2

Oases of Resistance and Reform

Each of those gardens brought forth its produce,

And failed not in the least therein:

In the midst of them We caused a river to flow.

QUR’AN 18:33

“ISLAM,” SHAIKH MUHAMMAD al Ghazzali pronounced, “has become an orphan and a stranger in its own lands.”¹ The terrible years of the twentieth century were particularly disastrous for Islam. Writing in the early seventies, Ghazzali expressed great apprehension for the threatened state of Dar al Islam, as the century entered its final quarter. His words echoed a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad that recounted that “Islam started as a stranger and will become a stranger again.”² Ghazzali was not referring to attacks on particular Islamic activists or movements. He was lamenting the undermining of the broken ummah as a whole. What disturbed him most was that “hatred of Islam itself” had become commonplace.³

The West and the Culture of Violence

The disasters suffered by Islam in the twentieth century were the culmination of processes long in motion. At the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century, the British, French, and Russian empires had all invaded Islamic lands. Out of the body of the ummah the colonial powers carved all manner of artificial entities to facilitate settlement and dominance. The twentieth century opened with the empires of Britain, France, and Russia using overwhelming force to consolidate their occupation of Islamic lands. Imperial powers came to the Islamic world as the carriers of a racist culture of violence. Murderous European civil wars, fueled by the blood and soil nationalism on which the West prided itself, had bred the terrible virus. Imperialism acted as its disseminating agent. European armies, whether from western or eastern Europe, waged wars of casual extermination in their quest for global domination.⁴ It inspired the horrific violence of settler colonialism in Algeria and Palestine. The terror was not restricted to Islamic lands, although Muslims numbered disproportionately among its victims. Horrors, without limits and without remorse, were unleashed on the hapless Islamic world.

A memo by Winston Churchill captures the imperial mood that remained strong into the early twentieth century. Churchill intervened in a high-level debate over what weapons should be used to crush the revolt in the 1920s of the people of Mesopotamia. “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” Churchill intoned. “Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror,” he continued.⁵ Routinely Churchill expressed his disdain for the Arabs in the most graphic terms. On another occasion he pronounced that “the Arabs are a backward people who eat nothing but Camel dung.”⁶ There was nothing exceptional about such dismissive racism. The British Manual of Military Law stated that the rules of war applied only to conflict “between civilized nations.” An elaboration noted that “they do not apply in wars with uncivilized States and tribes.”⁷

Americans are prone to distance their own national story from such European attitudes and their bloody consequences. History is far less forgiving, especially when viewed through an Islamic lens. Islamic historians note that the African slaves that subsidized American prosperity with their labor and their lives were at least 15 percent Muslim. A rarely noted dimension of the slave narratives is the struggle of the Muslims among them to preserve their faith and the Arabic language that conveyed its message. It is the American record in the Philippines, however, that stands out for its barbarism when the focus is on Islam. The brutal American seizure and occupation of the Philippines extended from the Spanish-American War of 1896 through World War I. It has a rarely acknowledged Islamic dimension. American forces of approximately 120,000 brought death and destruction on a genocidal scale. The historian Bernard Fall has argued that the American conquest of the Philippines was “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia; it cost the lives of 300,000 Filipinos.”⁸ The American assault was waged with particular viciousness against the Muslim resistance in the south.

The United States succeeded the Spanish as colonial power in the Philippines.⁹ The American era opened with a proclamation of “benevolent assimilation” issued by President McKinley on December 21, 1898. The proclamation explained that “it will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.”¹⁰ In practice, the American rules of engagement for this imperial adventure matched and surpassed in unrestrained violence those of the European colonizers. Resistance was most determined by Filipino Moros, as indigenous Muslims were called. Most Americans are familiar with “The White Man’s Burden” by the English author and poet Rudyard Kipling. However, very few are taught that this poem was written to support American imperialism in the Philippines.

President McKinley explained that the Philippines were thrust on an innocent America as a result of its victory over the Spanish. There was no choice but “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”¹¹ Mark Twain sardonically praised the U.S. government’s success in the “civilizing mission” of U.S. diplomacy over the Muslim inhabitants of the southern Philippines that ended in mass murder. Christian attitudes found perverse expression among the officers who led the American forces. One Major Edwin Glenn, to cite but one example, proudly reported how he had forty-seven prisoners kneel and “repent of their sins” before ordering them bayoneted and clubbed to death.¹²

Mark Twain, in uncensored versions of his work, wrote bluntly of American imperialism. As with so many genuine American heroes, Twain is encased in a neutering mythology. It must be broken for an encounter with the politics of the father of American literature and my neighbor for many years: The Mark Twain House, where his spirit rests, was just down the street from my first house in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford has its problems, but it also has the West End with its charming Victorian houses, including Mark Twain’s. As an ardent anti-imperialist, Twain spoke for Americans of enlightened conscience in a flood of articles denouncing England, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States for their imperialist depredations. In his “A Greeting from the 19th Century to the 20th Century” for the New York Herald Tribune on December 30, 1900, Twain wrote acidly that “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her the soap and a towel,” Twain concluded, “but hide the looking-glass.” He followed up in 1901 with his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” Twain explained that not only the United States but each of the strong powers of the day was advancing “with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other.”¹³

Even against such a dark background of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crimes, the Western atrocities of the mid-twentieth century still stand out. Not all the wounds in this most violent of centuries were to the “uncivilized.” In the twentieth century fratricidal bloodletting engulfed Europe on a scale without precedent in world history. Two European civil wars, labeled misleadingly as world wars, took over fifty million souls. Firebombing of “enemy” European cities numbed all sensitivity about the loss of civilian lives. The use of atomic weapons against Japanese “enemy cities” highlighted the utter lack of humanitarian restraint in the new American center of Western power. Islamic intellectuals witnessed these spectacular wars against all notions of civilized behavior with shock and dismay. They assessed the twentieth century, so completely dominated by the West, as one of the bloodiest in history. They felt great and justified apprehension for the fate of Islam in a world dominated by the West and its culture of violence.

Ending of the Caliphate

For Islam the twentieth century was the era that brought the demise of the caliphate. In 1924 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) officially ended the caliphate. Weakness and rampant political and financial corruption had long since diminished its role as the repository of the collective aspirations of Muslims. Nevertheless, it had provided a symbolic expression of the bonds that connected them. For the first time in their history, Muslims worldwide found themselves bereft of an overarching Islamic political framework and political figure symbolically representing the unity of the ummah. The “father of the Turks” went still further: He launched an unrelenting campaign to strip Turkey of its Islamic character. Turkey was declared to be secular.

Atatürk took secularism to mean the elimination of any role for Islam in public life. Politically, the regime reserved a privileged place for the military as the “guardian” of the nation’s secular and republican character as Atatürk had defined it. The elitist arrangement sharply limited prospects for democratic development. This Turkish model, greatly admired and actively supported by the West, paved the way for other countries to follow suit, most notably Iran and to a lesser extent Egypt. Three critical centers at the heart of the Islamic world seemed on their way to abandoning Islam. Western delight at any weakening of the Islamic world was tempered by fears that a strong and assertive nationalism, like Atatürk’s, would be equally or perhaps even more problematic. Over the coming decades the West at times did support Islamic movements as a counterweight to strong nationalism. The underlying consistency was abhorrence of any strong and unified alternative to imperialism, whether nationalist or Islamic.

By the mid-1970s, Atatürk-style Westernization had reached unprecedented proportions. Most disheartening for Islamic intellectuals was the systematic weakening of Shari’ah (the provisions from Qur’an and Sunnah to regulate human behavior) in most Arab and Islamic countries. The damages were not confined to the religious and cultural sphere: Two entire countries, Zanzibar and Palestine, had already been lost for Islam. The success of the Zionist project in establishing the state of Israel meant that the bulk of historic Palestine was severed from the Arab Islamic world and its remnants were left defenseless. In 1964 an uprising led by local African revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing the Arab-dominated government of Zanzibar. A massacre of hundreds of local Arab and Indian Muslims ensued. Zanzibar as an independent entity with an overwhelming Muslim majority was swallowed up in a union with Tanzania.

Great traumas seared the violent history of Western assault on the ummah into the collective memory of Muslims. The wounds were old. The memories and the pain remained fresh, and they included direct assault on Islam. The French conquered and occupied Algeria in 1830. An estimated one million Algerians were killed by the occupiers. The French, having themselves suffered losses of some 30,000, were determined to occupy Algeria permanently. They aimed to systematically destroy its Islamic culture, replacing it with their own. Mosques were converted into churches. Old Arab city centers were torn down and replaced with the French version of an orderly city. The French attacks on Algeria’s Islamic identity culminated with the conversion of the historic eleventh-century Great Mosque, believed to be the oldest in Algeria, into the Cathedral of St. Philippe. Qur’anic inscriptions in the interior were encircled with gold letters that read: “Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and forever.” A large cross was placed on its high minaret to signal, as the colonial officials announced, that “French domination of Algiers is definitive.” In his inaugural sermon, the new Archbishop of St. Philippe announced that the mission of the cathedral was to convert the Arabs from “their barbaric faith.”¹⁴

The assault on Algeria’s Islamic character extended to displacement of the country’s Muslim people. Prime agricultural land was distributed by the French rulers to an amalgam of European settlers, including Maltese, Italian, and Spanish as well as the French. These European “pied noirs” settlers, as they were called, exerted a political and economic stranglehold on the colony. The tragedy of Algeria was repeated at sites throughout the Islamic world. Most familiar is the colonization of Palestine by European Jewish settlers of mixed national origins. In the West, the colonization of Palestine is rarely understood in this way. In the Islamic world note is taken of the fact that in 1917 the Jewish population of Palestine represented less than 10 percent of the total. On this modest foundation, it is understood by Muslims everywhere that aggressive settler-colonialism, with many similarities to the Algerian experience, erected the Israeli state. By the mid-1970s the Palestinian Arabs were either second-class citizens in a Jewish state, living under oppressive occupation, or refugees.

Nasser’s Anti-Western Westernization

The twentieth century opened with renewed imperial assaults that once again targeted Islamic lands. It ended with postcolonial, anti-Islamic regimes on the Turkish model in power throughout the Middle East. The rulers were indigenous, but, from an Islamic perspective, there was little difference: All such postcolonial regimes pursued strategies that took the West as the model of progress. Invariably, movements under Islamic banners emerged as its major opposition. Some of the imitative new regimes allied themselves with the West. Others took anti-Western positions. Nasser of Egypt was the most successful of the “anti-Western Westernizers.”¹⁵

Ghazzali in the early 1970s had called for resistance, although the precise forms it should take were not yet clear to him. “We have decided that we will remain present,” he pronounced. “A willful and obstinate nabqa (presence),” he continued, “represents the heart of the message we bring.” Ghazzali pledged that “Islam will endure, even if those who struggle for it die. We will bequeath the message and the struggle to the next generation.”¹⁶ Ghazzali’s rhetoric of resolute refusal had solid historical grounding. Islam in the face of violent assaults from the West had consistently refused to play the role of passive victim. Although rarely emphasized in Western accounts, the history of the ummah from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century witnessed three great waves of Islamic reform and resistance to foreign intrusions.

Three Waves of Resistance

The successive waves of mass resistance to Western depredations wrote an impressive chapter in the history of Islamic lands. Over the course of the three centuries, from the eighteenth to the twentieth, Islam responded like a living entity to threats to its existence. It had, like any living thing, desperately searched for the means to defend itself against the odds. In doing so, it lodged itself more deeply in the hearts of ordinary Muslims. The story Islamic historians tell of Islam’s renewal is always and everywhere a story of the power of the faith in the lives of the masses of ordinary Muslims rather than a tale of charismatic leaders. The mention of key leaders is simply a shorthand. These figures represented a new way of thinking and acting to meet the dangers. By the time they emerged, that way of resistance had already taken shape in the minds of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. The leadership figures of each wave of resistance had only to speak its name to win mass support. In every era, resistance drew on the Islamic heritage rather than foreign sources.

The first great surge arose in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued through the first half of the nineteenth.¹⁷ Reformers of this period aimed to return Islam to its most essential sources in the Qur’an and Sunnah. They sought intellectual and fiqh (Islamic legal reasoning) reform. The great movements of reform included Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703–1791) from Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad Ibn Nuh (1752–1803) from Medina, Shaikh Muhammad Ali al Sanusi (1778–1859) in Morocco, Muhammad Ibn Ahmed al Mahdi (1843–1885) in the Sudan, Muhammad al Shaukani (1758/9–1834) in Yemen, al Shehab al Alus (1802–1854) in Iraq, and Wali Eddine al Dahlawi (1702–1762) in India. From an Islamic perspective, the large number of reformers and the massive followings they won indicate that a great deal more than personal charisma was at work in these diverse settings. These highly successful mass movements appear as the products of the Islamic environment itself as sustained by everyday Muslims. In some cases the reformers not only focused on a call to return to the sources but also built a political movement on these new intellectual foundations. The Wahhabi in the Arabian Peninsula, the Mahdi in the Sudan, and the Senussi in Morocco all had this dual intellectual and political character. Others remained movements of thought and fiqh without a distinctive political character.

The second great surge of mass Islamic resistance arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and extended into the early years of the twentieth. Its proponents arose in opposition to deepening imperial intrusions. The West at this time completely dominated the Islamic world. The British had taken Egypt and the Sudan, the French Tunis and Morocco, and the Italians Libya. Mass movements of national resistance arose. They were inextricably tied to Islam. The mass uprisings included those of Abdul Qader al Jazeiri (1808–1883) in Algeria, Abdul Karim al Khatabbi (1882–1963) in Morocco, Ahmed Sharif al Senussi (1873–1933) in Libya, and Muhammad Ahmad al Mahdi (1845–1885) in the Sudan. In Egypt, the arc of Islamic resistance extended from Gamal Eddine al Afghani (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), and Rashid Rida (1865–1935) to Mustafa Kamel (1874–1908). Afghani and Abduh left the most durable imprint as theorists of Islamic resistance. The Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973) has aptly described Afghani as the spark for the resistance to the Western assault and Abduh as the figure who stimulated reform to address the underlying vulnerability that had made assault possible. Afghani agitated tirelessly for the unification of the Islamic world to resist the incursions of the violent Western intruders. He sought the unification of Sunnis and Shi’i, notably of Turkey and Iran. Abduh for his part added a more nuanced notion of resistance that included strenuous efforts to reform traditional Islamic institutions and the traditional ways of thinking they embodied. He argued that the Islamic world must be not only united but reformed as well. The challenge facing these reformers was far more complex than those of the first wave, when the focus was essentially on the reform of the heritage. Imperialism, by the time of the second wave, had sunk deep roots into Islamic lands, seriously threatening not only the heritage but also the Islamic identity and way of life of the people themselves. Westerners had established protected foreign enclaves or outright colonies in the heart of the Islamic world. Particularly destructive was the impact of Christian missionaries who arrived in the wake of Western armies. By the end of the second wave, it had already become clear that the Islamic character of both the land and the people was threatened. It was not enough to respond to colonialism itself; it was essential to deal with the cultural destruction that came with it.

The third great surge of Islamic reform arose in the wake of World War I (1914–1918). It lasted through World War II (1939–1945) and the subsequent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. World War I represented the first great European civil war of the modern period. It brought the ascendency of the French and the British. They proceeded to divide the heartlands of the Middle East between them. The British took Palestine and Iraq. The French exerted their control over Syria, Lebanon, and Algeria. Russia in turn took Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, consolidating control over the Islamic lands of central Asia. The British and the Dutch dominated the islands of southwest Asia that had majority Muslim populations.

By the third wave, the threat to Islam and Islamic identity of relentless Westernization no longer came only from the outside. The colonial presence in Islamic lands created a whole new set of challenges for which the responses of the earlier eras were no longer adequate. The occupying powers set about building entirely new institutions to parallel and ultimately displace inherited Islamic institutions and the ways of thinking and living they made possible. Western political and legal structures were imported wholesale. Educational and health facilities on Western models were built. A debilitating dualism came to characterize the colonial situation. Islamic societies were split in two and suffered an inevitable erosion of social and cultural coherence.

The collapse of the caliphate opened the way for a variety of transnational Islamic societies that sought to address these ills. These included the Muslim Brothers, founded by Hassan al Banna in Egypt in 1928; the Islamic Society, by Abul Ala Maududi in India in 1941; and the Nurcu, inspired by Said Nursi in Turkey in the 1950s. During this third wave, resistance initially drew on both Islamic and nationalist sentiments that appeared indivisible. Gradually, however, strains appeared between those with essentially nationalist motivations and those whose loyalties derived from broader Islamic commitments. While the nationalist trend emphasized political and economic independence, the Islamic trend focused as heavily or more on cultural demands. Islamic intellectuals argued strongly that only civilizational independence could provide a shield for Islam. Both trends evoked popular support. They were often at odds, even though their demands were complementary. This divisive split persists to this day.

Despite this history of resistance, by the decade of the 1970s it looked as though Islam would be decisively defeated. In the Middle East nationalists with secular orientations were everywhere dominant. On the global level the general picture was not all bleak, although new dark shadows were coming into view. The European bloodletting had ceased. The European empires withdrew from their overseas territories, vacating Islamic lands. Europe itself was at peace. Competition among European imperial powers for imperial acquisitions was no longer the major threat to Islamic lands.

However, a new danger just as deadly had already appeared on the horizon, although the nature of the threat it posed was not yet clear. The United States was establishing itself as the dominant world power. The Cold War, a supposed rivalry between equally balanced world powers, had masked America’s rise as a global hegemon. Only calculated exaggerations of Soviet power and assertiveness created the illusion of parity. Emphasis on the perfidies and infinite evil of the communists deflected any critical self-examination in the United States, as it renewed its taste for imperial adventures. More importantly, the inflation of the Soviet threat also justified the immense arms buildup that within a remarkably short time would make the United States the sole superpower. America would be the driving force and major beneficiary of globalization, as the soft version of American empire would be called.

Even before the end of World War II, the United States had focused on the vast energy resources of the Gulf region. Not surprisingly, Islamic lands hosted the most important of the string of American bases that with time defined the new face of the American successor empire. From the skies and on the seas, American power shadowed the lives of Muslims. The full violence to which Muslim peoples would be subjected by this ominous presence was as yet beyond comprehension. Still, the final decades of the twentieth century were years of profound and rightful apprehension for Islamic intellectuals. History, or so it seemed, had turned decisively against the ummah.

The Fourth Wave and New Reserves for Reform and Resistance

At the very brink of despair, Islam defied all the trends and reasserted itself in multiple yet complementary ways. In the great Shi’i arc that stretched from southern Lebanon through Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf to Iran, centuries-old religious connections defined durable commonalities. Islam would find resources in those venerable Shi’i connections, not only to preserve the faith but also to make Islam a force to inspire mass revolution. In Arab lands a network of loosely connected associations of Muslim Brothers provided a generative matrix out of which came all manner of Islamic groupings. Among the Turks a spiritual revival centered on the works of Turkish Islamic mystics, notably Said Nursi. Remarkably, these diverse resistances flowed together in ways no one could have foreseen. The energy from these creative fusions fueled the Islamic Renewal.

The Shi’i Arc from Lebanon to Iran

The Shi’i arc represented the most improbable of all the reserves for Islam’s capacity to resist, in the face of overwhelming Western power. The lands of the Shi’a stretch from Lebanon to Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf. The venerable connections between the Shi’i communities of Mount Amel in Lebanon to such centers of Shi’i learning as Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran date back to the mid-sixteenth century. They remain vital today. As a minority community estimated at under 15 percent of the world’s Muslims, the Shi’a represent a distinctive Islamic presence. In the popular imagination, Shi’a are defined by emotional rituals of self-flagellation. They shed oceans of tears as part of Ashura, the yearly commemoration of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein. Community leadership is understood to reside with learned ayatollahs. These accomplished Shi’i scholars command moral deference and wield material power. Traditionally, their leadership has leaned to political accommodation and quietism as the most appropriate strategies to protect a minority community. Shi’i vulnerability crystallizes in the distinctive concept of taqiyya (dissimulation), which justifies the concealment of adherence to Shi’ism when believers are under threat. Taqiyya is permissible where the dangers to life or property are clear and when no damage to the faith results from the deception.

This characterization of the vulnerability and passivity of the Shi’a is accurate, but it is also incomplete. Critical contradictions are integral to the Shi’i legacy. Both an inclination to quietism and a contrary propensity to dissent have consistently characterized Shi’i communities and given them a volatile character. Moreover, extreme emotionalism and rigorous rationality both find their place. Rivalries and intense debates among the Shi’i ayatollahs are not at all unusual. Shi’i scholars do privilege gnosis and intuition. They retain a profoundly mystical conception of the infallible power of interpretation of the Shi’i imams. At the same time, Shi’i scholarship draws on a strong rationalist tradition. In the absence of the last imam, scholars are called to deploy reason in the service of ijtihad (an effort of interpretation of the sacred texts) to guide the community. Rationalism, intuitive understanding, and extreme emotionalism coexist comfortably in the Shi’i tradition.

The imams of the Shi’a occupy a place midway between the human and the divine. They were not created from clay into which God breathed life as ordinary men and women. Rather, they originated from a divine beam of light that appeared before the world itself was created. Imam Ja’far al Sadiq (702–765) teaches that God reserves certain knowledge for himself, while knowledge of other things is taught to his angels, his messengers, and his imams. The judgments of imams were regarded as protected from error by God and therefore infallible. The majority Twelver Shi’a believe that in the absence of the imam the ayatollahs should take responsibility for the guidance of the community. Deprived of their beloved imam, Shi’i communities turned to the most learned among them for leadership. From the ranks of the learned ayatollahs came the grand ayatollahs. Those grand ayatollahs of outstanding scholarly weight and moral authority might then ascend to the position of marja’ (the highest rank of authority among Shi’a religious scholars). The maraji’ (plural) have been at the very core of the Shi’i capacity for community building that has proved so durable and resilient.

The process by which an ayatollah is elevated to the position of marja’ is fluid and reserves an important role for the followership. A marja’ emerges through his reputation for learning and high moral principles. The most important sign of the emergence of a marja’ is the publication of a collection of important rulings that establish his strong scholarly record. What matters even more is the reception of the marja’ by ordinary Shi’i who look to him for guidance. It is the number of such self-selected adherents that has the greatest weight in establishing a figure as a marja’. Followers of a particular marja’ can come from widely dispersed communities, located in a variety of different states. They typically render to the marja’ the celebrated khums (payment of one fifth of acquired wealth). The maraji’ often command great wealth and the accoutrements of power that it makes possible. Grand ayatollahs and maraji’ would arise across the Shi’i arc, and not just in Iran, to mobilize movements of mass resistance that would startle the world. In 1979 an Iranian ayatollah from the second ranks who was neither the most learned nor most influential as a scholar created the alchemic formula that would transmute traditional quietism into the extraordinary revolutionary energy of Iran’s Islamic revolution.

The Muslim Brothers in the Sunni Heartland

A very different Islamic assertiveness has had a venerable tradition in Egypt, the confident heart of the Sunni world. Egyptian associations with the mission of protecting and fostering Islam were the earliest and most numerous in the Arab world.¹⁸ From Egypt came the most important movement of politicized Sunni Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Organizational Genius of Hassan al Banna

The origins of the most important of Sunni Islamic associations were extremely modest. An Egyptian schoolteacher in the provincial city of Ismailia joined with his brother and a handful of followers to found the Muslim Brothers. It is difficult to verify the details. What we do have is the clear projection of the founding myth by Banna himself. In his telling, Banna makes clear the intended link of the new association to the quest for justice. Banna relates that in March 1928 six laborers from the British camp for the Suez Canal Authority came to him to thank him for his teachings. They went on to say that “we know not the practical way to reach the glory (‘izza) of Islam and to serve the welfare of Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. Lo, we see the Arabs and the Muslims have no status (manzila) and no dignity (karama). They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.” The laborers explained that “we possess nothing but this blood … and these souls … and these few coins…. We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland (watan), the religion, and the nation (ummah) as you know it. All that we desire now is to present you with all that we possess, to be acquitted by God of the responsibility, and for you to be responsible before Him for us and what we must do.”

Banna, who was twenty-two years old at the time, accepted the obligation. Together the small group swore an oath to God to act as junud (soldiers) for the message of Islam. Banna pronounced that “we are Brothers in the service of Islam; hence, we are the Muslim Brothers.”¹⁹

The Islam Banna sought to protect was an inclusive Islam. Banna explained to his followers that “we are a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a cultural-educational union, an economic company, and a social idea.”²⁰ The Islam for which the Brothers spoke was also a worldly Islam, deeply committed to transforming Muslim societies. It was very much motivated by fierce opposition to colonialism and the positive struggle for moral rectitude and social justice. To achieve these social aims, Banna believed that strong and tightly organized leadership would be essential. He wed his notion of community service to an authoritarian conception of leadership.

Traditional conceptions came naturally to Banna. He was born in 1906 into a pious lower-middle-class family in the village of Mahmudiyya to the northwest of Cairo. As a boy, Banna attended village schools. His father was a religious teacher who often led the community prayers in the village. By the age of fourteen, Banna had memorized the Qur’an. While still in his early teens, Banna began attending the mystic circles of the Hasafiyya Sufi Order. He totally immersed himself in the activities of the order and attained the status of an initiate. Banna remained an active member in the Order for some twenty years. For a brief time, he even wore the tasseled turban and white outer garment of the Order. His readings lead him to the work of the medieval scholar Abu Hamid al Ghazzali (1058–1111), who played a key role in bringing Sufism into mainstream Islam. From the great scholar, Banna drew the paradoxical lesson that scholarly pursuits should be limited to just enough learning to secure an occupation and perform one’s religious obligations in an informed way. Throughout his life, Banna maintained the position that the bulk of the vast literature of fiqh, developed over the centuries by Islamic scholars, was irrelevant to the current conditions of Muslims. He turned instead directly to the Qur’an and urged his followers to do the same.

Banna’s involvement during these same years in a variety of religious associations reinforced this strong practical streak. He regularly rose to leadership positions and showed a gift for recruitment. Banna consistently sought to think through an issue and then act on conclusions, bringing others along with him. Ideas and principles really came alive for him when they were embodied in social actions. Social and political activism demanded the practical discipline of embodying ideas in concrete projects.

Banna left his village for Dar al Ulum in Cairo, a Western-style university where he trained for a teaching career. Upon graduation, he accepted a post teaching Arabic in the public system in the city of Ismailia. In an essay from his last year of studies, he wrote that “I believe that the best people are those who … achieve their happiness by making others happy and counseling them.” Banna concluded that Sufism offered one path to that end of “sincerity and work in the service of humanity,” while teaching offered a second. He chose the second path, explicitly preferring it because of “its involvement with people.”²¹ Banna remained a teacher for nineteen years. He taught his young students during the day and their parents at night in voluntary adult education programs. He described his calling as “preaching and guidance.” Banna found his students not only in mosques but also in coffee houses and other public gathering places that he regarded as “people’s institutes.”

During those same years, Banna actively participated in demonstrations against British rule. Ismailia hosted the Suez Canal Authority, and consequently there was a very large British presence in the city. Throughout his life, Banna’s deep faith and gentle personal manner coexisted with his passion to free Egypt of a degrading occupation and return Islam to its rightful place as the moral anchor of community. Banna had no formal higher education in the Islamic sciences. The paths to leadership in traditional Islamic organizations were closed to him. He defined a new trajectory through social activism, wedded to a call for Islamic renewal.

Hassan al Banna developed an innovative organizational formula aimed explicitly at reflecting the shumeleyya (comprehensiveness) of Islam. The insistence on Islam’s all-inclusive character provided an essential response to efforts by the colonizers to marginalize and neutralize Islam. Banna could not accept the Christian notion of relegating religion with its moral and ethical principles to a sacred sphere separate from the rest of human life. Banna believed, and sought to demonstrate through the activities of his movement, that Islam was a complete way of life, fully capable of generating political, economic, social, and faith institutions to respond to the needs of a modern society. Banna’s conception was an innovative one. Outside observers have done their best to force the Brotherhood into recognizable Western molds as a covert political party, social movement, or fellowship of faith. Islam as Banna conceived it could not be contained by any of these “buckets.” Banna himself said simply and directly to his followership that “my Brothers: you are not a benevolent society, nor a political party, nor a local organization having limited purposes. Rather, you are a new soul in the heart of this nation to give it life by means of the Qur’an.”²² The Brothers were to be, quite literally, an Islamic society in embryo.

Banna never synthesized into a critical intellectual system these powerful impulses. His writings have more the character of tracts designed for mobilization, rather than serious intellectual works. He had absorbed his insights directly from the humiliations of the colonial situation. He expressed these insights in organizational forms, rather than in theoretical treatises. His writings and speeches were enlivened by flashes of insight, captured in powerful aphorisms like “eject imperialism from your souls, and it will leave your lands.”²³ However, Banna left no systematic contribution to contemporary Islamic thought. When asked why he did not write books, Banna famously explained that he authored men who authored books. Muhammad al Ghazzali characterized Banna as a synthesizing vehicle for reformist influences from Abduh, Afghani, and Rida. From Afghani he took a sense of the dangers coming from the West, from Abduh the notion that the ummah should reform itself, and from Rida guidance to deeper understanding of the Qur’an. Ghazzali believed that Hassan al Banna sowed knowledge the way a farmer sows seeds. Ghazzali regarded himself as a lifelong student of Banna. He believed that Banna had a skill that allowed him to explain complex things in simple terms that the Islamic world had not seen since the great Abu Hamed al Ghazali (c. 1058–1111).²⁴

Hassan al Banna possessed the imaginative power to envision organized actions in a wide variety of spheres, all within reach of ordinary Muslims. He then created the new institutional arrangements on all levels to make them possible. The depth of his insights can be read from the very practical activities of the Brothers. They taught proper forms of worship. They explored issues of Islamic morality in group settings. However, the real burst of transformative energy came as social activism among the people. The Brothers established schools and clinics as well as factories where wages and benefits were higher than in state-owned enterprises. They launched a modern Scout movement. They ran literacy clinics and night schools for workers as well as tutorial programs to assist with civil service programs. Here was the real strength of the Brothers. Banna’s activism united people around social activities, permeated with Islamic teachings. The Brothers could live an alternative, more meaningful and moral life. They could build their identity on that basis. In contrast, the Marxists, with whom the Brothers competed for the loyalties of the youth, focused on study groups to explore interesting ideas, but the ideas themselves were for the most part disconnected from life around them. Banna understood his community works as essential planks of his strategy to resist colonial encroachments. Politically, the mainstream Brothers stressed moderation and gradualism in the service of a very long-term vision of social transformation. They opposed any headlong rush to power and strongly opposed the use of violent means to achieve the Brotherhood’s aims.

Banna’s achievements were not without deep and disturbing contradictions. There was an inherent tension between the cohesive and adaptable social networks he built and the rigidly disciplined leadership structures that managed them. Governance of the Brothers was authoritarian and secretive. The absence of a coherent overall theoretical understanding of the mission of the Brothers also created its own dangers. Banna emphasized the call, rather than a drive for political power. However, he was aware that power would in fact be necessary to accomplish some of the goals he set for the movement.²⁵ Banna never resolved these ambiguities about power. Nor did the Brothers under Banna develop a coherent economic philosophy. In practice, this shortcoming meant that, despite their support for some progressive measures, especially in health and education, they left the structures of economic privilege in place and worked through them.

Perhaps most fateful of all was Banna’s ambivalence and contradictory responses on the question of violence. Like all political trends in Egypt at the time, the Brothers did develop an armed wing ostensibly for defensive purposes in a climate of escalating violence. That secret apparatus proved difficult to control. It threatened to turn the Society in a more overtly political direction, laced with violence. Banna’s gradual and moderate vision of change through “Qur’anic wisdom and sound counsel” had difficulty holding its own in the face of calls to take political paths to hasten the Islamization of Egypt. Banna famously spoke against the violent actions of militants with a political agenda. He charged that they “are not Brothers, they are not Muslims.”²⁶ However, there were inconsistencies in his statements. At other times, he spoke loosely of jihad (struggle for the faith) in both spiritual and physical senses, giving it a militant meaning. At any rate, Banna never incorporated his warnings into an effective institutional mechanism to contain the extremists within the Brotherhood. Their violence, including the assassination of political figures, eventually turned back on the Brotherhood. In February 1949, at of the age of forty-three, Banna himself was assassinated by an Egyptian government agent near his office in Cairo. He reportedly was shot seven times and then denied medical care until he died from his wounds. Banna’s murder by the palace left the Society vulnerable to its extremist elements. The political vision that the extremists championed, with the scent of violence surrounding it, haunts the Brotherhood to this day.

The Utopian Political Vision of Sayyid Qutb

In his Milestones, Sayyid Qutb gave the extremist alternative its most cogent theoretical expression.²⁷ Qutb’s writings contain very forceful condemnation of the predatory violence of colonial powers in the Islamic world. He also attacks the corruption and brutalities of ruling secular regimes. His arguments on these circumscribed matters are well reasoned and well founded. Few intellectuals of the Islamic Renewal would disagree with either of these basic positions. Qutb went further: He called for the support of revolutionary resistance to the crimes of Western empires and to the tyrannies of Westernizing, postcolonial regimes. These positions, too, have widespread support among centrists. However, for many in the midstream, Qutb crossed a red line in his thinking when he pronounced existing regimes as un-Islamic rather than simply deeply flawed or even criminal.²⁸ Qutb argued that these systems were only nominally Islamic and open to the charge of takfir (declaring Muslims to be unbelievers). This formulation left the implication that killing their leaders was not only permissible but even a duty.

Qutb’s stance read as a declaration of war against existing regimes across Dar al Islam and of the global order of which they were a part. Qutb argued against accommodation with either the regime or the Western-dominated world system. Here we have the most radical of all his ideas. With the charge of jahilliyya (belonging to the pre-Islamic age of ignorance), Qutb forcefully challenged a centuries-old Sunni compromise with ruling power. In the wake of the assassination of the fourth caliph Ali in 661, the Sunni community acquiesced in the capture of the caliphate by the ruler of Damascus. The Umayyad dynasty followed, with its secular orientation and commitment to hereditary rule, both contravening the Prophet’s example. Henceforth, the majority Sunni community would accept dynastic rule that had little to do with Islam. It did so on condition that internal order and territorial integrity were maintained, while religious matters were left largely to the ‘ulama (Islamic scholars).

Qutb called for a clean break with that tradition. He considered the Sunni historic compromise with ruling power to be the greatest mistake in the history of Dar al Islam. More than any other single factor, it explained, in Qutb’s view, how the Islamic world lost its place of world leadership. The compromise had opened the way to jahilliyya. Qutb applied this reasoning to the contemporary challenges facing the ummah. Acceptance of the Western imperial order and of regimes that accommodated that order was unacceptable to Qutb. To implement his radical challenge to Sunni tradition, Qutb called for the formation of a vanguard that would galvanize true Muslims both by persuasion and “physical power and jihad.”²⁹

Centrist Islamic intellectuals agreed with the dissent from the tyrannies of the Egyptian regime. They did not agree that the road to reform and accommodation was closed. Moreover, they feared that such a position opened the door to an even more violent repression of the Islamic trend. In the view of the mainstream, the “dark ideas” of Qutb’s later writings reflected an extremist interpretation of Islam that had more to do with the terrible provocations of the Nasserist state and the criminal depredations of dominant powers than the message of Islam.

Western critics are fond of charging that Islamic moderates have failed to challenge such extremist positions. The charges are without merit, no matter how endlessly repeated. In fact, centrist Islamic intellectuals produced volume after volume of refutations of Qutbist positions.³⁰ Virtually none of this important work in Arabic is read or discussed in the West. It does receive attention in Egypt and the Arab and Islamic world, however. Islamic centrists have been remarkably successful in countering the influence of Qutb’s extremist ideas for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

It should be noted as well that while Qutb did reach extreme conclusions on the theoretical plane, he himself never participated in actions that relied on the “physical power” that he foresaw as necessary to face such repressive regimes. It is a serious mistake to see him as an engaged advocate of armed struggle. Qutb’s vision was utopian on a grand scale. He looked to the vanguard not as a violent underground movement but rather the embryo of an Islamic society that would grow organically as a movement until it formed a truly Islamic community “in some Islamic country.” He reasoned that “only such a revivalist movement will eventually attain the status of worldwide leadership, whether the distance is near or far.”³¹

The frequent comparisons made between Qutb and Lenin are without merit. Qutb was no Lenin. Sayyid Qutb did not act to create and lead a revolutionary party of militant revolutionaries, committed to employ violence without restraint to impose their will. There is more mystical fantasy in Milestones than the ruthless realism of What’s to Be Done, Lenin’s most influential revolutionary tract. On the political plane, Qutb advocated utopian ideas. Lenin, in contrast, led the first workers’ revolution in history. Qutb’s political philosophy was closer to anarchism than the militant Marxism and party dictatorship that Lenin advocated and succeeded in installing in revolutionary Russia.

Qutb’s ideas were in no sense those of a democrat. But neither his radicalism nor antidemocratic stance makes him an advocate for theocracy, as is often charged. Qutb was indeed unimpressed with the Western-style democracy that he observed firsthand in the United States. He had total disdain for the kind of society it enabled. In his view, Muslims should stand against both “rule by a pious few, or democratic representation.” Qutb in full anarchist mode actively opposed any system where men are in “servitude to other—other human beings … from the clutches of human lordship and man-made laws” that Qutb regarded as “un-Islamic and a violation of hakemeyya (God’s sovereignty) over all his creations.”³² Qutb opposed theocracy as strongly as he did Western-style democracy.

For his writings and utopian speculations, Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned for ten years, periodically tortured, and eventually hanged. One incident from his decade-long imprisonment left an indelible mark. It can stand for all the brutalities that overwhelmed his spirit. Qutb witnessed the slaughter in 1957 of twenty-one defenseless Brotherhood prisoners, who had balked at reporting for backbreaking manual labor. A regime capable of such crimes, in his view, was not redeemable. In a final show trial in 1966, with none of the most elemental requirements of a genuine court procedure, Qutb and five other Brothers were charged and convicted of plotting to kill the president and other state leaders. The trial came in the wake of an alleged Muslim Brother assassination attempt against Gamal Abdel Nasser. It has never been firmly established that such an attempt was real. It is instructive that the “evidence” used against Qutb in the trial consisted essentially of passages from his radical writings, primarily Milestones. If hard evidence of a plot and Qutb’s role in it actually existed, it made no appearance at the trial. Qutb vigorously denied the charges of criminal and treasonous actions. At the same time, he adamantly refused to disavow his ideas, knowing what the price would be. A legend has grown up around Qutb “kissing the gallows.”³³ Stories are told about the smile that passed over his face as he faced death. Nasser reportedly had offered Qutb a reprieve, provided he renounced his ideas. Qutb refused, just as he had years earlier refused offers of a high-level position in the new military regime. Qutb’s principled martyrdom utterly captivated a great many youths in the Islamic world in the late 1960s.

Sayyid Qutb is now a man routinely described as “the father” of modern terrorism, usually in a few declarative sentences that brook no rebuttal. The indictment typically jumps from a sketch of Qutb’s undeniably revolutionary ideas, his show trial and hanging, and then to the heinous crimes of later terrorists who distorted Qutb’s thinking in the most ruthless ways. The suggestion takes shape that violence erupted from Qutb’s pen, inspiring murderous actions from al Qaeda to ISIS. Such a view exonerates the bloody deeds of the regime that murdered him and of the imperial powers that despoiled Dar al Islam. Unlike Frantz Fanon, Sayyid Qutb did not argue for the cleansing force of violence as a way to ameliorate the damaging psychological effects of a racist, colonial occupation. But he did respond to it. He explained that “it is not that Islam loves to draw its sword and chop off people’s heads with it. The hard facts of life compel Islam to have its sword drawn and to be always ready and careful.”³⁴ Qutb did not choose violence. Violence chose him, and it left its marks on his body and spirit. To exhume the tortured body of Sayyid Qutb and drag him into the company of al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri or, more recently, ISIS’s Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and other such violent criminals makes any reasonable understanding of his actual role in history extremely difficult. Qutb was never linked to any violent or criminal act. Sayyid Qutb was murdered by the Nasserist state for his ideas. Each time accounts of Qutb’s life and thought implicitly justify that judicial murder by reference to crimes committed by others years or even decades later, Sayyid Qutb is murdered once again.

The pervasive caricature of Qutb blocks from view the real human being. Qutb was a man given to theoretical and rhetorical excess. He was also a principled man and an intellectual of depth and sensibility. In any serious attempt to understand the sources of the exceptional strength and resilience of the Muslim Brothers, the intellectual Sayyid Qutb must stand second only to the activist Hassan al Banna in stature and enduring importance. Qutb’s influence has been multifaceted. It has flowed abundantly in centrist as well as extremist channels.

My own effort to know Sayyid Qutb in all his complexity was a personal quest embedded in the kind of theoretical conundrum that intrigues graduate students. I became aware of Sayyid Qutb first as a man in a box, with an intellect and a spirit that was transparently available for scrutiny. Nadav Safran, my Egypt-born mentor in Middle East Studies at Harvard, introduced him to me in the early 1960s in just this way. Safran believed that the intellectuals of his land of birth could be understood by grasping the worldview that animated their beliefs and action, a worldview presumably carried around in their heads. Qutb was no exception. Once you grasped the worldview of a radical fundamentalist, you knew the man and could assess his historical weight. Qutb, in Safran’s explanation, represented a “Weberian ideal type” of a fundamentalist extremist. That box was all that was needed to contain him. A second boxing of Qutb confirmed the analysis. In 1966, while I was still a graduate student, Qutb was hanged in Cairo. The most enduring image of that travesty is an iconic picture of Qutb in a cage during the show trial. The image was still fresh in my mind when I first arrived in Cairo in 1968.

Through the years that followed, and, to my astonishment, I encountered the footsteps of Sayyid Qutb everywhere I traveled in Dar al Islam, from Bosnia to Turkey and on to Iran and central Asia. He was a presence in all these places, his writings banned and his name pronounced only in whispers. I wondered how a one-dimensional figure so easily boxed and caged could have escaped to such far-flung places.

The answer turned out to be quite simply that there is weight and there is substance to Sayyid Qutb. Men in boxes don’t evolve. Sayyid Qutb did. There were at least three important waystations on Qutb’s short life voyage. At each of them he produced substantial work. The Qutb of the first station is an educator and an author, with a liberal nationalist orientation. He first established himself in Cairo’s celebrated literary salons as a poet, one of the many prodigies of the towering figure of the writer and poet Abbas al ‘Aqqad (1889–1964).

Qutb himself wrote prodigiously throughout his life, a pattern set in this first waystation. He published some 130 poems. He also wrote several novels, including one that drew on his experience as a boy in a poor Egyptian village. However, Qutb had his greatest success in Cairo intellectual circles as a literary critic. It was Sayyid Qutb who first brought the work of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, then unknown, to the attention of a wide Egyptian and Arab public. Qutb’s own prolific writings from these early years merit attention for their limpid style and insightful critical analyses.

Once Qutb moved out of the shadow of al ‘Aqqad, he gave clearer emphasis to his own Islamic commitments. In his second waystation Qutb emerged as a moderate Islamic intellectual. He wrote his important Social Justice in Islam. Sayyid Qutb, the man from a poor village, the schoolteacher, and the social activist, explained how the Qur’an spoke directly to the yearnings for justice of those oppressed by poverty. Qutb explored the notion of justice in a third voice that was neither capitalist nor socialist. His discussion of the concept of property, central to any system of economic thought, gives a sense of the Islamic quality of his thinking. “The individual,” Qutb writes, “is in a way a steward of his property on behalf of society; his tenure of property is more of a duty than an actual right of possession.” Making the Islamic dimension still clearer, Qutb continues that “property in the widest sense is a right that can only belong to a society, which in turn receives it as a trust from God who is the only true owner of anything.”³⁵ With Social Justice, Qutb established himself as an original Islamic thinker who gave Islam a progressive cast that went beyond the thinking of the liberals of the day. The work had a significant influence on the Free Officers around Gamal Abdul Nasser, the authors of the 1952 coup. These nonideological military officers took a great deal of the left-leaning social program they enacted after their coup from the more progressive wing of the Muslim Brothers. Sayyid Qutb was the mediator. He met with the young officers and for a time served as a mentor on social and political affairs to the men who were to eventually orchestrate his murder.³⁶

The third waystation saw Sayyid Qutb establish himself as both a major Qur’anic scholar and a radical Islamic thinker. Despite their support for his coup, Nasser turned against the Muslim Brothers, fearing their independent mass base. Nasserists contest this version of events. They argue that Nasser did respond sympathetically to the Brothers, giving them a position in the cabinet and more. However, the Brothers both insisted on more power and advocated for a diversionary agenda that focused on imposing the veil and closing cinemas. In any case, an attempt was made to woo Qutb from the Brothers with promises of a high government post. By then, Qutb understood the Westernizing thrust of the emerging Free Officer regime. He declined. That decision led to a lifetime of persecution by Egypt’s military rulers. During this third period Sayyid Qutb completed his In the Shade of the Qur’an.³⁷ He also wrote Milestones. Undoubtedly, angry young Muslims will continue to turn to Milestones. In far greater numbers, Muslims of all shades will look to In the Shade of the Qur’an for a creative and beautifully written companion for their own explorations of Islam’s holy book.

It is only very recently that serious scholarly treatments of Qutb have begun to appear in the West, although Islamic scholars have long appreciated his contributions. The more recent Western work invariably gives rightful attention to In the Shade of the Qur’an. Qutb’s intellectual achievement is staggering.³⁸ The impact is even greater still when one learns that Qutb began In the Shade of the Qur’an in the early 1950s and completed its thirty volumes during his imprisonment from November 1954 until May 1964. Qutb spent a good deal of his time in cells with up to forty other prisoners, many of them criminals. It was the practice in Nasser’s jails to blare the speeches of the president some twenty hours a day. Under these conditions, Qutb completed a monument of will, intellect, and faith. I know of no other like it in the history of prison literature. Today the work is read quite simply as one of the most admired Qur’anic commentaries ever written. During the month of Ramadan devout Muslims aim to reread the Qur’an in its entirety. When I ask acquaintances and friends which commentaries on the Qur’an they find most helpful, In the Shade of the Qur’an is frequently mentioned. Usually, readers appear quite unaware of the circumstances under which it was written.

By Qutb’s reading, the Qur’an through all its verses issues a call to freedom and social justice. As a Qur’anic exegete, he brings out as no other the subtle literary qualities of the Qur’an—the sounds, the rhythms, the images, the stories—that continue to make its reading such a moving experience for millions.³⁹ Qutb also makes clear the imperatives for action built into Qur’anic ethical teachings. Qutb’s influence on Islamic radicals is undeniable. However, it is only one strand in his story and not the most important one. Sayyid Qutb, the literary figure and scholar of the Qur’an, had a deeper impact on the far broader and far more important moderate center.⁴⁰

Sayyid Qutb lingered at each of the waystations of his life. He, therefore, came to his revolutionary thinking and Islamic activism as a Muslim Brother late in life and by a route with some very strange loops. The most fateful twist in his life story came with a two-and-a-half-year trip to America in 1949 on a scholarship to study education. His adventures began on the liner across the Atlantic when an inebriated foreign woman tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce him. American analysts and policymakers are fond of attributing anti-Western attitudes to jealousy and the progress and prosperity of American society. The notion of America the beautiful, implicit in such analyses, eluded Sayyid Qutb. What he saw was the distasteful character of American consumerism, pervasive violence, and the brutality of American culture, as typified by such sports as football, and the moral and ethical failings of a people for whom the quest for material acquisitions overshadowed struggles for moral and ethical refinement. Qutb registered shock that in America elderly parents were often left by their children to fend for themselves. A man of dark skin, Qutb experienced firsthand the rampant racism of American society. He tells of one incident when he and a group of Arab friends were denied entrance to a “whites-only movie theatre.” When one of the group explained that they were Egyptians and not African Americans, the doors opened. Qutb refused to enter. Qutb pronounced the American dream, that so captivated Egyptians, and indeed so much of the rest of the world, a grand deception.

Reading of Qutb’s disappointments in America heightens awareness of the profound frustrations that seemed to confront him at every turn. Escaping from village life, he succeeded in establishing himself as a literary figure of some stature in a sophisticated urban milieu. Soon, however, the materialist appetites of the elite in Egypt under the monarchy, their imitation of Western culture, and their tolerance of glaring social inequality eroded his sense of having found a world where he belonged. Qutb’s commitments to social justice opened the way for connection to the young officers who would overthrow that order. Yet, again having through his intellectual talents found footing with the emerging new political elite, he suffered crushing disappointment at the Westernizing character of the project they envisioned for Egypt. Given the very great promise of the original connection, the break with the Free Officers represented yet another profoundly disquieting experience.

For some, disappointments in political or public life are offset by the solace of the happiness that relationships in the private sphere bring. There is little indication that Qutb ever enjoyed that kind of comfort. All his life he was plagued by ill health, variously attributed to asthma or even tuberculosis. He always appeared frail of body and dour of personality. There is also a clear record that not all of the frustrations in Qutb’s life were political in nature. Sayyid Qutb was very much the fastidious, effete intellectual, but one with no hint of the romantic adventures of any kind that were part of his mentor al ‘Aqqad’s mystique. For all his acquired urban sophistication, he retained strands of rigid conservatism in his thinking, including a hostile attitude toward Christianity and Judaism and little development of his ideas on the role of women. Qutb’s biographers report that his first romantic attachment ended in painful failure, as did a later one. Qutb never married. He explained, unconvincingly, that he had not found a woman of sufficient “moral purity and discretion” and therefore remained single.⁴¹ An uncomfortable relationship to sexuality pervades Qutb’s work.

An important source of the appeal of Sayyid Qutb’s work is the sense of the many dimensions of the real human being who shows through. His work is not summed up by his most radical tract, Milestones. His life voyage as an Islamic intellectual cannot be reduced to its endpoint on the gallows. Sayyid Qutb, with all his talents and flaws, did manage to escape the boxes and cages designed to contain him.

Turkish Mysticism and the Triumph of Said Nursi

The policies of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, made clear the terrible repression that Islam would suffer at the hands of the secular postcolonial rulers who dominated key Islamic states. It would be an exaggeration to argue that Atatürk’s assault on Islam precipitated the Islamic Renewal and the massive mobilizations that swept through Dar al Islam. Yet Turkey’s military, as the guardians of the Atatürk legacy of extreme secularism, did set a terrifying and galvanizing example. The Turkish military spared no excess in their campaign to eliminate Islam from Turkish public life. Given Turkey’s historical role as the base of the Ottoman Empire and the site of the caliphate, the anxiety and anger caused by this active repression of Islam registered with Muslims worldwide. The fervent embrace of this Turkish “model” by Western governments did not go unnoticed. For decades the Turkish military that Atatürk ensconced in power appeared to be firmly in control and without serious Islamic opposition. The trauma of Islam’s fate in Turkey haunted the imagination of Islamic intellectuals. Extreme secularism, or so it seemed, was poised to triumph throughout Dar al Islam.

Few noticed that for decades the Turkish military guardians of the secular idea waged a battle with a ghost. Their prolonged struggle did not go well. In the end, it was the phantom that triumphed. The opening salvo in that decades-long war came on the night of July 12, 1960. It took place just weeks after the first of the Turkish military coups that punctuated the twentieth century. Tanks entered the town of Urfa in southeast Turkey. The military imposed a curfew. They surrounded the shrine of Abraham in the city center. Troops stormed the shrine, smashed a marble tomb, removed a shrouded body, and drove to an airfield outside of town. The body was placed in a military plane and disappeared.

In March the body of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878–1960) had been laid to rest in that shrine. The site almost immediately attracted thousands of mourners. The military feared Nursi’s tomb would become a focal point for anti-Atatürk sentiment and a tangible symbol of Islamic resistance. The effort to contain the impact of Nursi’s spirit failed. Even an empty shrine attracted mourners in large numbers. More importantly, Nursi’s ideas continued to inspire a spiritual movement that drew Turks by the hundreds of thousands into its informal ranks. The current ruling party in Turkey has its roots in the Islamic soil that Nursi preserved and nurtured. The spirit triumphed over the tanks.

Said Nursi of Turkey, although far less well known outside of Dar al Islam, is a figure whose importance to the Islamic Renewal bears comparison to that of Hassan al Banna. Nursi felt profoundly the threat to the ummah in the early decades of the twentieth century, declaring that “the pain and suffering of the Muslim ummah have always bruised me so deeply. I feel as though the stabs directed at the Muslim world are directed at my heart, first. That is, my heart is often wounded.”⁴² While Banna acted to fortify Islam’s public presence, Nursi focused on preserving Islam’s hold on the interior of minds and hearts. Over the course of the long and difficult decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, ordinary Turks inspired by Nursi quietly nourished and deepened their private commitment to Islam. It appeared that extremist secularism had gone from victory to victory. The West exulted. These surface impressions were profoundly misleading. Nursi had successfully laid the groundwork for oases of Islamic resistance in the hearts of ordinary people.

The deep spirituality and personal character of Nursi’s writing, so different from the prosaic pamphlets of Banna, left an indelible stamp on Turkish Islam. Banna’s genius turned interpersonal relationships, anchored in shared commitments to Islam, into organizational strengths to advance common goals. Nursi lived his life in the shadows cast by the massive slaughters of World War I, the abolition of the caliphate, and the onset of extremist secular rule. Nursi nurtured the spirit as the only means to offset these terrible defeats and preserve Islam for a time to come. In Nursi’s work, a pervasive sadness coexists with an improbable sense of hope. Nursi shed “tears of blood for Islam,” as one of his followers expressed it.⁴³ Yet he never faltered in his belief that Turkey would play a central role in preserving and advancing the Islamic ummah. His writings come alive in this core contradiction of profound grief and irrepressible optimism.

This reading of Said Nursi as an emblem of Turkish spirituality came easily to me. I first encountered his work precisely in this way. For years, Said Nursi was to me a mystic figure with a very personal role that had little to do with Turkey. Nursi helped me shape an attitude to the world and life experience that has never left me. “When I enter a garden, I choose its most beautiful flower or fruit,” he writes. “If it is difficult for me to pick it, I take pleasure in looking at it.” Then he wisely adds, “if I come across a rotten one, I pretend not to notice it, according to the rule: Take which pleases and leave what does not. This is my style.”⁴⁴ I found in him a spiritual adviser who spoke to me at times of apprehension, deep disappointment, and grief. Above all, Nursi helped me understand how trauma can echo through a lifetime and what one can do to ameliorate its effects. “O Long-Suffering One!” Nursi writes, “when a misfortune is sent to you, do not divide your patience by confronting both past and present misfortunes.” Nursi advises that we “focus on the present one, for the painful past has joined with the remaining spiritual blessings and rewards they gained for you in the Hereafter.” Nursi continues: “Do not use up your patience confronting possible future misfortunes, for what the future brings depends on Divine Will. Use your patience for today, even for this hour. Reinforce it by smiling at misfortune and loving it so that it will join your patience and help you rely on your OWNER, the ALL-munificent, All-compassionate, and All-Wise. When you do that, your weakest patience will suffice for the greatest misfortune.”⁴⁵

All of Nursi’s writing reflects a painful awareness of the human capacity for cruelty and the perennial risk of slipping into barbarism. At the same time, Nursi also understands the strange power of impossible dreams and unfounded hopes. Islamic mystics, like Nursi, understand the human capacity to dream large in the most adverse of circumstances. They know that hope springs from action, however small the steps, modest the gestures, and distant the realizations. They express those thoughts and feelings that you know absolutely cannot be expressed. Such is your understanding, that is, until these mystics succeed in doing precisely that. They are the purveyors of the impossible in the realms of the spirit. It is helpful to have the writings of Said Nursi close at hand when considering the sources of the Islamic Renewal.

The years of Nursi’s early adulthood saw the savagery of World War I and the painful final decades of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The young Nursi regarded the Ottomans as the guardians of Islam. He actively served the Ottoman cause. As a fighter, Nursi commanded the militia forces on the Caucasian front against the invading Russians. Nursi’s valor attracted the attention of his superiors and won him a medal. Undeterred by the constant shelling in one battle with the invading Russians, Nursi declined to fight from the trenches. He inspired his troops to advance by his personal bravery. To this story, Nursi’s followers add a revealing detail. They tell us that, while battling the Russians on horseback, Nursi dictated to a scribe his Qur’anic commentary, Signs of the Miraculous.⁴⁶

It is Nursi’s driving spirituality that is the secret of his astonishing hold on Turks in numbers beyond counting. His spiritual depth has made him a major source of the Renewal. For Nursi the spiritual is very much enmeshed in the world. Despite the richness of his spiritual life, Nursi knew the feel of the ground beneath his feet. Captured by the Russians, he spent two years in Siberia until he managed to escape. He made his way to Istanbul, where he achieved a certain prominence as an advocate of educational reform. The backwardness of Turkish education distressed Nursi. In particular, he decried the neglect of math and the sciences in Turkey’s Islamic schools. His reforms centered on the integration of classical Islamic studies with a fully modern education. The capstone of Nursi’s planned reforms was to be the founding of a university that would exemplify this integration. Nursi managed to get his proposals before the last of the Ottoman emperors. However, the war intervened and the plans for the university lay dormant.

A turning point in the war came with the British and French attempt to secure a sea route to Russia by forcing passage through the Dardanelles. When that failed, a landing was undertaken to capture Constantinople. Eight months of heavy fighting ensured with heavy losses on both sides. Casualties are estimated at about half a million. The Allies conceded defeat by withdrawing. For the Turkish fighters, this Battle of Gallipoli represented a great national victory. The Allies had already made plans for the dismemberment of the Anatolian heartland. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, this military success galvanized the Turks for their War of Independence. Eight years later, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, one of the commanders at Gallipoli, led the successful struggle to found the modern Turkish state.

Nursi rallied. He never wavered in his embrace of Atatürk’s founding of modern Turkey and in his commitment to Turkish independence. Atatürk, in turn, recognized Nursi’s enormous gifts. He offered him several government positions. By that time, however, Nursi saw the dangers to Islam of the extreme secularism that Atatürk had wedded to his version of Turkish nationalism. Nursi could not accept that aggressive secular agenda and declined. The decision was momentous. The break between the two figures never healed. The rupture it signaled meant a lifetime of harassment, imprisonment, and exile for Nursi.

The republican regime sought to contain Nursi’s influence by exiling him to distant Kastamonu. The limitations imposed by exile and house arrest did not work. His physical movement was sharply circumscribed. But Nursi’s spirit soared. Nursi internalized his disillusionment with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the republican regime dominated by the military. He ended his public role and ceased even reading the newspapers. Nursi concluded that participation in the affairs of the state Atatürk founded would mean complicity in efforts to undermine Islam. Instead, a “new Said” emerged who, Nursi himself explained to his followers, had turned his back on politics. The new Said would devote all his intelligence and energy to spiritual matters.

In conditions of exile, Said Nursi produced his most important work. Deprived of libraries and the company of scholars, he focused on an extended personal reflection on the Qur’an, Risale-I Nur. He completed his grand project in the years from 1925 to 1948. His work fell outside of traditional Islamic scholarship. Nursi made no attempt to connect to the religious establishment. He had lost hope that they could be a force to save Islam. In turn, the establishment scholars showed indifference to his work. Attempts are made at times to cast Nursi as a Sufi and to describe his followers as a neo-Sufi tariqa (a school or order of Sufism). Such attempts to press Nursi into a traditional mold simply do not work. They greatly devalue the innovative character both of his writings and of the associational forms that emerged from his work as an independent Islamic scholar.

Out of Nursi’s followership, there emerged self-organizing networks of an entirely new kind. They took shape without central direction and without any model. Totally new relational connections emerged as a consequence of very practical activities that Nursi inspired. He had neither wealth nor power. Spirit proved sufficient to generate one of the most extensive and successful networks the contemporary Islamic world has ever seen. The new forms had nothing do with the traditional practices that were under siege by the secular state. The Nurcu, as the network of Said Nursi was known, did not engage those old battles. Rather, energies migrated to entirely new fields for action. Nursi handwrote his massive commentary of some six thousand pages. He had no access to any means for printing or distributing his work. Instead, his followers stepped in to hand-copy and circulate the texts. The process of copying the manuscript gave thousands of ordinary Turks the justified sense that they were themselves a part of Nursi’s message. With the Qur’an in one hand and the Risale-I Nur in the other, the Nurcu gathered in small reading groups to discuss Said Nursi’s message for the age. Spontaneously, these reading groups of Nursi’s students became the essential connectors of the Nurcu network. First, they numbered in the hundreds, then in the thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Nursi’s popular title was Bediüzzaman, which means “the Wonder of the Age.” The extraordinary story of how Nursi’s deeply spiritual writings safeguarded Islam in secular Turkey gave substance to the title.

The political Nursi had a deeply spiritual commitment to Islam that drove his public activities. The spiritual Nursi had an astute political sense that enabled him to understand how best to serve Islam in changing circumstances. Nursi avoided the temptation of a drive for power in a setting decidedly unfavorable to direct Islamic resistance. Nursi succeeded in leaving an indelible imprint on Turkish Islam, precisely because both the political and the spiritual informed his work at every turn. Nursi’s apparent passivity in the face of the aggressive secularism of the Atatürk regime was misleading. By appearing to cede the political kingdom at a time when Islam in Turkey had no prospects at all of confronting Turkish secularism in power, he preserved and deepened the wells of Islamic belief and commitment in the lives of ordinary Turks. At the time of his death, estimates of the size of his movement ranged up to one million. The Nurcu spread from Turkey into central Asia and the Balkans.

The shift in Nursi’s personal stance from political activism to withdrawal from public life only strengthened the coherence to his legacy. Nursi grounded a firm commitment to freedom of conscience and expression in an unwavering conviction that people required these freedoms to know God. The corrosive effects of materialism and decades of systematic attacks on Islam could only be reversed by the collective efforts of believers who could make use of such freedoms to strengthen their faith. In Nursi’s view, such a collective force could only take shape in a pluralistic society and democratic political order. This logic led to an accommodation with moderate secularism that has ever since been characteristic of dominant trends in Turkish Islam. For Nursi, secularism was anti-Islamic only in its extreme versions. He believed that a moderate secularism would be neither for or against any religion, provided that religious figures did not rule and basic freedoms, including freedom of conscience, were guaranteed. To Nursi, moderate secularism would mean that all citizens of any faith, or of no faith at all, would have equal status and the same protected rights.

At the core of Nursi’s thinking, through all stages of his life, was the commitment to reverse the damage of Western materialism and undemocratic governance that Atatürk had fostered. Several decades before the appearance of recognizably Islamic parties, Nursi had worked out a theoretical politics, rooted in Islam and in accommodation with moderate secularism. The Islamic political culture he imagined would be committed to both constitutional democracy and development. He believed that such a politics could only be achieved under conditions of the existence of basic freedoms, including the freedom for Turks to reaffirm their Islamic faith. In such an open society it would be possible to counter the negative effects of extreme secularism. Nursi looked to a democratic political system to strengthen pluralistic society. The Turkish political system did open to multiple parties in the 1950s. The legacy of Nursi’s sophisticated thinking that merged Islam with democracy gave parties under an Islamic banner a distinctive advantage. Nursi prepared the way for the Islamic trend to seize the democratic banner and to win power democratically in one of the most important states in Dar al Islam.

Diverse Cultures of Resistance and the Survival of Islam

It is clear, in retrospect, that Islam was not nearly as exhausted in the early 1970s as surface indicators suggested. Islam was gathering strength just below the surface. What Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali and others could not yet see clearly, as they surveyed the desolate landscape of Dar al Islam, were the subterranean springs that kept Islam alive as a river of life. Resistance under Islamic banners would arise from dispersed oases fed by Islam’s regenerative capacities. The differences among the diverse sites in Iran, Egypt, and Turkey were profound. Remarkably, however, the improbable ties that connected them were stronger. Everywhere, the Qur’an was a presence. Prayers provided constant reminders of the oneness of God and the unities of his community. Invocations of the Prophet reminded Muslims everywhere of his example and the worldly miracles of human effort and commitment it inspired. When Muslims prayed, they understood that all their fellow Muslims, wherever they might be in the world, also prayed in the direction of Mecca. These essential elements of the faith had the power to transcend difference.

Ever-shifting patterns of complex interactions made it possible for the cultures of resistance that arose in these diverse sites to flow together, even if only intermittently and largely in symbolic ways. They are what make it possible to speak of an interconnected, although not unified, Islamic world. There were strange loops in the complex connections that yielded the Islamic Renewal. They explain how it is that the Renewal only seemed to come out of nowhere. Drawing on these hidden sources of strength, Islam would defend itself in the final quarter of the twentieth century. It did so at great cost but with a measure of success that defies the imagination. No one predicted the unexpected triumphs of the Islamic Renewal that would arise from the hidden oases of reform and resistance to sweep through Islamic lands. Even Ghazzali did not recognize as such the heralds of the fourth historic wave of Islamic resistance who emerged from those oases. The mesmerizing figures, who were appearing across Dar al Islam, pronounced the name of resistance for the millions of ordinary Muslims who were to drive the Islamic Renewal of our time. Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali was himself one of the most important of their number. He did not work alone.