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Islamists, or at least the more educated among them, use the Western
terminology of democracy and human rights but that they also believe
that the holy Quran is not open to discussion on the part of the faith–
ful. And if the Quran says, for instance, that sovereignty lays not with
the people but with God, or that women are inferior
to
men, this can–
not be explained away or reinterpreted. The only way out of the
dilemma is
to
claim that the Quran does not really mean what it says,
and this argument is hardly acceptable
to
a pious Muslim.
Sayyid Qutb also figures prominently in two other recent works on
Muslim fundamentalism. A page from Qutb's
Signposts,
his last and
most influential book, appears on the cover of Gilles Kepel's
Jihad.
Kepel works at the Paris CRNS; he has followed radical Islam for many
years and has written about Qutb and Muslim extremism in Egypt ear–
lier on. Together with his colleague Olivier Roy he belongs
to
the lead–
ing students of this phenomenon. But Kepel (like Roy) is less impressed
than Euben by Qutb's political ideas-there are references
to
the
poverty of the Islamic radicals' ideas. As he sees it the expansion of
Islamism occurred because of the breakdown of traditional Islamic
regimes on one hand, and the weakness of radical ideologies such as rev–
olutionary socialism on the other. As a result many Muslim intellectuals
rediscovered Islam hence the calls for Holy War
Uihad)
or at least the
establishment of true Islamic states.
But as Kepel sees it, this movement has not been a great success
either, and this seems to be true both for the conservative and the radi–
cal wing of the Islamic fundamentalists. The conservatives, Saudi Ara–
bia and the Muslim religious establishments in Egypt and elsewhere are
discredited, whereas the record of radical regimes such as Iran, Sudan,
and the Taliban in Afghanistan have been dismal and prospects are less
than brilliant. Extreme nationalist regimes such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya
have kept their distance from Islamism or even combated it. The
Islamists have made some progress among the Palestinians but the ter–
rorists in Algeria are on the defensive and a phenomenon such as Osama
bin Ladin, the Saudi planner and paymaster of the terrorists, while pro–
viding headlines for the Western media, will forever remain marginal.
Kepel may well be right in the long run. Having underrated the
importance of political Islam for many years, some Western observers
have belatedly accepted its important role and are again lagging behind
events; they now attribute to Islamism an exaggerated importance even
while it is in decline. The important differences between conditions in
various countries are overlooked, and so are the rifts within the Muslim
Brotherhood and kindred groups. Qutb's teachings have by no means
