Summary
Too often, treatment of contemporary Islamic thinkers starts by categorizing them as either ‘traditionalist’ (and ‘religious’) or modern and secularist. This dichotomy does not fit Sayyid Qutb, who restructures it so that modernity is subsumed under God’s sovereignty (Hakimiyyah), but in a way that preserves the individual believer's freedom to interpret God's word, and responsibility for striving with other believers to bring about a truly Islamic society.
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Notes
- 1.
I am indebted to Sally Humphreys, Rudolf Wagner, and Joachim Kurtz for invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The errors are strictly mine.
- 2.
“The sacralisation of politics is a process which belongs to modern society, and through which the political dimension, after having gained its autonomy from the traditional metaphysical religions, takes on its own religious character, becoming the mother for new systems of beliefs, myths and rites, thus taking on the characteristics and functions typical to religion, such as interpreting the meaning and finality of existence” (Gentile 2005: 29). Also see Gentile (2006) for a broader exploration of this theme.
- 3.
On the received view, modernity assumes, among other things, ‘disenchantment’, a rupture in temporality, growing confidence in scientific knowledge, the triumph of Reason, secular government, and the ascendency of an anthropomorphic field of vision.
- 4.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to engage with the full scope of Qutb’s investigations into a very large family of disparate themes embracing the “discursive tradition” (Haj 2009) of his times. The purpose here is more modest: to outline Qutb’s radical departure from the Islamic Reformist tradition centered on the question of the relation between modernity and sacralization, particularly as it relates to the question of sovereignty and its relation to the Qur’ān—arguably a ‘living’ classic in the Islamic tradition. For Islamic views on Greco-Roman ‘classics’ see Pormann (2009).
- 5.
- 6.
As Binder (1988) notes: “The Ma’alim [Milestones] is a response to a new nonscripturalist literature of reform and reassessment of the Islamic tradition. But it is not a wholly negative response to that literature. One of the most important elements in Qutb’s altered perspective is his all but admitted adoption of the pragmatic perspective which he attacked in the ‘adala (188).” Qutb’s starting premise, as in philosophy, is not doubt, but “an unequivocal acceptance of revelation” (ibid. 195).
Missing in standard interpretations of Qutb is his reliance on a deeply antisemitic language in parts of Milestones embedded in his deep-seated hatred and suspicion of the Jews. Notably, Qutb’s deployment of the theme of a Zionist global conspiracy allegedly found in Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a case in point. This deployment is not merely rhetorical but captures widespread antisemitic prejudice in large sections of the population.
- 7.
Akhavi (1997) mentions an assumed “dialectic” between the purposes of scripturalists and their utilization of modern concepts to promote traditionalist objectives; similarly, modernists, influenced by ideas of foreign provenance, feel compelled to try to reach their goals by reference to early kalam (377). Akhavi attributes this distinction to Şerif Mardin, a renowned international thinker from Turkey.
- 8.
According to Gentile (2005: 29): “In the modern age, politics, after conquering its institutional autonomy toward traditional religion…has acquired the aura of sacredness up to the point of asserting, in an exclusive and complete way…the prerogative to define the ultimate meaning and the fundamental goal of human existence on earth.”
- 9.
Gentile draws a distinction between civil religion and political religion. The former “is a form of sacralisation of a collective political entity that is not identified with the ideology of a particular political movement, affirms separation of Church and state, and, though postulating the existence of a deistically conceived supernatural being, coexists with traditional religious institutions without identifying itself with any one particular religious confession, presenting itself as a common civic creed above parties and confessions. It recognizes broad autonomy for the individual with regard to the sanctified collectivity, and generally appeals to spontaneous consensus for observing the commandments of public ethics and the collective liturgy.” By contrast: “Political religion is a form of the sacralisation of politics of an exclusive and integralist character. It rejects coexistence with other political ideologies and movements, denies the autonomy of the individual with respect to the collective, prescribes the obligatory observance of its commandments and participation in its political cult, and sanctifies violence as a legitimate arm of the struggle against enemies, and as an instrument of regeneration. It adopts a hostile attitude toward traditional institutionalised religions, seeking to eliminate them, or seeking to establish with them a relationship of symbiotic coexistence, in the sense that the political religion seeks to incorporate traditional religion within its own system of beliefs and myths, assigning it a subordinate and auxiliary role” (ibid. 30).
- 10.
“Qutb is horrified by the divided and alienated self that the inequalities of modernity have produced and rejects the capacity of reason alone to provide meaning and purposes for mankind. His solution also involves a similar effort to construct an integrated and emancipated modern self out of both presocial, innate human materials (fitra) and the habits, emotions, and relationships of society. Qutb’s modern emancipated self cannot be achieved through a turn inward away from commercial society or upward through losing oneself in God. It cannot be achieved privately because the development of a certain moral personality has to occur within comprehensive social relationships that eradicate domination and competition for esteem and advantage. Qutb’s response to modernity thus involves a similar gambit to Rousseau’s: not a reactionary turn to historical tradition and the hierarchies and mystification so useful for domesticating the passions of the many, but an effort to harmonize modernity’s expectations of social justice, formal equality, and publicity with a political morality both austere and responsive to human psychology” (March 2010: 193).
- 11.
Qutb’s Hakimiyyah is a distant cry from “Alfarabi’s neo-Platonic characterization of a virtuous city, where every individual maximizes his or her virtue by playing a specialized role, under the direction of a virtuous ruler, who combines religious knowledge and rational insight to achieve harmony in the state” (Rahman 2009: 40). See also Alfarabi 2001.
- 12.
For background see Gibb 1962.
- 13.
Qutb releases this concept from its original locale in pre-Islam to characterize all societies devoid of Hakimiyyah. Hence, “Jahiliyya for Qutb becomes a transcendent historical designation of universal existence and application to any trend of human moral and intellectual culture not revelation-based” (Nettler 1996: 185).
- 14.
As Binder notes: “Despite Qutb’s embracing Mawdudi’s theory of Hakimiyya, he turns it into a declaration of man’s radical freedom. Man’s absolute subjection to God’s will is a matter of individual conversion and personal conviction, as his rejection of worldly government—for no Islamic state actually exists. Man may be the measure of all things religious in the sense that Islam is an expression of the divine conception of man, but that conception is not articulated in a doctrinal formula. It is rather grasped intuitively and experienced by a living consciousness existing through time. The Islamic experience of man’s Being is founded upon faith and revelation rather than upon material existence alone, but its dynamism, its capacity to change, the fact that the Islamic conception—al-Tasawwur al-islami [Islamic Conception]—is also a tasawwur haraki [Concept of action] means that Islamic religion is conceived of as a human phenomenon and not something coterminous with God, as in the Qur’ān. It is, nevertheless, important to insist that the origin of this religious experience, or enlightenment, is not historical or this-worldly experience. As a consequence, religious duties are not governed by political prudence, or natural necessity, or the laws of social process” (1988: 200).
- 15.
Notable scholars of Islam rehearse the view of Qutb’s outright rejection of modernity. See, for instance, Sivan 1985.
- 16.
According to Binder (1988: 200), Qutb’s “arguments remind one of some elements of contemporary Protestant theology, especially those that are unconcerned with the question of the literal truth of revelation and more concerned with the moral phenomenology of the scriptural message.”
- 17.
March (2010: 191) reads Qutb within a broader reformist tradition: “His work represents some of the most elaborate and sophisticated expressions of Salafi Reformist themes. These include Islamic renewal and authenticity, the purification of religion of arbitrary practices (certain Sufisms, excessive legal formalism, customary habits), a direct encounter with the texts and practices of the revelatory period, the rationalization of Islamic legal and political thought for application within the political-institutional conditions of modernity, the relevance of Islam for action and material life, and, perhaps most important, the natural religion doctrine.”
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Pasha, M.K. (2013). Modernity’s Islamicist: Sayyid Qutb’s Theocentric Reconstruction of Sovereignty. In: Humphreys, S., Wagner, R. (eds) Modernity's Classics. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33071-1_5
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