Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Back to the Future with Islam (Part 1)

September 11, 2001, a fateful day that infamously entered history as 9/11, has just marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, an appropriate time to look again at Lawrence Wright’s seminal work, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Among other things, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book written in 2006 offers critical insight into the minds of jihadists like Al Qaeda’s late leader, Osama bin Laden, who masterminded 9/11’s horrifying terrorist attacks.

A basic starting point for this analysis is bin Laden’s August 23, 1996, “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Two Holy Places,” now also having reached its thirtieth anniversary. Hereby, noted Wright, “bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War.” Wright emphasized the document’s feeling of antiquity. “Indeed, one of the striking features of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden’s universe.”

This fixation on the past becomes evident in one of the intellectual godfathers of all Islamist ideology, namely the Egyptian education official Sayyid Qutb, who developed a loathing for Western society during a 1948-1950 fellowship in America. While the Cold War was then emerging, in “Qutb’s passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied,” Wright observed. “Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus the real struggle would eventually show itself: It was not a battle between capitalism and communism; it was between Islam and materialism. And inevitably Islam would prevail.”

Qutb’s “central concern was modernity. Modern values—secularism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism—had infected Islam through” Western influences, Wright delineated. Qutb “intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incompatible. His extraordinary project,” Wright explained,

was to take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins. For him, that was a state of divine oneness, the complete unity of God and humanity. Separation of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, science and theology, mind and spirit—these were the hallmarks of modernity, which had captured the West. But Islam could not abide such divisions. In Islam, he believed, divinity could not be diminished without being destroyed. Islam was total and uncompromising. It was God’s final word. Muslims had forgotten this in their enchantment with the West. Only by restoring Islam to the center of their lives, their laws, and their government could Muslims hope to recapture their rightful place as the dominant culture in the world. That was their duty, not only to themselves but also to God.

Qutb’s resulting worldview was Manichean. “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,” noted Wright, a term that “encompass all of modern life.” “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.”

Qutb’s fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan, established 1928 in Egypt after the abolition of Islam’s last caliphate in Turkey in 1924, put his ideas into action in Qutb’s homeland, to which he returned in 1950. Here a corrupt King Farouk ruled under indirect British imperial influence. While “his debauchery tested historic standards,” Wright recounted, “the usual measures of despair—poverty unemployment, illiteracy, and disease—grew recklessly out of control.”

“In this rotten political environment,” noted Wright, “one organization steadily acted in the interests of the people.” The Ikhwan “created their own hospitals, schools, factories, and welfare societies; they even formed their own army and fought alongside other Arab troops” against Israel in its 1948 independence war. Although the Egyptian government officially dissolved the Ikhwan during a 1948 security crackdown, “by that time the Brothers had more than a million members and supporters—out of a total Egyptian population of 18 million.” The Muslim Brothers

acted less as a countergovernment than as a countersociety, which was indeed their goal. Their founder, Hasan al-Banna, had refused to think of his organization as a mere political party; it was meant to be a challenge to the entire idea of politics. Banna completely rejected the Western model of secular, democratic government, which contradicted his notion of universal Islamic rule.

The long term “main object of the Islamists’ struggle was to impose Islamic law—Sharia,” Wright observed. Islamists like the Ikhwan “believe that the five hundred Quranic verses that constitute the basis of Sharia are the immutable commandments of God, offering a road back to the perfected era of the Prophet and his immediate successors.” “Non-Muslims and Islamic modernists, on the other hand, argue that the tenets of Sharia reflect the stringent Bedouin codes of the culture that gave birth to the religion and are certainly not adequate to govern a modern society,” Wright objected. Nonetheless, ideologues like Qutb sought “to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a more authentically Islamic legal system that is untainted by Westen influence or any improvisations caused by the engagement with modernity.”

The ramifications of such Quranic law are wide-ranging, Wright elaborated, for the Quran’s sharia injunctions,

comment upon behavior as precise and various as how to respond to someone who sneezes and the permissibility of wearing gold jewelry. They also prescribe specific punishments to some crimes, such as adultery and drinking, but not for others including homicide. Islamists say the Sharia cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it comes directly from the mind of God.

While apologists for Islam often cite Quran 2:256 and its supposed prohibition of religious coercion, Qutb gave this seemingly liberal verse a decidedly theocratic interpretation. “Qutb makes the argument that life without Islam is slavery; therefore real freedom cannot be achieved until jahiliyya is eliminated,” Wright clarified. “It is only when the rule of man has been eradicated and Sharia imposed that there will be no compulsion in religion, because there is only one choice: Islam.”

Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders reached similar conclusions in their Afghanistan base before their February 23, 1998, pronouncementv of an “International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” For these jihadists, Wright explained, the

main point of their diagnosis was that the Islamic nation was in misery because of illegitimate leadership. The jihadis then asked themselves who was responsible for this situation. They pointed to what they called the Christian-Jewish alliance that had emerged following the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France divided Arab lands between them, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Soon thereafter the Ottoman Empire collapsed and with it the Islamic caliphate. This was all seen as a war against Islam, using such tools as the United Nations, compliant Arab rulers, multinational corporations, satellite channels, and international relief agencies.

Such faith-based a politics had little concern for any practical plans to further human wellbeing, as indicated by a March 1997 CNN television interview with Osama bin Laden in a mud hut near Jalalabad, Afghanistan. CNN reporter Peter Arnett asked bin Laden “what kind of society he would create if the Islamic movement were to take over Saudi Arabia,” Wright noted. He found “notable” in bin Laden’s

response, filled as usual with ritualistic locutions, is the complete absence of any real political plan, beyond imposing Sharia, which of course was already in effect in Saudi Arabia. The happiness and dignity that bin Laden invoked lay the other side of history from the concepts of nationhood and the state. The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate. Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.

How jihadists seek to justify and implement such terror will be the subject of the next article in this series.