Sayyid Qutb: The Ultimate Incel

The “Baby it’s Cold Outside” Jihadi—in his own words.
by Michael Isenberg.

Many of you have seen the article making the rounds of cyberspace last week which added yet another twist to the “Baby it’s Cold Outside” controversy. According to the article, written by Adam Pasick, the classic holiday tune has not only “come under scrutiny in the #MeToo era for its light-hearted portrayal of sexual coercion—though a close reading suggests the song could just as easily be a sly homage to female empowerment.” It also “played a small but crucial role in the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism:”

Back in 1950, the Egyptian author and religious theorist Sayyid Qutb spent two years as an exchange student at a teacher’s college in Greeley, Colorado. He was infuriated by many things about American life—people spent too much time taking care of their lawns, and it was impossible to get a decent haircut—but especially by a church dance where a pastor played Frank Loesser’s Grammy-winning song on a gramophone: “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs,” Qutb wrote later. “Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion...” When Qutb returned to Egypt, he was a changed man, determined to reject the West and embrace a purified version of Islam.

(A more detailed account of Qutb’s years in Greeley may be found in David von Drehle’s 2006 article, “A Lesson in Hate.”)

When I read Qutb’s complaints about America, he did not sound like a culture warrior to me. He sounded like a man who can’t get a date. His obsession with “seductive legs,” not to mention waists, lips, and chests, is a dead giveaway. What motivation other than sex would get the male of the species so spun up over a bad haircut? Granted, the Hitler mustache that he sported during those years, when the wounds of losing loved ones during World War II were still fresh, probably didn't help him any. I concede that this is pure speculation on my part, but it seems to me that Sayyid Qutb was the ultimate incel—involuntary celibate. Women didn’t want to go out with him, so to protect his ego, he blew his personal problems up to literally cosmic proportions, and invented the modern theory of jihad. In his own mind he was, in the words of the Psalm, the stone which the builders rejected, but which, with God’s help, would become the chief cornerstone.

Anyway, Qutb’s entanglement in the “Baby it’s Cold Outside” controversy gives us an excellent opportunity to shine the disinfectant of sunlight on his writings, in particular his signature work, 1964’s Milestones, and glean from it some insight into the modern jihadi movement.

The title of the book refers to the milestones that Islam must follow in order to become “the leader of mankind.” Now that East and West have failed because of their decadence, according to Qutb, “the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived.”

World leadership is the final milestone. The first is to reconstruct the original seventh century Muslim community of Muhammad and his Companions. They were the best generation because Islam for them was an all-encompassing way of life—not just one part of it, nor an academic discipline. And they were completely governed by the Quran, free of the influence of foreigners like the Greeks and the Jews. In this utopia, homosexuality and other sexual immorality will be prohibited. Women will be free to tend to their “basic responsibility of bringing up children,” relieved of the burden of choosing a career. Indeed, men will also be relieved of that burden since “the society automatically recognizes his capabilities” and will assign a job to him. Science will be permitted, as long as it stays in its proper bounds and doesn’t cross the line into metaphysics. Examples of science crossing that line, which presumably will be off limits going forward, include evolution and psychology.

Only after the Muslim heart has been prepared by the creation of such a totalitarian nightmare will it be ready for the next milestone: jihad [struggle] against the unbeliever. The chapter on jihad is the longest in the book, and certainly the most relevant for understanding modern Islamic fundamentalism, since it bears directly on a debate about its nature that we in the West have been conducting since September 11.

Our left-of-center friends tell us that Islam is a religion of peace. It has no desire to force itself on the West. Indeed to do so would violate the Quran, which says, “There is no compulsion in religion (2:256).” And although the Quran does talk about jihad, conventional warfare is the “Lesser Jihad.” The “Greater Jihad” is to war internally against one’s own individual weaknesses. The only reason Muslims have warred against the West, according to the Left, is to defend themselves from the West’s attacks on them (colonialism, overthrow of Mossadegh, Gulf Wars, etc.). As for their attacks on Israel, please be assured that they are merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Jew.

On every one of these points Qutb either disagrees in no uncertain terms, or he understands the terms in some way that is very different from the way those of us in the West do. For example, “The peace which Islam desires” according to Qutb, “[is] that the obedience of all people be for God alone.”

Compulsion, to Qutb, isn’t what we in the West understand it to be either. According to him, it is important for the individual to choose Islam freely—but Qutb has some peculiar notions about what constitutes compulsion and freedom. Living under any government that is not Islamic is, in his view, compulsion. “The real servitude is following laws devised by someone, and this is that servitude which in Islam is reserved for God alone.” Such laws are obstacles to free choice. Muslims have “no recourse but to remove them by force.” “Islam does not force people to accept its belief, but it wants to provide a free environment…in which they will have the choice of beliefs.” “It is the right of Islam to release mankind from servitude to human beings so that they may serve God alone…all men are free under Him.” That's really messed up. According to Qutb's logic, if you live under laws crafted by legislators that you elected, you’re in servitude. But if a Muslim army invades your country and imposes shari’ah on it, you’re free.

Qutb does believe in the so-called “greater” jihad, but only as preparation for the “lesser:” “Before a Muslim steps into the battlefield, he has already fought a great battle within himself against Satan.”

To war against the unbeliever is commanded by the Quran. Qutb cites verse 9:29, for example:

Fight those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the Religion of Truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax [jizyah] in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection [Maulana Muhammad Ali translation].

In case there’s any doubt from the text that the Quran is not talking about defensive war, but rather an unprovoked war of expansion, Qutb spells it out:

It may happen that the enemies of Islam may consider it expedient not to take any action against Islam, if Islam leaves them alone in their geographic boundaries to continue the lordship of some men over others and does not extend its message of universal freedom within its domain. But Islam cannot agree to this unless they submit to its authority by paying Jizyah, which will be a guarantee that they have opened their doors for the preaching of Islam and will not put any obstacle in its way through the power of the state…Islam takes the initiative.

Qutb ridicules those Muslims who believe that defense is the ultimate objective of jihad: they’re dupes of “shrewd orientalists.”

Among the unbelievers who must be forced into a state of subjection, Qutb singles out one group in particular to be reviled. He warns of the

tricks played by world Jewry, whose purpose is to eliminate all limitations, especially the limitations imposed by faith and religion, so that the Jews may penetrate into the body politic of the whole world and then may be free to perpetuate their evil designs. At the top of the list of these activities is usury, the aim of which is that all the wealth of mankind end up in the hands of Jewish financial institutions.

Try to argue that that’s not anti-Jew, just anti-Zionist.

The apologists for Islamic fundamentalism will no doubt argue at this point that Qutb was just one guy—we can’t judge a whole movement based on his insane opinions.

Yes, we can.

Qutb was not a fringe figure. It’s difficult to overestimate the extent of his influence, thanks to his role in the Muslim Brotherhood. As I wrote previously the Brotherhood lies at the center of the web of individuals and organizations, what Andrew McCarthy called the “Siamese connectedness,” that comprise the infrastructure of modern Sunni extremism. Abdullah Azzam, co-founder of al-Qaeda, was a Brotherhood alumnus, as were al-Qaeda Number Two Ayman al-Zawahiri and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Hamas is the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch.

If the Brotherhood lies at the center of extremism, Qutb lay at the center of the Brotherhood. He joined after his return to Egypt, and soon became one of its leaders. He was its chief propagandist and editor-in-chief of its weekly publication, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin. His influence even extended to Osama bin Laden, who, though not a Brotherhood member himself, studied under Qutb’s brother.

In the edifice of modern jihadism, Qutb, sadly, became a cornerstone after all. But I doubt that God had much to do with it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): CNN

Is Tommy Robinson a fascist?

No.
Part II of a series: Who is Tommy Robinson?
by Michael Isenberg.

England’s best known political prisoner was in the news again this weekend as thousands turned out in London for a Free Tommy Robinson protest on Saturday. If you watched the coverage in the mainstream media, you would have seen images of violence as groups of protesters hurled bottles, broke through police barricades, and chased Britain’s finest down the street. There’s even one video making the rounds of a member of the crowd giving a Nazi salute (in all fairness, it looks like he was trolling either counter-protesters or the police).

If you searched a little harder and looked at some of the grassroots videos, well, you’d have seen more images of violence, but you also would have seen much larger groups peacefully waving flags, chanting “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” listening to speeches, and clowning for the cameras. Sometimes both sides' narratives are true.

In much of the coverage of Mr. Robinson and his supporters, especially in the far-left media, there seems to be a recurring theme: “Robinson and his supporters have a history of racism and Islamophobia, and have many links to fascist organisations (Searchlight Magazine).” “Fascist and racist criminal Tommy Robinson has been jailed, but we can’t be complacent (standuptoracism.org).” “Protest for Tommy Robinson in London is a warning about the threat of fascism (The Socialist Worker).” In a learned dissertation, rife with nuanced definitions, Hope not Hate assures us that “Tommy Robinson is a far-right, Islamophobic extremist,” but “We don’t consider [him] a ‘nazi’, a ‘fascist’ or a ‘white supremacist.’” It’s a cheap trick — backhandedly associating your opponent with something heinous by insisting it isn’t true. In any case, even when purportedly denying that Mr. Robinson is a fascist, our left-of-center friends can’t stay away from the f-word, usually with the r-word (racist) trotting along in its footsteps.

Following the links to these articles, you’ll find a lot of name-calling, a smattering of quotations from Mr. Robinson himself, often without context, and a copy of his rap sheet, leaving out key details that change the complexion of some of the charges. What you won’t find is any actual evidence that Tommy Robinson is a fascist.

In Part I of this series, I provided the basic biographical stuff about Mr. Robinson: his upbringing in Luton, his soccer hooligan years, and how he got involved in anti-jihadist activism. I’ll address the accusations of racism in the next installment. In this part, I’ll take on the question of whether he is a fascist.

Let me cut to the chase: No.

The idea that Tommy Robinson is a fascist is ludicrous.

In the first place, he doesn’t embrace fascist ideology. I find no record of him calling for a dictatorship, a totalitarian state, or government control of the economy (which is more than I can say for his left-of-center critics). He just doesn’t seem interested in questions of how the government or the economy should be organized. The only part of the fascist program that he might possibly accept—and this is a stretch—is nationalism. But then, what’s the difference between nationalism and garden variety patriotism?

“But what about that time he joined the British National Party (BNP)?” his critics demand.

Yes, it’s true. For one year in the mid-2000s, Tommy Robinson was a member of the BNP, whose Führer at the time, Nick Griffin, has been quoted as saying (during his trial for inciting racial hatred), “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat.” Nevertheless, when you hear the whole story of Mr. Robinson’s involvement with the BNP, you’ll see that it brings him far more credit than shame. From his autobiography Enemy of the State:

I went along to the first meeting with my uncle and listened, mostly. They had a guest speaker, gave out loads of literature and they were talking what I thought was plain common sense about the whole range of Muslim/Islamic issues. I suppose I was reasonably impressed with it, so I signed up for a membership and decided to bring the football lads to the next meeting. These guys had become my best friends, they had become my community. I never gave a minute’s thought to their colour or background. We met up and went along to the pub, the King Harry again, which has two bars. As we walked through the door, this organiser said, ‘They’ll have to wait here,’ and he was on about the black lads — Isaac, Little Craigy and Webster. I could not believe it. I simply could not believe it…They discovered in no uncertain terms that we were about as pissed off as pissed off gets — and that was that with the BNP as far as I was concerned. After that, any time we heard about the BNP, we just told them to get fucked… You probably think that I was naïve for not realising the BNP was a racist group. I’m sure I was.

If anyone who wasn’t an anti-jihadist activist brought a group of black men to a meeting of white supremacists, our left-of-center friends would hail him as a hero. But instead, the incident is twisted — without the details of course — to lay bogus accusations of fascism at Tommy Robinson’s doorstep. (BTW, the incident was supposedly corroborated at the time by an article in Searchlight Magazine of all places. Unfortunately, as of press time, Searchlight has not responded to my request for information.)

From the beginning, neo-Nazis and other assorted fascists attempted to infiltrate and co-opt the English Defense League (EDL), the organization that Mr. Robinson co-founded. In a recent video, Brian John Thomas, of Israellycool fame, following Douglas Murray, places the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the Left. “If you keep calling something far right,” he said, “then the far right want to join it. If you keep saying that they’re neo-Nazis, then the neo-Nazis want to join it.”

Also from the beginning, Robinson fought to keep these “wankers” out. Mr. Thomas followed the story as it was unfolding:

They had a forum [online] and I used to read that forum from Israel, and that’s actually how I got to understand what the EDL was and what it wasn’t—and it wasn’t a neo-Nazi far right organization, because I could see what happened when people came into their forums trying to come with what today the alt-right calls the JQ—the Jewish Question. They were not treated well and it didn’t have a safe home at the EDL.

But the message that fascists were not welcome was not limited to the online forum. In Part I of this series, I mentioned Mr. Robinson’s confrontation with Paul Ray and “Nazi Nick,” but there were many other examples as well. At an early EDL March in Birmingham, Mr. Robinson writes,

[T]he police brought in double decker buses to ship us out and apparently some geezer in a green bomber jacket who was getting on one of the buses gave a Hitler salute towards a group of journalists. To this day I reckon it was a plant. The Unite Against Fascism lot used that image against us for years. I didn’t see it, others did—Sappy was going berserk, because his daughter is mixed race. They got a slapping and kicked off the bus. We weren’t having that.

At a September 2012 rally in Walsall, he had an unambiguous message for the BNP: the EDL didn’t want them—and the crowd had his back:

Throughout his career, Mr. Robinson has had a flair for the sensational—it’s part of the secret of his success. He once donned a burqa to sneak into a talk by a hostile journalist. After the speaker spent his entire presentation trashing him, Robinson stood up during the question period and threw off the burqa for a dramatic reveal. In another such stunt, members of the EDL—both black and white—burned a fricking Nazi flag. The Telegraph reported the story at the time, albeit with the somewhat illogical headline, “Will the flames of hatred spread?”

Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson lost control of the EDL while he served a ten month prison sentence for entering the United States with someone else’s passport (although how that’s a violation of British law mystifies me). And yet, even after this gave the fascists an opportunity to infiltrate his organization, Mr. Robinson kept trying to keep them out:

It was March 2013 when I got out and I was asking myself why I continued putting up with all the aggravation…Regional organisations should have been keeping the extremists out, but while I was inside they’d opened the doors again to any idiot who wanted to create strife. In Manchester and Liverpool the regional leadership had basically welcomed the North West Infidels with open arms…One of the first things I did was get rid of the North West regional leadership. It was zero tolerance where right-wing idiots were concerned, if I was going to be back involved.

Sadly, with another prison term on the horizon, this time for a completely inane mortgage fraud charge, Mr. Robinson had to throw in the towel. He couldn’t keep the fascists out. And so he quit—left the organization (I’ll cover the mortgage fraud business, as well as some additional reasons he left the EDL in a future installment).

Of course, his critics have a pat answer for all this: It’s a trick! Writing in The Guardian, Alex Andreou warned, “Don’t be fooled by Tommy Robinson’s political sleight-of-hand. The former EDL leader may have left his party, but this is just an old far-right trick to attract the media and shift the debate.” Mr. Andreou provides a catalog of right-wing (and a few left-wing) figures who have done just that, but the only evidence he offers that this is actually the case with Mr. Robinson’s departure from the EDL was that there were “inconsistencies in his account.” I’ll have grounds more relative than this.

I’m not in the business of supporting fascists (albeit I am in the business of supporting their freedom of speech). So before I took up Tommy Robinson’s cause, I researched him carefully. And what did I find? No ideological smoking gun, the incident with the BNP, the flag burning stunt, the epic struggle to keep fascists out of the EDL, and when that was ultimately unsuccessful, his departure from that organization. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the snowflakes who shoot off their mouths about punching Nazis can only dream about the sort of genuine anti-fascist cred that Tommy Robinson has built over the course of his career.

Next up: Part III—But he IS racist, right?

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Trump Gets One Right

Those of you who follow me on social media know that I’m not a fan of Donald J. Trump, but that I’m always delighted to give credit where credit is due when he gets one right.

Yesterday he got one right.

Mr. Trump’s speech at the Riyadh summit hit the bulls-eye. He called out terrorists for what they are, “barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life.” In an uncharacteristically Churchillian flourish, he urged the assembled nations to “Drive. Them. Out. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive the out of your holy land, and Drive them out of this earth.” And in a room full of Muslims, he stood up for the rights of women, Jews, and Christians.

My right-of-center friends are kvelling. My left-of-center friends are unusually quiet. What a welcome change from the cringing, apologetic tone of Mr. Obama! Indeed our former president sometimes seemed unwilling to even say the word “terrorism.” In the past day, better commentators than I have contrasted the two men at length, and I don’t think I can add anything to what they have already said. Instead, I’d like to focus on another aspect of the speech.

Mr. Trump mentioned ideology six times. He said that the Middle East can have a prosperous and peaceful future, “but this future can only be achieved through defeating terrorism and the ideology that drives it.” He challenged Muslim nations not only to defeat terrorism, but to “send its wicked ideology into oblivion.” And, “Starving terrorists of their territory, their funding, and the false allure of their craven ideology, will be the basis for defeating them.” (Emphasis mine)

In speaking of ideology, Mr. Trump showed real insight into the War on Terror: it's a War of Ideas. Terrorists become terrorists because they accept an ideology that tells them to become terrorists.

Mr. Trump did not go into the nature of this ideology, but at its core is the Quran, which says of unbelievers, “Kill them wherever you find them and drive them out where they drove you out.” (Chapter 2, verse 191. Yes, I appreciate the irony that Mr. Trump’s speech echoes this verse). Some modern interpreters are quick to argue that the verse refers to the enemies of Islam during Muhammad’s lifetime and does not apply today. Jihadists disagree. They believe that the Quran is the literal and final testament of God, binding on all mankind for all time.

The truth is, most Muslims don’t support terrorism. We see that in the hundreds of thousands of #NotInMyName tweets that follow major terrorist attacks. We see it in the generally positive reception of Mr. Trump's visit within the Muslim world. But large numbers of Muslims do accept the divine origin of every word in the Quran. I don't argue that Muslims should reject the Quran. But I do argue, in step with many Muslim reformers, that they should reject a literalist interpretation of their scripture, as most post-Enlightenment Jews and Christians have done. In accepting a literalist interpretation, they accept the underlying ideology of terrorism, and become its unwitting enablers.

For example...

I watched the speech on Fox News. During the pre-game show they had a Muslim expert on—I didn’t catch her name—who insisted that the Quran is a peaceful document and that the key to defeating terrorism is to return to what the Quran “really” says—the Islam of Muhammad and the Companions. In my humble opinion, she has it exactly backwards. Jihadists understand the Islam of Muhammad and the Companions perfectly well, and that’s the problem. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, for instance, says that when he was interrogating suspects in the first World Trade Center bombing, he would ask them about their motivations and they would quote this or that verse of scripture to justify themselves. Mr. McCarthy would go look it up, and sure enough, it said exactly what the jihadists said it said. Indeed, the approach that the Fox News expert proposed, a return to the Islam of the founding generation, has been around since the 18th century and is called Salafism. It gave birth to jihadism.

Of course, in the end, my opinion and Andrew McCarthy’s opinion aren’t what matter. It’s up to Muslims to reform the Muslim religion. As Mr. Trump said in his speech, “Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalization.” To that end, after his oration, he joined King Salman of Saudi Arabia and President al-Sisi of Egypt in opening something called the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology. It remains to be seen exactly how the Center’s work will play out. As far as I can tell, it’s a boiler room for countering jihadism on social media. Given that the Saudi government is a key player, I am not optimistic that it will work along the lines I suggested, and there’s something creepily Orwellian about the whole thing. The "Hail Hydra" photo making its rounds on the Internet isn't helping. But nevertheless, any recognition that the War on Terror is a War of Ideas is a step in the right direction.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092 and depicts the battle for the Muslim soul between those who embrace science and tolerance on the one hand, and those who throw in their lot with mysticism and persecution on the other.