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Terrorism (the new Enemy)

From a simplest standpoint, Terrorism can be seen as a desperate response to eternal
economic exploitation, to imperialism, to inequality. i.e. the "poor" against the "rich"

But there is more. Islam increasingly sees the West as an enemy, for many reasons : from
the permanent conflict in Middle East, to its perception of the Jews as partners in the
conspiracy against Islam, to the hatred for wealthy Western countries, to nationalistic
disputes and conflicts after the fall of the USSR.

And this led to an increasing solidarity of the "poor", cemented by religious ties.
So, terrorism is also an attempt to fight a Western society seen as corrupted, amoral,
barbaric and lacking any value.

And, while a war on Terror cannot be won, the West needs an enemy too.

One reason is the fall of USSR, and hence the need for another "rival", somehow reflecting
the eternal conflict between good and evil.
Also, the determination of western countries, and on top USA, to impose unquestionably their
absolute "power" to the rest of the world (we might say "imperialism")

Moreover, western people will be scared. And FEAR should bring with it a strong
sense of solidarity against Terror (the "ENEMY"), and by the way, will make people very
willing to cooperate, to accept, and ...to vote for almost any government : suffice it
that it shall fight terrorism and protect "peaceful" citizens.

In reality, we should look closely at the absence of values in western societies, at the
growing exploitation of poor countries, and so on.

And try to answer some questions. One of which is simply:
all wealth comes from resources. WHY are resource-wealthy countries poor, and
resource-poor countries ...rich ?

Other questions we should pose concern consumerism, the power of Media, and so on.
(see also the New Commandments, in CONSUMERISM )

extracts from a conference on Islamic fundamentalism by Prof. Michael J.Thompson (1):

One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that there was a huge debate about its causes. On the one hand there were those on the political left who said that fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism are the result of decades of economic exploitation and political manipulation. Fundamentalism and terrorism are the results of imperialism, disenfranchisement of the population and of massive economic inequality and poverty and therefore people in the Islamic world embraced fundamentalism as a way of rebelling against these injustices and finding fault with the imperialist, and Christian, West. Then there were others who argued that there was something inherent within the faith of Islam, within the traditions of Islamic thought and the content of the religion itself, that leads ineluctably toward the logic of fundamentalism and acts of terrorism.

The kind of fundamentalism that Qutb formulates has its own philosophical center, its own moral message and set of ideas to offer. But what is it an alternative to? The one thing that characterizes western societies and western democracies since the Enlightenment is the notion that there is a distinction between church and state. There is a distinction between the religious sphere of faith and the secular political sphere. That is the founding notion of liberalism and of all western liberal democracies.

What Islamic fundamentalism says-especially Qutb's brand of fundamentalism-is that this distinction is artificial and it leads to the moral corrosion of any culture.

This separation between the sacred and the secular is something that fundamentalists find repugnant because they consider their viewpoint as essentially the only truth, divined from the realm of God himself. As human beings we can create our own system of values that are totally legitimate in and of themselves. This is another aspect that Islamic fundamentalism find repugnant: the self-creation by human beings of their own moral values.

What he sees in American culture is a land of barbarism that is not only immoral but amoral - lacking all moral values whatsoever. There are no foundations and therefore human beings start to degenerate into beasts.

So philosophically, Qutb makes a distinction between two kind of social systems. The first one is truly Islamic, or Nizam Islam. And then there are those societies that are pre-Islamic, or ignorant or barbaric, or Nizam Jahi.

Before Islam, the Arab peoples, the Jahiliyya, are ignorant and barbaric. They have not been made human. Jahiliyya means specifically "pagan ignorance." What Qutb does-and this is an interesting move for modern fundamentalism-is to say that Jahiliyya is not simply a period before Mohammed arrives. It is a state of being itself, in the world.

Allah's authority must be reconnected to the entire world, not just its Arab nations.

This is similar to the views of critics of the European Enlightenment like Nietzsche, Herder and Hamann as far back as the middle of the Eighteenth century. They felt that the French and German Enlightenment had produced a scientific renaissance of the mind at the expense of human values, culture and morality and that this emphasis on intellectual progress leaves behind our emotions, leaves behind the true value of being human.

The modern world, the western world, European civilization is corrupt, it's bankrupt and going nowhere because it has no moral foundation for its existence. This is precisely Qutb's critique. Anybody who has read the ABCs of political theory is familiar with Thomas Hobbes and his book Leviathan -which introduces the idea of a social contract. Government, politics, and culture, the entirety of society itself, is the result of a social contract which is totally factitious, it is not the result of God's will. This leads Hobbes to the separation between the public and the private. I can do whatever I want at home but in public, I am accountable to the laws set out in the social contract.

For Qutb and for most fundamentalists, this is the central problem: you cannot have a public morality and a private morality.

What Qutb sees as the real problem of modern civilization is that once you separate God (or Allah) from the politics, from the very system of social organization itself, then you immediately replace political rule through divine authority with the rule of men over other men. Without Allah's presence through divine law, the only choice is human oppression.

Traditionally, the general notion of Islamic scholars, the ulama, or wise men, has always been that the modern world is too corrupt to realize the ideal Islamic society, the umma.

Qutb, however, says that this general position is wrong. You have to fight against Jahiliyya here and now. You have to eradicate it from the earth.

This connects with the notion of jihad; another classical Islamic term of Islamic theology, which simply means "struggle."

My own personal view differs from what a lot of people are saying now about Qutb. He is not simply engaging in a critique of political institutions. He is going after what in philosophy is called epistemology, or how we know about the world, how we think. The western way of thinking is based on a post-Enlightenment notion that there are no absolute moral values that undergird all human society. There is no such thing as the absolute good, there is no such thing as only one form of good life. Only through toleration and pluralism and the acceptance of pluralism can we survive without social strife and turmoil. This is precisely the problem that Qutb sees: there are, in fact, universal values that undergird human existence, and any rejection of them leads to the corrosion of morality and to human corruption.

Fundamentalists like Qutb see the whole idea that we ourselves can create the values and the laws by which we live as an expression of hubris and the price that is being paid is a falling into corruption, ignorance and barbarism.

"Savyid Qutb and the philosophical roots of Islamic fundamentalism" by Michael J.Thompson, editor of "Islam & the West",Professor of political theory at Hunter College ( from a talk at CUNY, dec.2003 ) (1)

www.lapismagazine.org/thompson2.htm (1)

http://www.hackwriters.com/Skinner.htm (poverty-consumerism-Islam)

http://www.ict.org.il/articles/isl_terr.htm (Ussr fall- cultures- need of enemy)

http://www.ied.info/books/why/ (historic war- wealth distribution unfair)

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/rail/terror.html (imperialism- 3rd World oppression)

http://www.robert-fisk.com/american_convert_views_oct2001.htm (Islam is the only threat for West)

http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/politics/profiling_islam_as_terrorism.htm (Islam is "terrorist")

http://www.energygrid.com/society/2005/06bb-newworld.html (starving people oppressed)