<<SNIP>>
As this piece does as well.
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From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at p...> Date: Thu Sep 26, 2002 7:35 am Subject: Re: [DemocraticLeft] Re: Debate about what exactly
Fascinating. Evola is a major influence on the European far
right. See, for overviews on Evola see, "Black Sun," by Nicolas
Goodrick-Clarke, " New York Univ. Press, 2002 and, "The Beast
Reawakens, " by Martin A. Lee.
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/Boroumand.pdf
>... After this he read out long
passages from Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola (1898–
1974), an Italian author often cited by European extreme rightists.
This
strange ideological brew suggests the importance of exploring the
intel-lectual
roots of Islamist terrorism.4
The Genealogy of Islamism
The idea of a “pan-Islamic”5 movement appeared in the late
nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries concomitantly with the rapid
transforma-tion
of traditional Muslim polities into nation-states. The man who did
more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology
was
an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906–49). Banna
was not a theologian by training. Deeply influenced by Egyptian
nation-alism,
he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal
of counteracting Western influences.6
By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revo-
lutionary
junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were
close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had
begun
by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also
had a
youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a
para-military
organization whose slogan “action, obedience, silence” echoed
the “believe, obey, fight” motto of the Italian Fascists. Banna’s
ideas were
at odds with those of the traditional ulema (theologians), and he
warned
his followers as early as 1943 to expect “the severest opposition”
from
the traditional religious establishment.7
>From the Fascists—and behind them, from the European tradition of
putatively “transformative” or “purifying” revolutionary violence
that
began with the Jacobins—Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death
Journal of Democracy 8
as a political art form. Although few in the West may remember it
to-day,
it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the
aestheticization of
death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom,
and
faith in “the propaganda of the deed” shaped the antiliberal ethos
of both
the far right and elements of the far left earlier in the twentieth
century.
Following Banna, today’s Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult
of
martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la
violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shi’ite Islam.8
After the Allied victory in World War II, Banna’s assassination in
early
1949, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952–54, the Muslim Brothers
found themselves facing the hostility of a secularizing military
govern-ment
and sharp ideological competition from Egyptian communists.
Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Brothers’ chief spokesman and also their
liaison with the communists, framed an ideological response that
would
lay the groundwork for the Islamism of today.
Qutb was a follower not only of Banna but of the Pakistani writer
and
activist Sayyid Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi (1903–79), who in 1941 founded
the
Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Islamic Assembly), which
remains
an important political force in Pakistan, though it cannot claim
notable
electoral support.9 Mawdudi’s rejection of nationalism, which he had
earlier embraced, led to his interest in the political role of
Islam. He de-nounced
all nationalism, labeling it as kufr (unbelief). Using Marxist
terminology, he advocated a struggle by an Islamic “revolutionary
van-guard”
against both the West and traditional Islam, attaching the
adjectives
“Islamic” to such distinctively Western terms as “revolution,”
“state,” and
“ideology.” Though strongly opposed by the Muslim religious authori-
ties,
his ideas influenced a whole generation of “modern” Islamists.
Like both of his preceptors, Qutb lacked traditional theological
train-ing.
A graduate of the state teacher’s college, in 1948 he went to study
education in the United States. Once an Egyptian nationalist, he
joined
the Muslim Brothers soon after returning home in 1950. Qutb’s brand
of Islamism was informed by his knowledge of both the Marxist and
fas-cist
critiques of modern capitalism and representative democracy.10 He
called for a monolithic state ruled by a single party of Islamic
rebirth.
Like Mawdudi and various Western totalitarians, he identified his
own
society (in his case, contemporary Muslim polities) as among the
enemies
that a virtuous, ideologically self-conscious, vanguard minority
would
have to fight by any means necessary, including violent revolution,
so
that a new and perfectly just society might arise. His ideal society
was a
classless one where the “selfish individual” of liberal democracies
would
be banished and the “exploitation of man by man” would be abolished.
God alone would govern it through the implementation of Islamic law
(shari’a). This was Leninism in Islamist dress.
When the authoritarian regime of President Gamel Abdel Nasser sup-
pressed
the Muslim Brothers in 1954 (it would eventually get around to
Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand 9
hanging Qutb in 1966), many went into exile in Algeria, Saudi
Arabia,11
Iraq, Syria, and Morocco. From there, they spread their
revolutionary
Islamist ideas—including the organizational and ideological tools
bor-rowed
from European totalitarianism—by means of a network that
reached into numerous religious schools and universities. Most young
Islamist cadres today are the direct intellectual and spiritual
heirs of the
Qutbist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
<snip>
Michael Pugliese