Arabs (84 page)

The new regime’s goodwill toward the Muslim Brotherhood proved short lived. Qutb was arrested in the general clampdown on the organization after a member of the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser in October 1954. Like many other Muslim Brothers, Qutb claimed he had been subjected to horrific torture and interrogation while under arrest. Convicted on charges of subversive activity, Qutb was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor.

From prison, Qutb continued to inspire fellow Islamists. Ill health often confined him to the hospital wing, where he wrote some of the most influential works of the twentieth century on Islam and politics, including a radical commentary on the Qur’an and his clarion call for the promotion of a genuine Islamic society, titled
Milestones
.

Milestones
represents the culmination of Qutb’s views on both the bankruptcy of Western materialism and the authoritarianism of secular Arab nationalism. The social and political systems that defined the modern age, he argued, were man-made and had failed for that very reason. Instead of opening a new age of science and knowledge, they had resulted in ignorance of divine guidance, or
jahiliyya
. The word has particular resonance in Islam, as it refers to the pre-Islamic dark ages. Twentieth-century jahiliyya, Qutb argued, “takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behaviour, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed.” By implication, the remarkable advances in science and technology of the twentieth century had not led humanity into a modern age; rather, the abandonment of God’s eternal message had
taken society back to the seventh century. This was as true for the non-Islamic West, Qutb believed, as it was for the Arab world. The result, he argued, was tyranny. Arab regimes did not bring their citizens freedom and human rights, but repression and torture—as Qutb knew from painful firsthand experience.

Qutb believed that Islam, as the perfect statement of God’s order for mankind, was the only route to human freedom, a true liberation theology. By extension, the only valid and legitimate laws were God’s laws, as enshrined in Islamic sharia. He believed that a Muslim vanguard was needed to restore Islam to “the role of the leader of mankind.” The vanguard would use “preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs” and would deploy “physical power and jihad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord.” Qutb wrote his book to guide the vanguard who would lead the revival of Islamic values, through which Muslims would once again achieve personal freedom and world leadership.
⁵

The power of Qutb’s message lay in its simplicity and directness. He identified a problem—jahiliyya—and a clear Islamic solution that was grounded in the values that many Arab Muslims held dear. His critique applied equally to imperial powers and to autocratic Arab governments, and his response was a message of hope grounded in the assumption of Muslim superiority:

However much Qutb disapproved of Western imperial powers, his first target was always the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, and Nasser’s government in particular. In his exegesis of the Qur’anic verses on the “Makers of the Pit,” Qutb draws a thinly veiled allegory of the struggle between the Muslim Brothers and the Free Officers. In the Qur’anic story, a community of Believers was condemned for their faith and burned alive by tyrants who gathered to watch their righteous victims die. “Doomed were the makers of the pit,” the Qur’an relates (85:1–16). In Qutb’s commentary, the persecutors—“arrogant, mischievous, criminal and degraded people”—took sadistic pleasure in witnessing the pain of the martyrs. “And when
some young man or woman, some child or old man from among these righteous Believers was thrown in to the fire,” Qutb wrote, “their diabolical pleasure would reach a new height, and shouts of mad joy would escape their lips at the sight of blood and pieces of flesh”—graphic scenes absent from the Qur’anic tale, but perhaps inspired by Qutb’s experiences, and those of his fellow Muslim Brothers, at the hands of their torturers in prison. “The struggle between the Believers and their enemies,” he concluded, was essentially “a struggle between beliefs—either unbelief or faith, either Jahiliyya or Islam.” Qutb’s message was clear: the government of Egypt was incompatible with his vision of an Islamic state. One would have to go.

Qutb was released from prison in 1964, the year
Milestones
was published. His standing enhanced by his prison writings, he quickly reestablished contact with comrades from the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Qutb must have known that his every movement would be followed by Nasser’s secret police. The Islamist author had gained such prominence across the Muslim world for his radical new thoughts that he would be a danger to the Egyptian state at home and abroad.

Qutb’s followers faced the same surveillance and risks as the reformer himself. One of Qutb’s most influential disciples was Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917–2005), the pioneer of the Islamist women’s movement. When only twenty years old, al-Ghazali founded the Muslim Ladies’ Society. Her activities had brought her to the attention of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who tried to persuade her to join forces with the Muslim Sisterhood he had just launched. Though the two Islamist women’s movements followed their separate courses, al-Ghazali became a loyal follower of Hasan al-Banna.

In the 1950s al-Ghazali met the sisters of the imprisoned Sayyid Qutb, who gave her draft chapters of
Milestones
before the book had been published. Inspired by what she read, al-Ghazali devoted herself to the vanguard role envisaged by Qutb’s manifesto—preparing Egyptian society to embrace Islamic law. Just as the Prophet Muhammad spent thirteen years in Mecca before migrating to Medina to found the first Islamic community, so the followers of Qutb allowed thirteen years to transform Egyptian society as a whole into an ideal Islamic society. “It was decided,” she wrote, “that after thirteen years of Islamic training of our youth, elders, women and children, we would make an exhaustive survey of the state. If this survey revealed that at least 75% of the followers believed that Islam is a complete way of life and are convinced about establishing an Islamic state, then we would call for the establishment of such a state.” If the poll results suggested a lower level of support, al-Ghazali and her colleagues would work for another thirteen years to try to convert Egyptian society.
⁷
In the long run, their aim was nothing less than the overthrow of the Free Officers’ regime and its replacement with a true Islamic state. Nasser and his government were determined to eliminate the Islamist threat before it gained ground.
The Egyptian authorities released Sayyid Qutb from prison at the end of 1964, after a decade’s imprisonment. Zaynab al-Ghazali and his other supporters celebrated Qutb’s release and met frequently with him, under the watchful gaze of Egyptian police surveillance. Many believed that Qutb had been released only to lead the authorities to like-minded Islamists. In August 1965, after only eight months’ liberty, Qutb was rearrested, along with al-Ghazali and all their associates. They were charged with conspiracy to assassinate President Nasser and overthrow the Egyptian government. Although their long-term aim was certainly to replace the Egyptian government with an Islamic system, the defendants insisted they were innocent of any plot against the life of the president.

Al-Ghazali spent the next six years in prison and later wrote an account of her ordeal, capturing in graphic horror the tortures to which the Islamists, men and women alike, were subjected by the Nasserist state. She was confronted with the violence from her first day in prison. “Almost unable to believe my eyes and not wanting to accept such inhumanity, I silently watched as members of the
Ikhwan
[i.e., the Muslim Brothers] were suspended in the air and their naked bodies ferociously flogged. Some were left to the mercy of savage dogs which tore at their bodies. Others, with their face to the wall awaited their turn.”
⁸

Al-Ghazali was not spared these atrocities; she faced whipping, beatings, attacks with dogs, isolation, sleep deprivation, and regular death threats, all in a vain attempt to secure a statement implicating Qutb and the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the alleged conspiracy. When two newly arrested young women were admitted to share al-Ghazali’s cell, after she had suffered eighteen days of abuse, she could not convey the horrors in her own words but read them the Qur’anic verses on “The Makers of the Pit” instead. Upon hearing these verses, one of the women began crying silently; the other asked, disbelievingly: “Does this really happen to ladies?”
⁹

The trial against Sayyid Qutb and his followers opened in April 1966. In all, forty-three Islamists—Qutb and al-Ghazali among them—were formally charged with conspiring against the Egyptian state. The state prosecutors used Qutb’s writings as evidence against Qutb and charged him with promoting the violent overthrow of the Egyptian government. In August 1966, Qutb and two other defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Zaynab al-Ghazali was given twenty-five years with hard labor.

By executing Qutb, the Egyptian authorities not only made him a martyr of the Islamist cause but confirmed to many the truth of Qutb’s writings, which became yet more influential after his death than they had been during his own lifetime. His commentary on the Qur’an, and
Milestones
, his charter for political action, were reprinted and distributed across the Muslim world. A new generation, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, was electrified by Qutb’s message of Islamic regeneration
and justice. Its members dedicated themselves to achieve his vision—by all possible means, peaceful and violent alike.

T
he Islamist challenge spread from Egypt to Syria in the 1960s. The influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb’s radical critique of secular government, combined to create a revolutionary Islamic movement bent on the overthrow of Syria’s praetorian republic. The conflict took Syria to the brink of civil war and claimed tens of thousands of lives before reaching its brutal climax in the Syrian town of Hama.

The founder of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa al-Siba‘i (1915–1964), was himself a native of Hama. He studied in Egypt in the 1930s, where he came under the influence of Hasan al-Banna. Upon his return to Syria, Siba’i brought together a network of Muslim youth associations to create the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Siba’i drew on the Muslim Brotherhood’s network to win a seat in the Syrian parliament in the 1943 elections. From that point onward, the Syrian Muslim Brothers were too strong to be ignored by the political elite, even if they were not powerful enough in their own right to exercise much influence on the increasingly secular and Arab nationalist political discourse in Syria in the 1940s and 1950s.

When the Ba‘th party seized power in Syria in 1963, the Muslim Brothers went on the offensive. The politics of the Ba’th were intensely secular, calling for a strict separation of religion and state. This was only natural, given the sectarian diversity of the party. Whereas the population of Syria was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim (about 70 percent of the total), the Ba‘th had also attracted many Christian members as well as secular Sunni Muslims. It had also had substantial support among the Alawites. An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Alawites were the largest of Syria’s minority groups, representing about 12 percent of the population. After years of marginalization by Syria’s Sunni majority, the Alawites had risen through the military and the Ba’th to new prominence in Syrian politics by the 1960s.

As the Ba’th tended toward secular, even atheist views, it provoked growing resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood, which claimed to be Syria’s “moral majority.” The Muslim Brotherhood saw the rise of the Alawites to political prominence as a distinct threat to the Sunni Muslim culture of Syria, and its members were determined to undermine their government through violent means if necessary.

In the mid-1960s, the Brotherhood formed an underground resistance movement in Hama and the northern city of Aleppo. The Islamist militants began to stockpile weapons and train young recruits drawn from high schools and universities across Syria. One of Hama’s most charismatic imams (mosque prayer leaders), Shaykh
Marwan Hadid, was particularly successful in recruiting students to the Islamic underground movement. For many of the young Islamists, Hadid was an inspiration and a role model for Islamic activism.
¹⁰