Spengler readers debate Qutb

I just want to say Rod you are doing a great job of raising the presence of intriguing spiritual conflicts within our society. It makes for a great blog. Your phraseology on this one opened some new vistas. I'm not sure what a kerfuffle is. Nor have I heard the phrase "free range rutting" before, although i have a pretty good idea what that means. I'm going to try that last phrase on some of my friends, such as, "Have you noticed all the free range rutting going on out there." It will be interesting to see them react to that one. But, keep up the good work.>

Is Qutb's importance way over estimated?

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2006/06/political-correctness-revenge-of.html

"Naomi Klein, Canadian activist and author of the book No Logo, is a darling of the Western Left. She claims that the real cause of Islamic terrorism is Western racism, traceable back to the personal experiences of Sayyid Qutb, theorist of modern Islamic Jihad, while in the USA in the late 1940s. The real problem, she concludes, is not too much Multiculturalism but too little. More Multiculturalism, she claims, would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.

Robert Spencer, however, is not too impressed with Klein s logic or historical knowledge: Qutb s world-changing rage? Is that rage really Qutb s? Can modern-day Islamic terrorism really be attributed to him, and to his experience of racism in Colorado? One would expect that if that were so, there would be no evidence of political or violent Islam dating from before 1948. But in fact the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was part, was founded not in 1948 but in 1928, and not by Qutb, but by Hasan Al-Banna. It was Al-Banna, not Qutb, who wrote: In [Muslim] Tradition, there is a clear indication of the obligation to fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and of the fact that God doubles the reward of those who fight them. Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace Islam.

Paul Berman does not share Klein s interpretation, either. According to him, Qutb s book from the 1940 s, Social Justice and Islam, shows that, even before his voyage to the USA, Qutb was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism, although it may have gotten worse after his meetings with Western immorality. According to Berman, the truly dangerous element in American life, in Sayyid Qutb s estimation, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women s independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America s separation of church and state the modern political legacy of Christianity s ancient division between the sacred and the secular. Islam s true champions had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in his book Milestones called a vanguard. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done. Both Milestones and parts of Qutb s perhaps most important work, In the Shade of the Qur an, are available online in English. In Milestones, he writes that Jihad will continue until all of the world answers to Islam, that Islam came into this world to establish God s rule on God s earth. Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path, it has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions around the world that are in opposition to this. God s rule on earth can be established only through the Islamic system. What does this have to do with Western racism? Why did Jihad start a thousand years before Western colonialism ever touched Islamic lands? What about the tens of millions of people massacred in India because of Islamic Jihad? Was that due to Western racism, too? Naomi Klein doesn t say, she just blames the West. And she is far from the only one suffering from this delusion.">

Just to be clear, David, Paul Berman does not blame the West for the Muslim world's ills. Neither do I. What is useful to learn from Qutb, I think, is his diagnosis of the loss of spiritual wholeness in the West. He is not wrong to say that if the Muslim world mimics Western ways, they will lose Islam as they know it (not that there's anything wrong with that from a Western point of view). Qutb understands the stakes. We don't.>