Martin Amis: On Qutb and Islam(ism)

Qutb's Fear?

Fred Kuhne, Eve

(Image from Wikipedia)

I directed my Islamism students to the article "The age of horrorism" that Martin Amis published over a year ago in The Observer (Sunday September 10 2006) as an intelligent and insightful even if nonexpert perspective on Sayyid Qutb and Islamism.

I especially called attention to what Amis wrote on two things, the first on Qutb's unreliable recollection of his Atlantic crossing on the way to America (a sojourn of two years, 1948-1950):

Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.

I recall reading this anecdote by Qutb elsewhere, perhaps somewhere in Paul Berman's writings. Berman and Amis both find Qutb to be an unreliable narrator, and Qutb's remembrance of a drunken, half-naked woman trying to break through his locked door to force him into having sex with her struck me as entirely unbelievable, no more reliable than his 'memory' of Americans cheering in the streets in 1949 upon learning that Hasan al-Banna had died -- a riotous uproar that Qutb supposedly heard as he lay in a hospital room during an illness.

Qutb's belief that the sexually aggressive woman was an American agent sent to seduce him suggests a paranoid aspect to his thinking, an aspect that seems to pervade much Islamist discourse. Perhaps the Islamists' utopian vision -- or anyone's utopian vision, for that matter -- gives rise to a paranoid mindset, as one attempts to make sense of history and explain why the utopia that one seeks to realize has been so successfully blocked. There must be malevolent forces opposed to the truth, the just, the right. Such a view can even provide the utopian believer with a satisfying if grossly inflated sense of self-significance. In Qutb's case, while he might appear to others as just an unknown writer in an underdeveloped part of the world, he knew himself to actually be of such profound significance that the great superpower America had understood that he must be stopped.

The second thing that I called my students' special attention to was what Amis wrote on the totalizing demands of Islam . . . or does he mean Islamism?

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma -- the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The second passage raises questions about just where to draw the line between Islam and Islamism. If Islam does make total demands, even political ones -- or perhaps especially political ones, then wouldn't Islam itself demand the struggle to make shariah into the law of all lands? Perhaps we can think of the difference in the way that Bernard Lewis distinguished between quietists and activists in Islam -- except that I want to reverse Lewis's distinction. Just as Muhammad's career had two phases, a quietist one in Mecca and an activist one in Medina (Lewis sees the activist first, the quietist second), so Islam has two faces: quietist and activist. In Mecca, Muhammad called for converts but forced nobody to submit, for in his powerlessness, he could not do so. In Medina, however, Muhammad demanded converts and did force others to submit, for in his power, he could do so. What we're calling "Islam" corresponds more to the quietist phase, and what we're calling "Islamism" corresponds more to the activist phase. Maybe. But since I'm rather at odds with the expert Lewis on this analogy, perhaps I'm no more reliable than Qutb.

At any rate, as I told my students, we have a couple of interesting passages that raise questions about the character of Islamism.

Martin Amis on the Kulturkampf in Islam

Martin Amis

Glancing askance

at something amiss?

(Image from Wikipedia)

In light of yesterday's post, this remark by Martin Amis in an article, "The age of horrorism," published the year before last in The Observer (Sunday September 10 2006), is apropos:

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

I have at times over the past seven years felt much as does Amis, usually when I feel something amiss as I read the statements of even moderate Muslims. At least, I'm told that they're 'moderate' . . . until I read something that they actually say. London mayor and secular leftist Ken Livingstone has assured us that Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a moderate . . . but I then find myself reading some of the 'moderate' Qaradawi's 'moderate' words:

Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.

This defense of suicide bombing, quoted in a BBC News article, "Controversial preacher with 'star status'" (July 7, 2004), was uttered by our 'moderate' Muslim, a scholar even, the eminent Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but if he's a 'moderate,' then who's an Islamist?

Yet, I also read of widespread, profound disenchantment with Al Qaeda in places that experienced their brand of Islam, such as the Anbar province of Iraq, or of large numbers within the Muslim world growing disillusioned with Islamist suicide bombings after having seen so many Muslims die in such blasts throughout the Muslim world.

And I then think that it is Amis who is amiss in his remark...

Islamists: Humiliated by God?

Martin Amis on Islamism: 9/11

He's got their number...

(Image from Wikipedia)

My online meanderings take me all over the place.

In looking for an article by Christian Smith on Christianity's unexpected resurgence in what was supposed to become an ever-more-secular world, I happened to notice that my old Berkeley advisor Robert Bellah was celebrated in the summer issue of the journal Sociology of Religion (Volume 68, Number 2, Summer 2007). Six articles from the "Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of Habits of the Heart" are included in this summer issue.

Congratulations to Bellah and the other authors of that seminal book.

Anyway, as noted, I stumbled across this journal issue as I was looking for an article by Smith, "Why Christianity Works," which purports to explain Christianity's success not only in surviving but also in growing phenomenally well in a world of countervailing forces. What had led me to look for Smith's article was an interview with him by Hunter Baker in Christianity Today, in which he said the following:

Smith: According to my argument in this article, Christianity "works" from a sociological perspective because it is able to successfully address a whole set of basic human needs and desires, particularly offering an emotionally as well as cognitively satisfying experience for ordinary believers. Whether or not various philosophers and scientists raise objections to Christianity, the fact seems to be that in believers' phenomenological experience, there is tremendous power in living in a theistic universe, having a way to deal with moral failure, believing one is loved and cared for by God, having communities of worship and belonging to be a part of, and so on. For many millions of people, that is much more compelling than arguments Freud or Darwin might have made. ("Christian Smith on Why Christianity 'Works,'" Christianity Today, 9/13/2007)

Perhaps Richard Dawkins should read Smith's article to discover why Christian memes have been so successful in propagating themeselves? But let that be. I haven't read Smith's article myself, for I'd have to subscribe to the journal to do so (unless I can access it through Kyung Hee University), so I don't even know that I'd find the article persuasive. But Smith's emphasis upon "community" suggests an intersection with Bellah's work on Habits of the Heart, so there might be something fruitful there to look into.

But whatever it is that 'explains' Christianity's success in the putatively secular world of our postmodern time, would it also explain the successful spread of Islam today? Or are other factors at work for Islam's appeal?

Something would also be needed to explain the appeal of Islam in its radical form of Islamism, which attracts not only Muslims who have become radicalized but even non-Muslims who convert and quickly move to the jihadist forms of Islam.

Martin Amis, in a recent article, suggests retrograde reasons:

The rolling creed we call Islamism is also an embrace of illusion, as indeed is religion itself -- a massive and multiform rearguard action, so to speak, against the fact of human mortality.

But this seems belied by the title of his article, "9/11 and the cult of death" (Times Online, September 11, 2007), as well as by the content of what Amis says about Islamism. After all, what is it that's appealing about a death cult that "is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal"?

Amis also wonders about this:

[W]hat do all the UK jihadis have in common, these brain surgeons and jailbirds, these keen cricketers and footballers, these sex offenders, community workers, former boozers and drug addicts, primary-school teachers, sneak thieves, and fast-food restaurateurs, with their six-litre plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapati flour, and their “dockyard confetti” (bolts and nuts and nails)?

And he proceeds to suggest:

[T]he answer to that question seems to be slowly dawning. What they have in common is this: they are all abnormally interested in violent death.

Which seems odd, for it includes their own violent deaths. One might attribute this to religious certitude, but Amis thinks not:

There is religious passion too, of course, but even the bruited, the roared fanaticism seems unrobust. It may even be that what we are witnessing is not spiritual certainty so much as spiritual insecurity and spiritual doubt.

I've been considering the same motive behind Islamism, that its moving force is not so much authentic belief as profound doubt and an accompanying desire to 'prove' one's true faith against one's actual doubt by killing and dying for the Allah that one doesn't really trust.

Just "imagine," suggests Amis, "how it feels to be humiliated, not only by history, but also by God."

Difficult to imagine, but perhaps it has its motivating emotional force, at least for those trapped in the darkness of an Islamist worldview. But does it provide a genuine "way to deal with moral failure," authentic belief that "one is loved and cared for by God," or even true "communities of worship"?

Rather the opposite seems the case, so why does Islamism attract so many Muslims? Even more mystifying, why does it seem to attract recent converts to Islam?