[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

mad was a merchant) favors trade and commerce. The institution
of zakat, a Koranic requirement that is central to Social Justice in
Islam, is to provide for the few who are permanently disabled and
the many who are temporarily in financial difficulties without
diminishing their dignity, by giving them the means for pro-
ductive work. Qutb is, in short, a profoundly interesting theorist
worth reading not merely as an exhibit in the archives of terror
but for his comments on justice and forms of government.
Qutb s most zealous disciples have been more interested in
other aspects of his work. In the years after 9/11 Qutb has been
described as  the man who inspired bin Laden and as a teacher
of terrorists. The vision of governance advanced by Qutb is sig-
nificantly different from that favored by Osama bin Laden, but
the attribution is not entirely in error. Qutb appears to have in-
112
Ancients and Moderns
spired many in the ranks of militant Islam, Ayman al Zawahiri
among them. He is most known in the Muslim world and among
his disciples not for advocating armed attacks on the West but
for permitting armed attacks by Muslims on Muslims. Qutb s
fiercest opposition was reserved for corrupt regimes at home: for
leaders violating the moral and political principles of Islam.
The world of Islam, like that of Christianity, has known civil
war, and has seen a once-unified religion divided by internal con-
flict. Sunni and Shia have engaged in persecuting one another
with a zeal almost equaling that of Protestant and Catholic. Qutb
revived the study of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, a philosopher active
during the Mongol invasions. Ibn Taymiyya wrote that though
the invading Mongols were Muslim, they could be fought be-
cause they did not fulfill the requirements of the faith. Sayyid
Qutb argued that the same could be said of corrupt regimes in
the (at least nominally) Muslim world. Sayyid Qutb s followers
were first feared not for the threat they posed to the West but for
the threat they posed to Arab and Muslim regimes.
Ironically, it may be this very inwardness that has brought the
disciples of Sayyid Qutb into conflict with the followers of Leo
Strauss. They opposed their regimes and were put into prison.
Some were executed. Those who remained went underground
and into exile. Sent away from nations, they made common cause
with one another and established communities and cells in
exile. Placed beyond national boundaries, they no longer con-
113
Ancients and Moderns
fined themselves to national politics. They found themselves in
the theater of a larger war. The prize was no longer Egypt but
the world.
Before America became an empire Walt Whitman wrote:
Long yet your road, oh flag, and lined with bloody death.
For the prize I see at issue is the world.
Exile and ambition, persecution and a sense of mission, created a
confrontation between the disciples of Qutb and the disciples of
Strauss that was initially alien to the imaginations of both par-
ties. The disciples of Sayyid Qutb saw themselves cleansing
Egypt and the Muslim world, driving out  Pharoah. The dis-
ciples of Leo Strauss saw themselves as the salvation of moder-
nity, restoring at least some of the strength and virtues that be-
longed to the Ancients. They thought they would make a home
for philosophy in America. If each party had claimed, among its
own, that the prize that was at issue was the world, no one would
have believed them.
The critique of modernity current among the Straussians and
their conservative allies bears a family resemblance to the critique
current among Qutb s disciples and their allies. Each set of dis-
ciples has seen the modern world as corrosive of public and private
virtue. Each has condemned modernity for nihilism. Both longed
for a single standard of conduct for all. Each has displayed a dis-
taste for mass culture and a distrust of mass politics. Both con-
demned totalitarianism in general and communism in particular.
114
Ancients and Moderns
Though their followers and their critics have often cast
them as opposed to modernity, neither Strauss nor Qutb cam-
paigned for a return to the purity of an imagined past. They saw
dangers in modernity, especially liberal modernity, but they were
not blind to modernity s virtues and possibilities. Their disci-
ples would turn to more theatrical forms of ancestor worship.
The disciples of Qutb grew beards, changed their costumes, and
painted their eyes with kohl. They cultivated a romantic view of
the time of the Prophet. The Straussians cultivated the romance
of the Ancients.
For many of the Straussians, the Ancients are what they were
to British poets and schoolboys of the nineteenth century. They
are brave and blond and wise, living in a city of public assemblies
and white marble temples, the Athens of the imagination. Once, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]