their neutrality and flexibility in relations with various Arab tribes. When Mecca found itself at war with Muhammad, some of these Jews even sided with the pagan city: Muhammad retaliated by exterminating the Jews of Khaybar wholesale. To this day, Islamists demonstrating all around the world continue to chant, “ Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yau ’ud ‘ — “Remember Khaybar, Jews, for Muhammad’s army will return.”
From this point on, the Prophet executed an about-face, setting on the true path by violent means anyone who refused to be swayed by words. Once Muhammad had retaken his hometown of Mecca, he dispensed with his early to-each-their-own sermons. Like Abraham before him, Muhammad destroyed the idols that surrounded the Kaaba, putting to death Meccans who resisted his rule. Muhammad even killed one unarmed man taking refuge in the Kaaba, which violated a long-standing taboo since Meccans considered the Kaaba a place of nonviolence.
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Muhammad had their city cleansed entirely of Jews and Christians, assembling a task force with the specific mission of staging assaults against his opponents. Among its victims were Jewish poets who criticized or lampooned him, as well as the leaders of tribes that had taken up arms against his rule. In one act of particular brutality, Muhammad sent his task force — led by his adopted son, Zayd — to put an old woman to death for calling him a liar, encouraging forty of her children and grandchildren to go to war with him. 3 Zayd personally killed all her children and grandchildren, sparing only one attractive woman as a personal slave for Muhammad, before tying the old woman in between two horses and driving them in opposing directions, tearing her in two while still alive.
As well as subjecting his opponents to fear and terror, Muhammad’s violence sowed seeds of intolerance at the heart of Islam — seeds that would take root and that bear rotten fruit today. Because of him, a hub of religious pluralism became a monotheist strong- hold; because of him, Islam’s god became imperious, unpredictable, and angry — an eternal dictator on high, refusing point-blank to negotiate, punishing apostates with the pain of hell, and choosing who deserves to live or die — a power-crazed god opposed to all others, never to be questioned and stopping at nothing to uphold his own power.
After each war Muhammad waged against the tribes of Mecca, he waged a war against a Jewish tribe that refused to submit to his rule; the Qur’an’s statements on Jews at the time grew polemical and hostile. Where once Jews had been “faithful people of scripture,” they became “falsifiers of scripture.” 4 Hostility of this kind escalated until the Qur’an came to refer to Jews as “apes” and “swine.” Three ofMedina’s Jewish tribes were outlawed, the fourth charged with high treason: on Muhammad’s instruction, all its men were executed, its women and children were sold as slaves, and Muslims resumed praying toward Mecca instead of Jerusalem once Medina was rid of all its Jews.
Surah 8 refers to Muhammad’s altercations with Jews, its text describing Jews as animals damned to remain backstabbers forever: “Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved, and they will not [ever] believe — the ones with whom you made a treaty but then they break their pledge every time, and they do not fear Allah. So if you, [O Muhammad], gain dominance over them in war, disperse by [means of] them those behind them that perhaps they will be reminded.”
And so the ethnic cleansing of Arabia began, designed to rid the region of all unbelievers and lay the foundations for an expanding Islamic empire. Its first moments were those in which the earliest form of Islamic fascism was bom.
Upon his death, Muhammad left Muslims the Qur’an and tens of thousands of hadith, containing detailed instructions for all aspects of life, including how Muslims ought to sit on the toilet in a godly manner. All he neglected to tell his followers was who should succeed him as their leader, along with what credentials this next ruler needed. As a result, severe conflicts broke out among Muslims only a few years after Muhammad died, culminating in a schism between the Sunnite and Shiite communities. At the time, the fundamental difference between the two lay in the fact that Shiites recognized only Muhammad’s direct descendants as his successors, while Sunnites accepted leaders who hailed from all ten of Mecca’s tribes. The Sunnite-Shiite conflict led to a brutal civil war that put the Islamic movement to the ultimate test mere decades after its founder’s death.
Emerging over time, one of the most traumatic marks this schism left was the concept of hakimiyyah, “the rule of God on Earth,” its core statements being both that only divine authority furnished a ruler with power or stripped him of it and that God reigned on Earth with such rulers as his representatives, entrusted to carry out his will. All Muslims, the concept of hakimiyyah stated, bore a duty to obey their rulers, while acts of rebellion and criticism were tantamount to questioning God himself.
Hakimiyyah gave rise to two Islamic concepts: for Shiites, that of the imam; for Sunnites, rule by the grace of God. Principally
among Sunnites, agreement was reached that rebellion against those in power was by definition rebellion against God, threatening the entire ummah with schisms and confusion. Two passages from the Qur’an were cited to this effect, one instructing Muslims, “Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you,” 5 the other stating, “fitnah [dissent] is worse than killing.” 6
Such convictions are equally central to fascist movements and totalitarian regimes. Those who deviate from their faith or ideology are branded unbelievers or traitors to the fatherland, then cast out or put to death.
In Sunnite states such as Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, where theocracy is yet to become reality, the argument persists that Muslims have tried all possible systems of governance, from nationalism to Marxism to capitalism, without any of them bearing fruit in the Islamic world, ostensibly because they are too alien and un-Islamic. Citing history as evidence that the nation’s glory days were those in which God’s will was carried out on Earth, religious orthodoxy presents itself as the one true alternative; today’s Salafists and jihadists dream of turning back the clock and restoring the social order Muhammad enforced in Medina. A fully Islamized society that carries out God’s will, their arguments insist, requires the Prophet’s teachings to take the world by storm.
IBN HANBAL, SALADIN, AND THE DREAM OF UNITY
Four different schools of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, exist, of which three are considered moderate. The Malikite, Shafi’ite, and
Hanafist schools allow limited room for interpretation of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition; Muslims who live by their demands occasionally have the opportunity to choose between several behavioral codes that make life in the modem world easier without venturing outside the realm of Islamic doctrine. Ultimately, of course, all three remain conservative, allowing interpretation and discretion only when no clear passage in the Qur’an or statement of the Prophet on a given topic can be unearthed. Since the Prophet made tens of thousands of surviving statements a Muslim might draw guidance from in any conceivable dilemma, room for interpretation remains scarce.
The most conservative of the four schools, however, is Hanbalism, founded in ninth century Baghdad by Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) after Islam’s Shiite- Sunnite schism. Far from being governed by sharia law, Baghdad was a permissive city at the time, with alcohol, singing, and dancing alike as parts of its daily life. At the palace of the caliph, contests were even held in which Jewish, Muslim, and Christian poets competed, criticizing one another’s religions in their compositions; some of the verses in question mounted direct attacks on the Prophet Muhammad yet were never deemed offensive.
Just as remarkable is that certain schools of fiqh emerged at the time, many of which independently questioned both the Qur’an’s divinity and its inerrancy. One of these schools, Mu’tazilism, read Qur’anic scripture as applying specifically to its own seventh-century context, sparking debates over whether the Qur’an was truly “everlasting divine writ” — or, rather, a document of its creators’ time, without far-reaching significance for centuries to come. Life in ninth-century Baghdad was different enough in the eyes of Mu’tazilists from life in seventh-century Mecca and Medina that they never felt any obligation to enforce Muhammad’s judicial code to the letter. In the Islamic world today, their stance would be unthinkable, as would the tolerant camaraderie found at the caliph’s palace in Baghdad.
With the spread of Islam to parts of the former Persian and Byzantine Empires, Muslim thinkers encountered Greek philos- ophy and Jewish and Persian folklore. A new Islamic theology emerged, willing to argue rationally so as to keep up with other religions’ followers — an occurrence that caused the forces of conservatism great anxiety. Ibn Hanbal feared Muslim schisms would continue, with rival newtheological schools competing endlessly, unless a return to literal readings of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s statements prevailed. Ceding room for interpretation would, he felt certain, lay the ground for sectarian secession, leading in the long run to civil war — so Ibn Hanbal founded the ultraconservative school of jurisprudence that lies at the core of fundamentalist Islam today.
In prosperous Baghdad, Ibn Hanbal’s theology initially fell on deaf ears. Nor was this to prove his sole obstacle: due to his strict
orthodox stance, Ibn Hanbal himself was imprisoned. By contrast, comparatively moderate schools of fiqh flourished in times of strength and prosperity for the Islamic empire, shaping jurisprudence in Andalusia, Baghdad, and Cairo. It was only in a time of crises, fragility, defeats, and schisms that Hanbalism’s hour rolled round. While the Crusades stretched on, a wave of orthodoxy swept across the Islamic world, transforming its societies as their people dreamt of a faithful ruler uniting all Muslims under the banner of Islam and striking back against Christian conquerors. Saladin (1137-1193) came closest to achieving all this, declaring jihad, defeating crusading forces, and liberating Jerusalem from Christian rule in 1187. The dream of Muslim unity and victory against the West has permeated history ever since, with every Islamist leader envying Saladin ’s success and dreaming of a new Islamic golden age.
IBN TAYMIYYAH AND THE CONCEPT OF JIHAD
After Mongol assaults on the Islamic world in the thirteenth century, orthodoxy enjoyed a great revival and the conservative Hanbalist school of jurisprudence was resurrected by a scholar named Ibn Taymiyyah, the spiritual forefather of modem-day Salafists and Wahhabists. Osama bin Laden often cited Ibn Taymiyyah’s example, especially his interpretation of the concept of jihad.
Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328) deemed it a ruler’s principal task to implement sharia in its totality and enforce public compliance; those who failed to do so were undeserving of their subjects’ loyalty. 7 Ibn Taymiyyah also construed the concept of tawhid, “belief in one and only one god,” extremely strictly, accusing Sufist Muslims of not being true monotheists for venerating not just Allah but all the sheikhs whose graves they regularly visited; for him, these graves’ adornment was nothing less than a sign of kufr, or “heathenry.” Accordingly, he held Shiite scholarship to be a falsification of Islam, since Shiites proclaimed the inerrancy of their imams. Ibn Taymiyyah labeled Syria’s Alawites apostates to be punished with death, rejected medieval Islamic philosophy, and insisted that enlightenment was reachable only through faith in the truth of Islam’s doctrines rather than through logic.
Ibn Taymiyyah’s views were a product of his time and its events — when Mongols took Damascus in the late thirteenth century, the city’s new rulers arrested and tortured him. Ibn Taymi- yyah left Damascus to roam Egypt and Arabia, hoping to call the region’s Muslim rulers to jihad, which he viewed not just as a means of hounding unbelievers but also as a duty unto God, this being the response believers were to show non-Muslims for all eternity.
Ibn Taymiyyah managed to persuade Egypt’s sultan, Ibn Qalawun, to go to war against the Mongols, forcing them to retreat to Damascus, yet he did much more than just preach Islam. He personally joined the army as an active participant. His military theology remained largely unknown until several centuries later, when another preacher in Arabia revived his ideas. During the eighteenth century, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1702-1792), founder of Wahhabism, was following the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah. He sought to cleanse the Islamic world of all things un-Islamic, starting with destroying the same Sufist burial sites across Arabia that had enraged his predecessor and demanding jihad as a longterm goal for all Muslims. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab ’s own teachings, ultimately a poor imitation of Ibn Hanbal’s and Ibn Taymiyya’s,
serve as the basis for Saudi Arabia’s judicial system today, as well as modem Islamists’ understanding of jihad.
SAYYID QUTB AND THE SIXTH PILLAR OF ISLAM
Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) started out as a literary critic — indeed, the literary world has him to thank for its discovery of Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, later a Nobel Prize winner. In several articles from the 1940s, Qutb was the first to note Mahfouz’s talent. That the world now remembers him for altogether different things speaks to the depth of the identity crisis Qutb, a Western-oriented intellectual, fell into while in the United States in the late 1940s.
On the orders of Egypt’s ministry of education, Qutb was shipped off to the States for two years to study its education system. There he grew enraged at the sight of his most important values being trampled in America, with racism, promiscuity, and money-worship part and parcel of everyday life. All of this spurred in Qutb a radical break from his former life, and after a religious awakening, he began studying the work of Indian theologian Abul Ala Maududi.
Maududi himself, rattled to his core by the collapse of the Islamic caliphate in 1924, had called on the world’s Muslims to reject modernity and return to the roots of the Islam. For him as for ibn Abd al-Wahhab, jihad was far more than a means of self- defense — it was a weapon with which to fight all things not in keeping with Islam’s laws and social order. Maududi saw Islam as more than just a religion; indeed he saw it as a regime meant to permeate all aspects of life, from politics, economics, and law to science, humanism, health, psychology, and sociology. Insisting a worldwide Islamic revolution was required to change the course of history, he called on Muslims to take part in it whether or not they lived in Islamic countries already. Muslim thinkers and literary scholars were to provide atheoretical basis for his revolution, Maududi stressed, since “German National Socialism would never have enjoyed the success it did without the framework Fichte, Goethe and Nietzsche provided, taken up under the brilliant and strong leadership of Hitler and his comrades .” 8
Like his fascist contemporaries, Maududi placed a high value on other Muslims’ willingness to make sacrifices for their cause. “Once you accept the rightness of Islam,” he once stated, “nothing remains except for you to strive with all your resolve to help it dominate the world, achieving victory or laying down your lives for the struggle .” Qutb agreed.
Maududi ’s call to jihad drew on its eternal appeal to young Muslims as a means of overcoming feelings of impotence and helplessness. As soldiers victorious in the struggle to do God’s will on Earth or else falling in battle, they would be rewarded with eter- nity in paradise — a win-win situation, so to speak.
Even acts of murder were acceptable in Maududi ’s eyes. “In God’s cause,” he wrote, “jihad involves making the greatest sacrifice of all,
for those who fight in the struggle take others’ lives and worldly goods as well as giving up their own. As has been established previously, making a lesser sacrifice to shield oneself from greater harm ranks among the most basic Islamic principles. What is the sacrifice of a few human lives — even several thousand or more — next to the disaster that would befall humanity if evil were to triumph over good, aggressive atheism trumping the religion of God ?” 10
Inspired by statements like Maududi ’s, Sayyid Qutb began composing his own texts in the United States. In his first essay, titled “The America I Have Seen,” he complains of Western decadence and consumerism, highlighting the alleged need for an Islamic social order. After the state of Israel was founded during his time in the United States, Qutb learned of the Arab armies’ defeat; after hearing the following year of Hassan al-Banna’s murder, he returned to Cairo, joining al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood in 1951 and becoming its foremost mastermind. (Two of his books, Signposts on the Road and The Future of This Religion, remain key Islamist texts today.) As an Islamist on the left,Qutb initially endorsed President Nasser’s socialist politics, but when the latter banned the Brotherhood in 1954 after a failed attempt on his life, Qutb turned his back on Nasser, deeming his rule un- Islamic and proclaiming — true to Ibn Taymiyyah’s teachings — that Egypt’s president, not having introduced sharia law, was neither to be obeyed nor to be recognized as its ruler.
From this point on, Qutb viewed Egypt not as an Islamic country in need of certain religious reforms but as an unbelieving nation ripe for Islamic conquest. The concept of jahiliyyah came to play a key role in Qutb’s thinking, denoting the “ignorance” of the unconverted world. Ibn Taymiyyah had broadened the concept in his own time, terming his society’s every deviation from Islam jahiliyyah, and Qutb also demanded Muslims cleanse themselves of all things un-Islamic; a truly independent society was possible in his eyes only once every individual had internalized the true faith and those convictions he deemed correct. Qutb hoped for a domino effect, a religious awakening sweeping the Islamic world with mounting momentum, catapulting the ummah back to its glory days.
In addition, he borrowed Maududi’s concept of hakimiyyah, the absolute rule of God on Earth, unfettered by democracy, sovereignty of the people, or the nation-state itself. In Qutb’s view, government gained sovereignty by Allah’s blessing and by ruling in his name; laws and customs were illegitimate unless based on sacred Islamic texts. Jahiliyyah, the state in which Qutb argued societies limped on before being ruled by sharia, bestowed sovereignty on the people, and this was blasphemy.
Last but by no means least, Ibn Taymiyyah’s concept of longterm jihad played a central role in Sayyid Qutb’s worldview. To enable the rule of God on Earth and to uphold it in the long run, Qutb argued that jihad must be promoted — both as a way of life and as every Muslim’s duty, practically the sixth pillar of Islam.
Sayyid Qutb’s ideas, although conservative and fundamentalist, were also revolutionary in some ways. In eras before his, Islamic scholars sometimes accepted despotic and decadent rulers to keep civil war at bay. State authorities were to be upheld, they emphasized, deeming jihad an option only in particular contexts, declared by rulers when Muslim lands were under attack or new ones had to be conquered. Qutb, in contrast, privatized jihad, claiming it fell to the faithful to depose illegitimate rulers whose states were any- thing less than theocratic, coming together and declaring jihad for themselves.
Not least because of ideas like these and his subsequent role in the conspiracy against Nasser, Qutb was executed in 1966 — yet his manuscripts continued spreading like wildfire, serving as manuals of terror for Islamist groups like Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, al- Gama’a al-Islamiyya, and al-Qaeda.
Three years before being elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi said of Sayyid Qutb in an interview aired on the Egyptian TV channel al-Fara’een on August 13, 2009, “I have read his work and rediscovered the true Islam in it.” Most of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders today are part of its Qutbist wing, the organization’s most powerful and influential internal faction, and are devoted to Qutb’s philosophy of jihad. Its rivals include the group’s Salafist and Azharite wings, the latter being graduates of the religious University of al-Azhar, as well as the so-called reformist wing — yet when the Brotherhood took power in Egypt, only the Qutbists managed to make their mark.
FROM MY STRUGGLE (MEIN KAMPF) TO OUR STRUGGLE— ARABIA AND ANTI-SEMITISM
O ne of Anton Chekhov’s short stories follows two patients staying in the same ward who hate each other with a passion. Not a day goes by without them squabbling, until one day the nurse informs one of them of the other’s death, expecting him to cavort around the room in fits of joy. Instead, she finds him lying dead on the hospital floor the next day. The patient’s feud with his rival had made his life meaningful, and after the other man’s death it no longer meant anything: the two could never live side by side, nor could the one go on without the other. At least from the Muslim point of view, Chekhov’s story could serve as an exaggerated account of Jewish-Islamic relations.
Nowhere has anti-Semitism’s impact been more profound than in the Arab world. Its modem form can be traced back to the founding of Israel and the various Arab military conflicts with the Jewish state that followed, as well as to Nazi propaganda that found sympathetic Arab ears during the Second World War. Arab anti-Semitism today owes more to Mein Kampf than to the Qur’an, Nazism’s depictions of Jews having made their mark in the Arab world long before Israel became a state. Arabs laboring under the same fixed sense of abjection as Hitler’s German supporters lauded his paranoid fantasies of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and both Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — banned in much of the world, and rightly so — have been bestsellers for decades in Arab states. On its official website today, Hamas even displays quotations from The Protocols, as if the anti- Jewish pamphlet in question, an uncontested forgery, actually served as the basis of a conspiracy by world Jewry.
At the same time, we might do well to step back and ask: is Arab anti-Semitism really such a modem phenomenon, or are its historical roots much deeper?
Hatred of Jews always had far more to do with Muslim self-perception than with Jews themselves, as is the case with all varieties of anti-Semitism, which only came to poisonous fruition in Germany once the public’s self-image was severely wounded. Yet Arabs have an altogether different relationship with Jews from that of the Nazis: the two peoples are more alike by far than either will admit, having moved in opposite directions during the last two centuries — specifically, in the case of Arabs, backward.
Although resentment has stirred repeatedly throughout Islamic history, Muslims and Jews also got along from time to time. Despite distinct historical tensions, no genuine theology of anti- Jewish hatred ever took hold in Islam the way it did in Christianity. Christians had Jews to blame for the killing of Jesus, and the Middle Ages lent European anti-Semitism a further pretext: moneylending and commerce were both frowned upon by Christians, making them the preserve of Jews, who were nonetheless banned from joining crafters’ guilds. Neither presented a problem for Arabs, in whose religion Jesus’s role was minor and who were prolific traders and far from squeamish in matters of finance or
merchandise. Competing claims on territory and ultimate truth lay at the heart of Muslim- Jewish conflict, with Muslims fighting tooth and nail to assert their ownership of both.
Never aspiring to convert others, Jews remained a small people even as Muslims conquered everywhere from Andalusia to Persia in just a century of conquest. Until the sixteenth century, 95 percent of all Jews lived within this region, with repeated waves of Jewish migration to the Arab world having taken place since the pre-Islamic era and many of Andalusia’s Jews emigrating to Egypt and North Africa in the late fifteenth century after Christian forces retook their home. There they were welcomed with open arms, as the Ottoman Empire outright encouraged Jews to move to Istanbul and Thessaloniki. Later, in the first half of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Jews fled European anti-Semitism, settling in Palestine. This time, however, they were to find themselves unwel- come. With the Islamic caliphate’s demise, an unbridled Muslim hatred for Jews had reared its head — and to this day, the same hatred has yet to be reined in.
The enmity between Muslims and Jews is a family feud, rooted in Abraham’s disputed legacy and the sovereignty of each school of monotheism. After the Temple at Jerusalem’s destruction at Roman hands in 70 CE, many of Palestine’s Hebrews had left, establishing themselves in the Arab city of Yathrib, renamed Medina by Muhammad five centuries later. The first century’s pre- Islamic Arabs never deemed these Jewish settlers a threat — indeed, Medina’s Jews lived side by side with Arab polytheists for a long period of peace, dealing in arms, wine, and instruments and contributing in no small part to the city’s flowering nightlife. Favoring neutrality in the event of war, they avoided taking sides in intra-Arab disputes, even mediating in occasional conflicts over water sources and land.
Then Muhammad arrived.
As detailed above, the Prophet spurred a radical movement, shifting in time from an admirer of Jewish customs and convictions to a committed enemy of Judaism, ordering whole tribes annihi- lated. Muhammad never saw his conflict with Jews as a one-off historical episode, indeed, saying so would have undermined his leadership and politics alike. Instead, he viewed it as part of a continual — if not eternal — struggle for which his people were destined, one that would only be won for good in the end times. “The [last] hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews,” Muhammad reportedly told his followers, “and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” 1
This prophecy seems to have foreshadowed many modem Islamists’ fantasies of mass extermination: in their eyes, the struggle against Jews is nothing less than a divine mission. Neither peace accords nor occupied territories’ release is reason enough for them to call oFf their war with Jews, whom they consider backstabbers for all eternity. This struggle is part of their God’s plan: victory being an impossibility without extermination of all Jews.
After Muhammad’s death and the Islamic conquests that followed, pragmatism came to shape Muslim relations with heretics again. Muslim conquerors relied on Christians’ and Jews’ cooperation, many of them doctors, manual laborers, and translators that Islam’s new empire urgently needed. During the Abbasid Caliph- ate’s so-called golden age, primarily between the ninth and eleventh centuries, both cultures drew on the other’s thought, with many Jews making names for themselves as advisors to caliphs, scholars, poets, and philosophers, informing Muslim philosophy in their turn. When part-polemic texts composed in poetry contests by Jews, Christians, and Muslims at the caliph’s palace in Baghdad’s gained public visibility, they spurred neither mass protests nor pogroms. To witness the last thousand years of the Islamic world’s development, one need only compare the tolerance of ninth-century Muslims with the views of their twenty-first-century counterparts: I need only allude to Denmark’s Muhammad cartoons and the consequences of their publication.
Jewish and Arab cultures influenced and augmented each other, with the Torah translated into Arabic and disputes with Islamic theologians and philosophers prompting a renaissance in Jewish thought. The nineteenth century would arrive before Arabia’s influence on Judaism ran dry, the Jewish religion being impacted more by European culture from then on.
THE MYTH OF ANDALUSIA
Despite being only a recent invention, a romantic legend had sprung up around peaceful Jewish and Muslim coexistence in Andalusia . 2 Appalled at mounting European anti-Semitism around the turn of the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals sought historical evidence their people could live side by side with adherents of other faiths, chancing upon the history of Andalusia and romanticizing its glory days. Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the region had, they maintained, lived together eight hundred years as equals and in peace, spawning an oasis of high culture and tolerance.
In Andalusia as in ninth-century Baghdad, sharia law went unenforced; alcohol was consumed in public; and song, dance, and erotic poetry were parts of everyday life. Jews held senior public offices, working in politics and the military. In the eleventh century, the Jewish poet and theologian Samuel ibn Naghrillah became grand vizier — head of government, so to speak — at the Berber monarch’s palace in Granada. When Ibn Naghrillah was also named supreme commander of the military, resistance surfaced among Andalusia’s Muslim theologians, with otherwise-moderate cleric Ibn Hazm deeming Ibn Naghrillah’s appointment a threat to Islam’s power in the Iberian Peninsula. His objections found an especially sympathetic audience in Muslim migrants from North Africa, followers by and large of Ibn Hanbal’s fundamentalist theology — a migrant populace that railed against Jews and Christians alike, as well as against Muslims who failed to obey sharia.
When Samuel ibn Naghrillah’s son Joseph became grand vizier after his death, Muslim theologians demanded the public depose him through violence; incensed religious zealots raged into Grana- da’s Jewish quarter, destroying people’s homes and killing every Jew they saw. Four thousand Jews lost their lives in the course of this pogrom, among them Grand Vizier Joseph ibn Naghrillah.
In the twelfth century, fundamentalist Almohads conquered broad stretches of Andalusia, allowing Muslim Berbers to effect great changes in a supposed oasis of prosperous tolerance, banning music, dancing, and public consumption of alcohol. Dhimmi laws Muhammad had introduced to govern coexistence with non-Muslims were tightened: while Christians and Jews were granted the same religious freedom they always had been, they were now forbidden to ride horses, build overly tall houses, or assume key offices, and they were required to wear symbols on their clothing indicating their religion. This clampdown led many Jews and Christians to convert to Islam.
Philosophy was declared tantamount to blasphemy and penalized. In Cordoba, officials burned books containing the works of historic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Averroes was one scholar responsible for annotating Aristotle’s chief works — which aided the advent of Christian scholasticism — and he was exiled as a heretic by orthodox Andalusian Islamic scholars. The same fate befell Jewish philosopher Mosheh ben Maimon, who was forced to flee enraged Muslims first to Fes and later to Cairo. Many other Andalusian Jews fled as he did, and still others were forced to convert to Islam.
Across the Mediterranean Sea at almost the exact same time, Muslims were battling crusading forces. Previously, Jerusalem had been a minor city with no real role in Islamic history, but once Christian conquerors captured it, executing scores of Muslims and Jews, the city became a sudden focal point symbolic of the struggle against Islam’s enemies. Legends were unearthed to emphasize the holiness of the struggle against Christians, among them the Prophet Muhammad’s overnight trek from Mecca to Jerusalem. As history ran its course, Islam’s enemies changed, but the myth of Jerusalem remained.
By the late fifteenth century, the Reconquista had mostly run its course, almost all of Andalusia’s Muslim enclaves had been recaptured by Christians, and in 1480 the mass expatriation of the region’s Jews and Muslims began — as did the Inquisition’s tar- geting of converts. From 1492 to 1526, Andalusia remained almost entirely Jew- and Muslim-free, both groups having turned tail and fled. Spanish Jews were welcomed with open arms in North Africa, where they enjoyed a favorable reputation thanks to their skills and knowledge, while others settled in the Ottoman Empire. While Jewish doctors, scholars, and financiers played vital roles at the sultan’s palace, other Jews remained second-class citizens — only in the mid-nineteenth century were the empire’s dhimmi laws repealed, and even then parity only existed on paper. In post-revolutionary France, by contrast, Jews were already recognized as citizens of equal worth.
As the Ottoman Empire’s strength waned by the day, whole territories fell to the might of France and Britain: North Africa slipped into French colonial hands, while Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, and Palestine were in Britain’s. Arabs found themselves in the death grip of triumphant Europeans, and, seeing a chance for emancipation and equal citizenship in its Enlightenment, Jews poured into Europe in great numbers as these events unfolded. Muslims, meanwhile, sensed only a threat to their religious identity, walling themselves off once again.
The Andalusia of popular myth, a refuge of tolerance and cultural cross-pollination between Jews and Arabs, endured only as long as Arab conquerors’ power went unchallenged. For a time, indeed a lengthy one, it served Muslims’ economic interest for Jews and Christians to retain their own faith, paying higher taxes than did Muslims — even four centuries after the Islamic conquest of Egypt and Syria, 60 percent of their citizens kept Christian beliefs — but in the end, once the Islamic world was overrun first by crusading forces and then by Mongol ones, its caliphate collapsed in ruins and periods of dramatic regress followed. Their backs against the wall, followers of Islam lashed out.
ZIONISTS, ISLAMISTS, AND ARAB NATIONALISTS
The wave of nationalism that gathered speed in the late nineteenth century washed over the Arab world as much as Europe, spawning two movements that would become mortal enemies in the twentieth, leaving their mark on the Middle East’s fate in the twenty- first. One was Zionism — the other, pan-Arabism. Both movements sprang from a sense of oppression, displaying nationalist influ- ences and pursuing liberation from something or other.
Jewish nationalists hoped to escape mounting anti-Semitism in Europe, founding an independent nation-state for Jews. Arab nationalists, meanwhile, hoped to shake off the yoke of European colonial rule, establishing a single Arab state as Otto von Bismarck had established the German Empire in 1871. Modem Islamists came upon the scene in no time at all, insisting that a state for the world’s Muslims must be ruled by sharia.
The Middle East was to serve as the battleground where these two movements came to blows. Arabs, from their own point of view, suffered defeat after humiliating defeat on their own soil: for the first time in history, Jews were their victorious rivals rather than simply their peers — a shock, indeed, a wound that still smarts to this day. Even before Israel was founded, Zionists’ organization and effec-
tiveness impressed Arabs as much as it intimidated them. Beginning outside the Middle East, thus at a disadvantage, it remains an
enticing question how Zionists succeeded at constructing a working democracy while contemporary Arab attempts failed.
Arab nationalists built their movement on myths and cults of personality, while Zionists deployed on multiple fronts. Zionist thought emerged both in the writings of Orthodox Jews like Nathan Bimbaum and those of secular commentators like Theodor Herzl; and Zionist conferences played host to journalists and lawyers, students and established minds, men and women, empha- sizing from the outset the diversity of the state it hoped to found. In Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, meanwhile, nationalist discourse was shaped solely by men who styled themselves as enlightened thought leaders, mostly from the Western academy.
The movement for Jewish nationalism unfolded on two planes. First, under the banner of political Zionism, it made its way onto the global political agenda through contact with politicians from powerful states, managing to convince not just Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and Great Britain but also the Ottoman Empire that the Jewish people had a right to a nation-state. (Herzl himself went so far as to visit the caliph himself in Istanbul, hoping to talk him into offering Jews a stretch of Palestinian land.) Second, there was practical Zionism, overseeing Jewish emigration to Palestine and founding kibbutzim (collective agricultural communities in Israel) where socialist ideas were put to work. Additionally and crucially, a current of cultural Zionism ensured that the Enlight- enment’s principles were imported toPalestine alongside Jewish
customs.
Intellectuals, farmers, workers, and guerillas gathered in Palestine, and when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence in May 1948, the world bowed to its sovereignty. Earlier, Ben- Gurion had ordered the sinking of a ship at sea on which under- ground fighters planned to smuggle arms into the country, yet despite numerous conflicts and ongoing threats from neighboring Arab states, a democratic constitution — the region’s first — was passed with popular support. Israel successfully became a melting pot where migrant Jews from all comers of the world converged, while early discrimination against African and Asians Jews eased up over time.
The quest for Arab unity, conversely, petered out. From the outset it had lacked a clear ideology beyond opposition to Israel, whose existence came to serve as a continual pretext for Arab leaders’ rearmament and consolidation of what power they had. (“No voice is to be raised about the din of battle,” Egypt’s President Nasser once declared, attempting to silence pacifist critics.) Arab sovereigns grew into unimpeachable despots, oppressing minorities alongside political opponents, hamstringing every push for social change, and engineering a perfect breeding ground for anti- Semitism and Islamist fundamentalism alike. Neither is a modem phenomenon; indeed, to draw a line from Abraham’s era to our own is to see both revealed, in Tunisian-French historian Abdel- wahab Meddeb’s words, for the “true Islamic sickness” they are.
THE MUFTI AND THE MASTERMIND: ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE RISE
In 1934 a fearsome massacre of Jews took place in Constantine, Algeria. Anti-Semitic comments by the city’s French mayor — at the time, France ruled all northern Algeria — emboldened local Arabs to set upon the Jewish populace. The pogrom that resulted came as a turning point for Arab Jews as well as their European counterparts, as most donned Western clothes from this point on, and those with French citizenship migrated to Paris. Even as they did so, many Jews were deserting Europe for the Middle East. Tens of thousands flocked to Palestine each year after National Socialists took power in Germany.
Both Arab nationalists and Islamists saw a chance to raise their own profile in the struggle against Zionism, with Syrian Salafist
Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna’s foremost mentor, referring to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been translated into Arabic not long before, and they were taken as open-and-shut proof of Jews’ intentions. In the years after 1929, Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, fanned the flames of anti-Jewish resentment, calling an Islamic congress there when another massacre followed in Palestinian Hebron. It was at al-Husseini’s congress that the first demands were made for a Palestine free of Jews, and contacting Hitler was only the next logical step.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood quickly found that anti-Jewish pot-stirring appealed to both the public and their country’s king. Adorning his speeches and articles with lines from the Prophet, Hassan al-Banna unearthed Muhammad’s every word against jews, reviving the legend of a “last battle” against them, with Hitler the new messiah. Translating parts of Mein Kampf and doing all they could to maximize public hatred of Jews, religious zealots waged a propaganda war, and in 1937 a mass Arab revolt against both Jews and British rule began. Britain reacted violently, laying waste to the then-Palestinian city of Jaffa, suppressing the revolt and forcing the entire Arab vanguard to flee.
Even the grand mufti himself took flight, landing in Berlin four years later, after several stops. From then on, al-Husseini recruited jihadists to Hitler’s side; Nazis even provided an Arabic-language radio station he used to broadcast toxic anti-Semitic propaganda across the Arab world. Informed by Heinrich Himmler that three million Jews had been killed and that the Final Solution was at hand, the mufti on air, opting not to betray the details but noting the prospect of a twin “Final Solution” in Palestine.
Shortly thereafter, the Muslim Brotherhood held a mass anti-Semitic rally in Cairo, spurring attacks on Jews in public streets and the ransacking of Jewish businesses. The following year, pogroms were carried out in Baghdad. “Those foreign immigrants the Zionists,” the mufti had declared years earlier. “We shall kill them to the last man. Only the sword can decide our nation’s destiny.”
The United Nations passed a resolution in 1 947, mandating partition of Palestine. While Jews rejoiced, Arabs prepared for a conflict some feared they may lose, with Palestinian Arabs and Arab Jews alike paying the price, driven out of Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria. Arab Jews found new homes either in Europe or in Israel, granted full citizenship for the first time in history, while in various Arab states, Palestinians arrived as refugees, treated from then on as second-class citizens. Ironically, Arab anti-Semitism would define their lives more than anyone’s.
Then, in 1950, Sayyid Qutb — mastermind of the Muslim Brotherhood — produced one of the sacred texts of Islamic anti- Semitism, his book Our Struggle against the Jews. In its pages, Qutb draws on the established topos of Jews conspiring against Islam, resisting it with all their resolve throughout history. “Today’s Jews resemble their forebears in Prophet Muhammad’s time,” Qutb writes, “showing the same hostility they displayed at the founding of the state of Medina, attacking the Muslim com- munity that served as its backbone at the earliest opportunity.
77 ISLAMIC FASCISM
The Jews practiced deception, attacking the first Muslims with all their duplicity, and so in their evil they went about turning Muslims from the Qur’an and their true religion. Only blood- shed, violence and evil of the basest sort can be expected of such creatures, who kill, massacre and defame the Prophet. . . . Allah sent us Hitler to triumph over them, and may send others too to show the Jews the terrible ways of retribution. In doing so, he will fulfill a plainspoken promise.” 5
Across the Arab world, hatred of Jews came to be a core part of history lessons and nationalist conditioning alike. Later, satellite channels like Al-Manar, A1 Aqsa TV, and A1 Jazeera would broad- cast their own Jew-baiting messages around the globe. Even children’s programming promotes anti-Semitic stereotypes, evoking legends of martyrdom as well as militarist propaganda.
If young Palestinians take issue with Israel today, their objections are understandable: for one thing, the building of Israeli set- tlements has had a direct impact on their lives. Less understandable is the mounting anti-Semitism of young Muslims whose daily lives
have little to do with conflicts in the Middle East. When Moroccans in Casablanca, Pakistanis in London, Tunisians in Berlin, Somalis in Copenhagen, and Lebanese residents of Malmo all nurse the same anti-Semitic views, fantasizing about Jews’ mass extermination, Arab-Israeli conflicts seem scant explanation.
The problem exists throughout the Islamic world, infecting whole generations with anti-Jewish as well as anti-Western hatred: Muslims in all parts of the world who delight in reading Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, yet have no idea who Hume, Kant, or Spinoza were, have missed the point of reading anything. When Muslim fanatics in Taliban dress are unafraid to preach sermons of hate in Frankfurt’s streets, but a rabbi in Berlin is assaulted simply for wearing a kippah, the whole of Europe has a problem — and when “Muslim patrols” control entire boroughs of London, yet Jews flee the Swedish town of Malmo, social cohesion is imperiled in all comers of the continent. Even after the bloody attacks against a synagogue in Brussels in 2014, a Jewish supermarket in Paris, and a synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015, Muslim communities still refuse to admit to a specific Islamic anti-Semitism.
This anti-Semitism is one symptom of an ancient disease, out- breaks of which come and go over time. It persists today not just due to Muslims’ critically infirm self-image, but also as a result of many Europeans’ indifference, who seem either unwilling or unable to oppose it outright.
FOREIGN AT HOME: AN ASIDE ON LIFE FOR EGYPT’S COPTS
The date is January 25, 2012, first anniversary of the revolution that deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Samir has been up since 4 a.m. In his neighborhood, Cairo’s southwestern Muqattam, all remains dark, with no trace of moonlight to be seen. Samir is nineteen, tired, and angry. “I’m a Copt,” he tells me defiantly. “Just because I haul trash around, it doesn’t mean I’m trash.” Then he starts his eight-mile walk to work.
A year ago, Samir took this same route to join demonstrators in Tahrir Square. Today as he wanders the capital collecting refuse, the square is in his thoughts again. His job is one frowned upon by Muslims, thus traditionally reserved for Copts, a Christian denom- ination who make up 6 to 10 percent of Egypt’s populace. Coptic farmers used to feed their livestock leftovers from discarded shopping bags, but two years back this practice met a sudden end.
On the pretext of a swine flu outbreak, Islamists ordered all of southern Cairo’s animals slaughtered. Samir is convinced that for the fanatics responsible, this was never just a case of disease control — indeed that their main aim was punishing “unbelievers.” Mubarak’s fall did nothing to end discrimination against his people, he tells me. On the contrary: Copts have it worse today than ever. Consequently, Samir is boycotting festivities in celebration of the year since the revolution.
Many of his fellow Copts have now left the country. “I’m not rich,” he comments. “I can’t afford to leave. But anyway, I want to stay. I love this country — these days I just can’t bear the looks I sometimes get when Muslims see a cross tattooed on my hand.” Samir knows not all Muslims, some of whom are his friends, look down on Copts. “Plenty of them came to demonstrate outside the TV center with us on October 9, 2011, but they’re still a minority in the end.”
This was the day Cairo’s Copts tried to demand their rights as a religious group. When Samir tried to pass the barricade surrounding the state broadcasting center, a soldier in the Egyptian army greeted him warmly. It was a trap: beyond the barrier, two more soldiers welcomed him, only to take a swing at him. Samir witnessed a different group of Christians crushed under an army tank, one man cut in half under its tracks while trying to save his wife. Thirty or so Copts were killed, and hundreds sustained injuries.
80 FROM MY STRUGGLE ( MEIN KAMPF) TO OUR STRUGGLE
What shocked Samir was never the soldiers’ brutality — they killed followers of Islam, he says, with equal indifference — but how many Muslims helped them surround his group of protesting Copts. “It wasn’t just hostility I saw in their eyes,” he says. “It was unadulterated hatred.” Two Muslim strangers kicked him over and over, ultimately picking him up from the ground and throwing him in the Nile.
Only six months beforehand, Copts and Muslims held peaceful demonstrations side by side, Copts in Tahrir Square forming a human chain around praying Muslims in one widely publicized scene while armed and mounted Mubarak supporters attacked them. Later, Muslim youths would return the favor, guarding Christians at a service. Briefly, it seemed revolution had bridged the gulf hewn by religion, but mere weeks afterward clashes erupted between Muslims and Copts in Alexandria. This outbreak of violence was a knee-jerk response to military smear campaigns targeting Copts in the state-run media: that the hateful tirades in question found sympathetic ears was a result, Samir suggests, of misguided education policies. In Egypt’s schools, hardly anything is taught about the country’s Copts or their history, and in any event, implacable Islamist dogma would only deny heretics’ humanity.
Though less than optimistic about Egypt’s future, Samir wants to do all he can. Hoping to catch up on his studies and pass his exams but with no time for school, he studies at home after work instead. In the future, he aspires to study business or law at university — perhaps then, Egypt’s people will show him more respect. “But even if I end up with a high-flying job,” he asks ruefully, “what can I do about the cross on my hand?”
All over the Islamic world, not just in Egypt, Christians face a life of persecution. In modem-day Iraq, extinction threatens one of the world’s oldest Christian communities as Islamists attack, setting
81 ISLAMIC FASCISM
churches ablaze for no reason at all. Hardly a Christmas passes without one being blown sky high or members of the Christian faith attacked. In December 2013, an exploding car bomb killed thirty- five Christians on their way out of church after a service, and one of YouTube’s most brutal videos shows two Islamists holding up a truck in an Iraqi street, asking the driver and both passengers their religion. Shaking with fear, they claim to be Muslims and are made to get out. One of the Islamists questions them about the Muslim
morning prayer ritual, forcing them to their knees when they fail to answer and mowing them down with a machine gun. In February 2015, twenty-one Christian Copts who were guest workers in Libya were captured and slain by ISIS. Whenever and wherever people are murdered for their faith or background, fascism is at work.
It would be wrong to lump together all the world’s Muslims, most of whom are as shocked as anyone by executions like these — but the number caught up from birth in hatred and persecution of dissidents and heretics is not to be underestimated. More and more of today’s Muslims deny that Christians — being unbelievers — have the right to exist at all, while more and more Arab Christians are forced to flee Arabia just as its Jews once were. Few in the region recognize this as the form of cultural self-harm it is. The obsessive desire to cleanse both the public and private spheres of all things un-Islamic has spurred cultural decline, as people entrenched in religion and a tribal culture clearly archaic today wall themselves in. Walls of this kind make perfect palisades for dictators, as well as perfect cages for their people.