The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [16]
Through family and friends, he managed to smuggle out, bit by bit, a manifesto called Milestones (Ma’alim fi al-Tariq). It circulated underground for years in the form of lengthy letters to his brother and sisters, who were also Islamic activists. The voice of the letters was urgent, passionate, intimate, and despairing. When finally published in 1964, the book was quickly banned, but not before five printings had been run off. Anyone caught with a copy could be charged with sedition. Its ringing apocalyptic tone may be compared with Rousseau’s Social Contract and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?—with similar bloody consequences.
“Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” Qutb posits at the beginning. Humanity is threatened not only by nuclear annihilation but also by the absence of values. The West has lost its vitality, and Marxism has failed. “At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived.” But before Islam can lead, it must regenerate itself.
Qutb divides the world into two camps, Islam and jahiliyya, the period of ignorance and barbarity that existed before the divine message of the Prophet Mohammed. Qutb uses the term to encompass all of modern life: manners, morals, art, literature, law, even much of what passed as Islamic culture. He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation. Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam. This was the choice: pure, primitive Islam or the doom of mankind.
His revolutionary argument placed nominally Islamic governments in the crosshairs of jihad. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” Qutb contends. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.” Humanity cannot be saved unless Muslims recapture the glory of their earliest and purest expression. “We need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country,” he writes, in order to fashion an example that will eventually lead Islam to its destiny of world dominion. “There should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking the path,” Qutb declared. “I have written Milestones for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.” Those words would echo in the ears of generations of young Muslims who were looking for a role to play in history.
In 1964 President Abdul Salam Aref of Iraq personally prevailed on Nasser to grant Qutb a parole, and invited him to Iraq, promising an important government post. Qutb declined, saying that Egypt still needed him. He immediately returned to his villa in Helwan and began conspiring against the revolutionary government.
From prison, Qutb had been able to regenerate the secret apparatus. The government of Saudi Arabia, fearing the influence of Nasser’s revolution, covertly supplied Qutb’s group with money and arms, but the movement was riddled with informers. Two men confessed and named Qutb in a plot to overthrow the government and assassinate public figures. Only six months after Qutb left prison, the security police arrested him again at a beach resort east of Alexandria.
The trial of Sayyid Qutb and forty-two of his followers opened on April 19, 1966, and lasted nearly three months. “The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement,” Qutb defiantly declared when the trial began. He bitterly acknowledged that the anticolonialist new Egypt was more oppressive than the regime it had replaced. There was little effort on the part of the judges to appear impartial; indeed, the chief judge often took on the role of the prosecutor, and hooting spectators cheered the grand charade.