ABSTRACT
The tendency in contemporary Islam known as radical Islamism or political Islam is one that, on the one hand, calls for the overthrow of any regime that does not govern according to the laws of God, and, on the other, for the installation of an Islamic state.1 Thus, the fundamental questions at the heart of any reflection on the Qur’an will centre round secularism, the modern Islamic state, politics and the function of religion in relation to society. Radical Islamism or political Islam denounces contemporary society as Godless and corrupt and calls for the rigorous application of the legislative principles contained in the Qur’an and, more particularly, in the sunna. The two countries where radical Islamism has emerged are Egypt (where the Muslim Brotherhood was formed) and India/Pakistan (where the Jama-‘at-i Isla-mı-
association was born in 1941). The most influential figures in these two movements were, respectively, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Abu-’l-‘Alà al-Mawdu-dı-(1903-79), briefly mentioned elsewhere in this book. Al-Mawdu-dı-was born into a devout Muslim family in the part of India
now called Pakistan. He had an irregular education, eventually becoming a journalist. At the same time, he joined a reformist Islamic association. He moved to Delhi and then to Lahore where he struck up a brief but close friendship with the poet Muhammad Iqba-l, one of the fathers of Pakistani nationalism, and founded the Jama-‘at-i Isla-mı-association that he was to lead until his death. Dissatisfied with the nationalist but secularising ideals promoted by ‘Alı-Jinna, leader of the new Pakistan (set up in 1947), not least because they lacked a religious dimension, al-Mawdu-dı-proposed the total Islamicisation of society and the state, answerable only to the sovereignty and authority of God (ha-kimiyya). In the light of the concept of ha-kimiyya, he maintained that Islam is a “theodemocracy”, where God is the basis of power but in which people enjoy perfect equality and freedom and are responsible before God for the duty to apply justice and good government. Al-Mawdu-dı-received more than one prison sentence as a result of his opposition to the Pakistani government, but the influence of his ideas gradually grew until Pakistan adopted an Islamic constitution in 1956. His fame became widespread throughout the Muslim world where he toured
tirelessly, establishing strong links particularly in Saudi Arabia and in the international Islamic organisations supported by the Saudis. During the ‘Alı-
Bhutto regime in the early 1970s, his association went through a period of crisis in Pakistan but returned to popularity after the military coup d’état staged by Zia ul-Haq (1977). Al-Mawdu-dı-renewed his opposition to the adoption of any models other than an Islamic one, arguing that secularism leads to something not dissimilar to a modern version of the Arab pagan society in pre-Islamic times (ja-hiliyya). Born in 1906, Sayyid Qutb was a “lay” intellectual until the age of
about forty.2 A student of literature and literary criticism, he worked in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. The appalling conditions in his country, where the liberal regime struggled impotently against corruption, combined with a working trip to the USA, which brought him face to face with a secularist society with its selfish and permissive individualism, led him to a rediscovery of the Qur’an and to embrace Islam. His first book, published in 1949 with the title Social Justice in Islam, was politically moderate, concentrating on the reform of society and customs. After a spell in prison in 1954 when Nasser first attempted to quash the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb’s ideas became more radical. In his commentary on the Qur’an, Fı-Zila-l al-Qur’an (In the Shade of the Qur’an) and particularly in the short work Ma‘a-lim fı-’l-tarı-q (Milestones), Qutb began increasingly openly to call for a violent jiha-d against the irreligious and bloody Nasser regime. I shall analyse these points in more detail below. Qutb’s entire treatise Social Justice in Islam is devoted to a discussion of
this theme. His book was reprinted a number of times, and each edition saw major revisions towards an ever greater radicalism.3 It is not the subject of the present work to trace the different stages of this progressive radicalisation. Suffice it to say that they went hand in hand first with events marking the author’s life as a Muslim Brother, as he was subjected to increasingly harsh persecution and restriction of personal liberty, and, second, with the stages of the (presumed) increasing secularisation of Nasser’s Egypt and the ArabIslamic world, dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by pan-Arab nationalism. Qutb sums up the fundamentals of justice in Islam under three headings:
1. absolute liberation of the interior dimension (taharrur wijdani mutlaq); 2. perfect human equality (musawat insaniyya kamila); 3. firm social solidarity (takaful ijtima‘i wathiq).4
