The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (19 page)

4.

Sayyid Qutb,
Al-Isl
m wa-mushkil
t al-had
ra
(n.p., 1967), pp. 80ff. See also John Calvert, “ ‘The World is an Undutiful Boy!’ Sayyid Qutb’s American Experiences,” in
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations,
2 (March 2000), pp. 87–103. He devoted a separate book, published posthumously in Saudi Arabia, to “our battle with the Jews”:
Ma‘rakatuna ma‘a al-Yah
d
(Jedda, 1970). In addition to the specific Arab conflict with the Jews, he speaks of the pernicious Jewish role in the war against Islam and more generally against religious values: “Behind the atheist, materialist conception is a Jew—[Marx]; behind the bestial sexual conception, a Jew [Freud]; behind the destruction of the family and the disruption of the holy bonds of society, a Jew—[Durkheim].” The three are actually named not by Sayyid Qutb but by his editor, who for good measure adds a fourth in a footnote—Jean-Paul Sartre, made into a Jew for this purpose, as the inspirer of the literature of disintegration and ruin. It seems likely that Sayyid Qutb’s inspiration for this and other anti-Jewish (as distinct from anti-Israel and anti-Zionist) passages was European or American.

1.

These and other texts will be found in
Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini,
translated and annotated by Hamid Algar (Berkeley, 1981). His
Islamic Government
was a series of lectures delivered in the Shi
^c
ite center of Najaf, Iraq, Khomeini’s place of exile, and published soon after in both Arabic and Persian. To those who read it, the subsequent course of the Islamic revolution in Iran will have come as no surprise.

2.

On this treaty see Bernard Lewis, “Orientalist Notes on the Soviet–United Arab Republic Treaty of 27 May 1971,”
Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies,
no. 2 (1993), pp. 57–65.

1.

The Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations,
sponsored by the Regional Bureau for Arab States/UNDP, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.

1.

Cited in Alexei Vassiliev,
The History of Saudi Arabia
(London, 1998), p. 265.

2.

‘Abd al-Sal
m Faraj,
Al-Jih
d: al-Far
da al-Gh
’iba
(Amman, 1982); English translation in Johannes J. G. Jansen,
The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East
(New York, 1986), pp. 159ff.

1.

The full text of the fatwa was published in the Iranian and international press at the time.

2.

These and similar traditions will be found in the standard collections of
had
ths,
for example, the
Sah
h
of al-Bukh
r
,
Recueil des Traditions Mahométanes,
vol. 1, ed. M. Ludolf Krehl (Leiden, 1862), p. 363; vol. 2 (Leiden, 1864), pp. 223–224, 373; vol. 4, ed. Th. W. Juynboll (Leiden, 1908), pp. 71, 124, 243, 253–254, 320, 364. For a full discussion see Franz Rosenthal, “On Suicide in Islam,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society,
vol. 66 (1946), pp. 239–259.

3.

Cited inter alia by Ibn Hanbal,
Musnad
(Cairo, 1313; 1895–1896), vol. 5, p. 87.

4.

For these and other reports on the Arabic media, see the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington, D.C. (
www.memri.org
).

5.

The full text of the letter, in both Arabic and English, was widely distributed via the Internet in November 2002. Because of differences of style and outlook, the personal authorship of Usama bin Ladin is unlikely.