Socialist Politics, As Usual

We were told by the State Department, the Liberal Media, and even some Conservatives, that the Egyptian riots weren’t about Israel, the U.S., or Islamicism; it was about an overeducated, unemployed, starving population. So the West held back.

Now, we’re told that it’s all about politics, politics as usual. Some politics, such as the restoration of freedom of the press and free elections, are issues with which we Americans can sympathize. Others are not. Unclear is what the opposition means by “constitutional reforms”. The state of emergency powers will be lifted. Understandable, at least in a civilized society, but possibly dangerous in a country where we’re told protestors throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails are exercising their right to assemble “peaceably.”

Secretary of State Clinton, meanwhile, assures Egypt that the United States will be open to discussions with the Muslim Brotherhood. (formally known as “The Society of the Muslim Brothers”). The United States also opened diplomatic relations with the Irish Republican Army (who eventually gained seats in Northern Ireland’s legislature) and Yassir Arafat (another Noble prize “laureate”) and Hamas.

My mother is always criticizing me for buying books instead of going to the library. Owning the books, however, while expensive, is very useful when I need to quote an author quickly, without having to get in my car and drive to the library, hoping the book is there (which it may not be). Admittedly, the library is less than five minutes away, but I prefer the leisure of having the book at hand when I need it, whether it’s Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, or, in this case, “The Looming Tower.”

Written by Lawrence Wright in 2006, with the subtitle, “Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11”, the book begins with a detailed account of the origins of The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Wright didn’t win the Nobel Prize for his book, but he did win he Pulitzer.

Wright begins by telling the story of an immigrant from Alexandria Egypt, Sayyid Qutb (prounounced kuh tub). He left Egypt in November of 1948, a country in “rags and tears” with an arrest sentence put on his head by the infuriated Egyptian king, Farouk. A civil servant in the Ministry of Education, born in poverty, he had become a popular literary and social critic, one of Egypt’s most esteemed writers.

At first, not a particularly observant Muslim, he became radicalized by the British occupation and Farouk’s complicity. “Egypt,” Wright tells us, “was racked by anti-British protests and seditious political factions bent on running the foreign troops out of the country – and perhaps the king as well.”

Qutb was fairly Westernized. He dressed in Western fashion, loved classical moved and Hollywood movies. He read translated versions of everything from British poetry to Einstein’s theories, and “immersed himself in French literature, particularly Victor Hugo.”

Still, he regarded the West as a cultural threat. “The distinctions between Capitalism and Marxism, Christianity and Judaism, fascism and democracy were insignificant by comparison with the single great divide in Qutb’s mind: Islam and the East on one side, and the Christian West on the other,” says Wright.

Qutb arrived in New York during the festive holiday season. 1948 was a prosperous year for America. The unemployment rate was under 4 percent; “anyone who wanted a job, could get one,” Wright notes. “Half of the world’s total wealth was now in American hands.”

He found New York filled with promise – and misery and decadence. Even on the journey across the Atlantic, he had been propositioned by a drunken woman who asked to share his bed. He slammed the door on her (rightly, I might add). What he saw were drunken alcoholics sleeping in doorways, pimps, prostitutes, and youth gangs. Qutb took heart in the way New York welcomed immigrants; each ethnic group had its enclaves. Unfortunately, one of those enclaves belonged to dispossessed European Jews.

A single bachelor, he has a singular disgust for America’s loose sexuality – even in the Fifties. Eventually he moved to a small-town in Colorado, where he observed men and women dancing close together. He came to view Americans as beasts, “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money,” referring to the Kinsey Report, with which he was familiar.

Qutb was a fervent anti-Communist and noted the anti-Communist fervor of American society. A year before he was exiled from Egypt and came to America, he wrote, “Either we shall walk to path of Islam or we shall walk the path of Communism.”

“He predicted,” Wright says, “that once the average American worker lost his dreamy expectations of becoming rich, American would inevitably turn towards communism. Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the real of the spirit – ‘like a vision in a pure, ideal world.’ Islam, on the other hand, is ‘a complete system’ with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. 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.”

Hasan al-Banna founded the Society of Muslim Brothers in 1928. The Brotherhood was founded for the express purpose of turning Egypt into an Islamic state. “Within a few years, the Brothers has spread across the country, and then throughout the Arab world,” notes Wright, “planting the seeds of the coming Islamic insurgence.” In February 1949, al-Banna – the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood - was assassinated in Cairo. “The assassination,” Wright says, “occurred just as Qutb’s book, “Social Justice Islam was being published – the book that would make his reputation as an important Islamic thinker.”

James Heyworth-Dunne, a British Orientalist and a convert to Islam, spoke to Qutb about the danger the Muslim Brothers posed to the modernization of the Muslim world. “If the Brothers succeed in coming to power in Egypt,” Dunne warned, “Egypt will never progress and will stand as an obstacle to civilization.” Dunne offered to translate Qutb’s book and pay him a fee of $10,000, “a fantastic sum for such an obscure book,” Wright notes. Qutb refused, later saying, “I decided to enter the Brotherhood even before I left the house.”

Qutb returned in 1950 to an Egypt and an Arab world humiliated by their defeat in the war against Israel. The Egyptian government ruled without popular authority. Qutb, instead of becoming more liberalized, as his friends had hoped, came home more radicalized against what he viewed as the morally and religiously bankrupt West. “Modern values,” Wright writes, “secularlism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, [sexual freedom], tolerance, materialism – had infected Islam through the agency of Western colonialism. America now stood for all that. Qutb’s polemic was directed at Egyptians who wanted to bend Islam around the modern world. He intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incompatible. His project…was to take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins.” Separation of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, were the hallmarks of modernity, which had enslaved the West.

“But Islam could not abide such divinity. Islam, in Qutb’s view, was total and uncompromising. It was God’s final word,” Wright notes. “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 to God.”

Wright tell us that Egypt outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood in 1948. “But by that time, the Brothers had more than a million members and supporters – out of a totally Egyptian population of 18 million. Although the Brotherhood was a mass movement, it was also intimately organized into cooperative ‘families’ – cells that contained no more than give members each, giving it a spongy, clandestine quality that proved difficult to detect and impossible to eradicate.”

With al-Banna’s approval, a secret and violent underside to the Brotherhood had been organized, targeting not only the British and Egypt’s dwindling Jewish population, but also bombing symbols of Western influence such as movie theaters, and the assassinations of judges and political leaders.

“By the time the government murdered al-Banna, in an act of self-protection,” Wright notes, “the secret apparatus posed a powerful and uncontrollable authority with the Brotherhood.” In 1952, in a military coup, King Farouk was put aboard his yacht and sailed into exile. Gamal Abdul Nasser, an Egyptian, was now in control of the country.

You can read much more in Wright’s book about the Muslim Brotherhood, their ties to the Nazis during World War II and to Al Qaeda leading up to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Once you’ve read "The Looming Tower," you’ll realize why our present administration is so supportive of this Egyptian-Arab uprising and its complete disdain for Israel. Nothing is more surprising than that a U.S. president who goes by the name Barrack Hussein Obama, his manifest Christianity not withstanding, himself strong-arms regulations such as the health care package into legislative existence, would lend an ear to the socialistic pleas of the Muslim Brotherhood.