The anti-Muslim propaganda film and protests against America

Anti-American protests seem to be popular at the moment in several Muslim countries. Peter Apps and Matt Spetalnick take a look at the developments in Weeks before U.S. election, Mideast gives Obama perfect storm Reuters 09/13/2012.

Several writers with The Atlantic have been working on aspects of this story. Garance Franke-Ruta put together a helpful timeline of the events of the first day (Tuesday, Sept. 11), focusing on the official statements that Romney and the Republicans have characterized as apologizing for American values and even Obama sympathizing with the attackers: Here's a Timeline of the Confusing Statements on Libya and Egypt 09/12/2012.

On the cultural war aspect, I'm going to plagiarize myself by repeating what I said in a couple of places in Facebook comments the day afterward. The statement from the US Embassy in Egypt which was the target of so much Republican criticism was issued before the attacks and referred to that blithering bigot Terry Jones and the Muslim-hating YouTube video that was the nominal topic of this latest round of attacks.

Jones does have the right to say pretty much any fool thing he wants, and everyone else has the right to say what dang fool nonsense he's talking. And it's perfectly understandable that a US Embassy in a Muslim country like Egypt or Libya that had recently gone through a revolution would and should make it clear that the US government and public aren't responsible for every dang fool thing some loser Muslim-hating bigot in the US says.

Cenk Uygur in 'Innocence of Muslims' Sparks Outrage The Young Turks 09/12/2012 discusses the movie and its strange producer:

I'm enough of a fan of the Enlightenment to say that it's dumb and wrong to get violent over someone thousands of miles away insulting your religion, much less kill people over it. And protesters are using the film as a rallying point.

Still, it's hard to imagine that any significant number of people could be enraged to violence against official American installations just on the basis of some private citizen expressing a nasty opinion of Islam if there weren't larger grievances at work. And it may well turn out to be that its not a significant number who are rallying to this. But strange developments and even unworthy causes can become a focal point for larger grievances. Just from the reporting I've seen so far, public and official reaction in Egypt and Libya have varied significantly. This story from McClatchy's Nancy Youssef and Suliman Ali Zway, No protest before Benghazi attack, wounded Libyan guard says 09/13/2012, discusses evidence "that the assault on the compound that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was a planned attack by armed Islamists and not the outgrowth of a protest over an online video that mocks Islam and its founder, the Prophet Muhammad." The timing may have been related to the date of 9/11 and there doesn't seem to be much indication that protesting the film was even nominally involved in that assault. Nancy Youssef has been doing some of the best reporting on Middle East events in recent years.

I hate to think that the mutual interacting fanaticism of religious extremists thousands of miles away could spark off confrontations that have far-reaching diplomatic consequences. But, as they say, stuff happens.

The Reuters report linked above says:

While Libya's government was swift to condemn the attack there and pledged to work with the United States to find those responsible, it was the equivocal initial response from Egypt's new President Mohammad Mursi - condemning the video but not the Egyptian mob - that infuriated Washington.

Obama pointedly told the Spanish-language network Telemundo that Egypt's Islamist-led government should not be considered a U.S. ally, "but we don't consider them an enemy," he added. Obama later spoke to Mursi and delivered a blunt message that Egypt must cooperate in protecting American diplomatic facilities.

David Kirkpatrick et al report in the New York Times that Obama pushed the Egyptian government for a response more clearly supportive of the US: Egypt, Hearing From Obama, Moves to Heal Rift From Protests 09/13/2012.

And remember, when it comes to understanding news from the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, one of the best English-language sources is the daily blog of Juan Cole, Informed Comment. Here's his summary of the positions of the governments of Libya and Egypt, Obama Plays Hardball and Egypt’s Morsi Folds 09/14/2012:

The attack on the US consulate in Benghazi happened because the Libyan government is still weak, rebuilding after its revolution against Muammar Qaddafi. But there was no doubt that the new government was a friend of the US ambassador who was killed, Chris Stevens, or that it would mobilize to deal with the cells of the Ansar al-Shariah extremists that launched the attack. Pro-America demonstrations regretting the attack on the consulate have been held all over Libya.

The puzzle comes in Egypt, where the government and security forces are strong, but were not deployed in force to protect the US embassy (unlike in the past), and where newly elected president Mohammad Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, did not explicitly condemn the small crowd that tried to invade the embassy grounds on Tuesday and which tore down the American flag.

Morsi was no doubt himself offended by the trailer on Youtube of a movie villifying the Prophet Muhammad, and he was probably concerned to not be outflanked by Muslim forces to his right, the Salafi Nour Party or the Gama'ah Islamiya (formerly a terrorist organization that has given up violence). But his declining to make a firm statement in defense of the sanctity of foreign embassies annoyed the Obama administration mightily.

Joan Walsh looks at Romney's response in Mitt Romney will never be president Salon 09/12/2012. So does James Fallows in Mitt Romney Drops His 3 a.m. Phone Call The Atlantic 09/12/2012.

Glenn Greenwald has written a lot about the problems Americans collectively create for ourselves in not thinking clearly about how US military actions in particular affect public attitudes in other countries. He looks at how those filters on US official, media and public thinking affect our understanding of incidents like the attacks in Egypt, Libya and Yemen in his Guardian blog: The tragic consulate killings in Libya and America's hierarchy of human life 09/12/2012 and US media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude 09/14/2012.

Tags: benghazi, christian fundamentalism, christopher stevens, muslim fundamentalism

Embassy attacks

The cheap propaganda movie that became part of the story of attacks on American Embassies this week in Egypt and Yemen and on a consulate in Libya may be lousy film-making. But I'll bet some screenwriter is already sketching out a movie or TV script based on the story.

Here's a bio from the UC-Berkeley Public Affairs Department on Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the Libya consulate attack; he was a Cal graduate: Slain ambassador remembered as a man of peace with a big heart 09/12/2012. Here's another from John Wildermuth et al, Libyan ambassador kept 'human touch' SFGate.com 09/13/2012.

Ambassador Christopher Stevens, killed in Libya consulate attack

The attacks got instantly translated into Presidential campaign and culture war terms. ("Obama weak! Islam evil!")

But it would be nice to think that the Congressional Foreign Relations Committees would use the occasion to ask some serious questions, beginning with the level of Embassy/consulate security in high-risk regions. And including what role US military actions in Libya and Yemen the last few years may have had in the planning and timing of such attacks. What looks in the short term like great success sometimes has very long-term implications. We're still dealing with the blowback of one of the CIA's great covert-ops success stories, the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.

Mohammed Ghobari and Edmund Blair, U.S. embassies attacked in Yemen, Egypt after Libya envoy killed Reuters 09/13/2012

Robert Fisk, The provocateurs know politics and religion don't mix The Independent 09/13/2012

With the help of our wonderful new technology, however, it only needs a couple of loonies to kick off a miniature war in the Muslim world within seconds. I doubt if poor Christopher Stevens – a man who really understood the Arabs as many of his colleagues do not – had ever heard of the ‘film’ that unleashed the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi and his own death. It’s one thing to witlessly claim that the US would go on a “crusade” against al-Qaeda – thank you, George W. Bush – but another to insult, quite deliberately, an entire people. Racism of this kind stirs many a crazed heart.

And what a strange character the guy behind the film turns out to be! Here are two reports on him:

Noah Shachtman with Robert Beckhusen, Anti-Islam Filmmaker Went by 'P.J. Tobacco' and 13 Other Names Danger Room 09/13/2012

Max Blumenthal, Inside the strange Hollywood scam that spread chaos across the Middle East Guardian 09/13/2012

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christopher stevens, muslim fundamentalism

Sayyid Qutb

This post is about Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist who is considered a major influence on today's Islamic extremism. Since most of the sources I've used are not online, I've listed them at the end and refer to them by number in the text.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologist and leader, who is considered a key intellectual figure for present-day Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda. But his influence extends to Islamists who do not share the terrorist approach of Al Qaeda, as well. Rohan Gunaratna calls Qutb "the leading ideologue of Egyptian fundamentalists" and a "pioneer" of "the Islamist revival in the Middle East." (2) Karen Armstrong has written:

Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili [barbaric] ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. (4)

Qutb provided a religious justification for fighting against Muslim rulers and for considering Muslims who didn't share the radical goals of the Islamists as not being true Muslims. He took the idea of "jahiliyya" and gave it a new meaning. For most Muslims, jahiliyya refers to the society in Arabia before the Prophet's revelation, a time of ignorance of God's true religion. Gilles Kepel suggests that "barbarism" may be the closest translation. (6)

Qutb was a journalist who also wrote essays and novels. Up until 1945, his interests were mainly literary. When he first started writing political pieces, he wound up having to leave Egypt in 1948 to avoid arrest by the royalist government, though his political friends arranged for him to do so on the government's dime. He came to live in the United States, an experience which he found quite unpleasant. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1951, he was ready to join up with the fundamentalist ("Islamist") Muslim Brotherhood.

It's interesting to speculate in what ways his encounter with America as such shaped his views, as opposed to the experience of effectively being exiled and taken away from his regular community and his country under those circumstances. John Voll suggests that Qutb's hostility to the West had been influenced by British behavior in Egypt during the Second World War and by what he saw as Anglo-American encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. Voll sees Qutb's stay in America as having reinforced those ideas:

He found Americans to be materialistic and lacking in spiritual values and was disturbed by the popular and media support in the United States for the nascent state of Israel. After his return to Egypt, he wrote that in the United States, "any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed and any human element other than ego is not recognized. Where the whole life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production. The result is class struggle which becomes inevitable and visibly evident." (1)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir) seized power in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Nasser favored a much more secular approach to government than the Muslim Brotherhood sought. Qutb wound up going to prison for a three months in 1954. After Qutb's release, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Nasser in October of 1954. Qutb was rearrested, and was incarcerated in the Tura concentration camp until 1964. The experience of persecution by the Nasser regime and the conditions of the concentration camp were the context in which he prepared his most influential works, Milestones and Under the Aegis of the Koran (also in English translation as In the Shade of the Qu'ran), a long commentary on the Qu'ran.

Arrested again in 1965 in a government move against another alleged Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy, Qutb was hanged in August 1966, making him a martyr to the Islamists.

A Muslim Brother who was Qutb's cellmate in the Tura camp, Muhammad Hawwash, said that Joseph had appeared to him in a dream and gave him a message: "Tell Sayyid Qutb that in my sura he will find what he seeks." (6)

Joseph's sura (# 12) in the Qu'ran relates the story of Joseph being imprisoned in Egypt after his master's wife had attempted to seduce him. There, two of his fellow prisoners related dreams to him. (In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the story is in Genesis 40.) Before interpreting their dreams, he tells them:

This knowledge my Lord has given me, for I have left the faith of those that disbelieve in Allah and deny the life to come. I follow the faith of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We must never serve idols besides Allah. Such is the fight which Allah has bestowed upon us and all mankind. Yet most men do not give thanks.

Fellow-prisoners! Are numerous gods better than Allah, the One, the Almighty? Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has reveal no sanction. Judgement rests with Allah only. He has commanded you to worship none but Him. That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it. (5)

This concept of idolatry was key to Qutb's interpretation of jahiliyya. Qutb applied the term to present-day Muslim societies, including his own Epypt under the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb's most important book is Milestones (also known in English as Signposts and Signs Along the Path or Signposts Along the Road), which he wrote in the Tura camp and was published in 1964. In it, he wrote: "Nowadays, the entire world lives in a state of jahiliyya as far as the source from which it draws the rules of its mode of existence is concerned." (6) This allowed Qutb and his followers to view Muslim societies and Muslim leaders as enemies of Islam and enemies of God.

Qutb also emphasized that in struggling against the jahiliyya, no doubt having in mind in particular the repressive Nasser regime, true Muslims must not restrict themselves to jihad in only the sense of internal struggle or of defensive war. Instead, they must be prepared to propagate true Islam by "the sword" as well as by "the Book." The "jahiliyya regime" of Nasser, writes Kepel interpreting Qutb, "had to be fought in the way pagans were fought."

Qutb stressed that true Islamic faith must be expressed in action against the jahiliyya rulers.

The notion of idolatry was at the core of Qutb's new definition of jahiliyya. Those thought of themselves as Muslims had actually made gods of other things besides God himself. One of those idols is the concept of national sovereignty:

The principle on which [jahiliyya] is based is opposition to God's rule over the earth and to the major characteristic of the Divinity, namely sovereignty (al-hakimiyya): instead it invests men with this, and makes some of them gods for the others. This transference of sovereignty does not occur in the primitive manner of the pre-hegira jahiliyya [of Mohammad's time], but by allowing man to unduly arrogate to himself the right to establish values, to legislate, to elaborate systems, and to take positions, all without regard to divine ethics (minhaj allah lil-hayah), but rather in accordance with what He has expressly forbidden! Now, to oppose the rule of God in this way is to be the enemy of His faithful.

The degradation of man in general in the collectivists regimes [including Nasser's], the injustice suffered by the individuals and people dominated by capital and colonialism, are only the effects of this opposition to the rule of God, the negation of the dignity that God bestowed upon man! (6)

Earlier Islamists had considered Communist, democratic-capitalist and other non-Muslim societies to be jahiliyya, but Qutb's innovation was to place Muslim societies in that category as well.

Qutb argued that a vanguard of the ummah (Muslim society) must lead the drive for a truly Muslim form of rule. The vanguard must purge itself of idolatrous influences by returning to the true faith of the first Muslims, Muhammad and the first four caliphs who succeeded him as leader of the ummah, also known as the rightly guided caliphs.

Once a vanguard has been established with a truly Islamic consciousness and truly Islamic practice, "In the meantime the battle begins between this nascent society that has declared its secession ... from jahiliyya society" and the jahiliyya society itself. and the latter..." (6)

One chapter of Milestones, that was replaced in many editions published after 1981 according to Kepel, Qutb defines jihad in his theology, insisting that jihad against the jahiliyya cannot be restricted to nonviolent measures alone:

To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to power out of the hands of those of His worshippers who have usurped it and to return it to God alone, to confer authority upon divine law (shari'at allah) alone and to eliminate the laws created by man ...all this will not be done through sermons and discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word alone, otherwise the task of His messengers would be far more easily done. (6)

John Voll summarizes the significance of Qutb's view for the Egyptian Islamist movement:

The major conceptual contribution of Qutb was to provide an intellectual and theoretical foundation for the concrete rejection of Nasserism and the other Western-based radical ideologies of his day. One could no longer simply attack the state as being a foreign puppet. Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler of the country for millennia. Egyptians had gotten what they wanted: a successful nationalist committed to social transformation. Qutb explained why true Muslims could not accept this. (1)

The "establishment" Muslim view of Sayyid Qutb, as enunciated by the authorities of Egypt's al-Azhar university, was simply that Qutb was a heretic and an agitator. But in fact, Qutb's ideas had a huge impact on the Egyptian Islamist movement, an impact which was taken in different ways by those who used his ideas.

Among the more militant strain, one of the most prominent in Egypt was the Society of Muslims, led by the agronomist Shukri Mustafa, who believed that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society in order to prepare to attack it. A more "moderate" interpretation within the Muslim Brotherhood and among other Islamists praised Qutb's ideas but had to refute parts of Qutb's Milestones.

If the concept of "moderate" Islamists seems strange, since Islamists as a group represent a "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islam, it's worth remembering that in 1997 even Al Qaeda disassociated itself, both in its pronouncements and in practice, from the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) after its repeated massacres of ordinary Muslims not associated with theAlgerian regime. GIA had also proclaimed the right to hold women captured in military actions as slaves. Al Qaeda, however, did manage to bring key operatives from GIA's European network into a new group, the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) which became part of the Al Qaeda network. (2)

One of Sayyid Qutb's most important interpreters was his own brother. Muhammed Qutb taught Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. At the university in Jeddah, he made a deep impression on one of his young students, Osama bin Laden.

In 1975, Muhammad Qutb published a piece in a journal of the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood defending Sayyid Qutb's views. He quoted the latter as having said repeatedly, "We are preachers and not judges. Our objective is not to legislate against people, but to teach them this truth: that there is no god but God. The problem is that people do not understand what this formula requires of them." (6)

Muhammad Qutb insisted that his brother's work should not be interpreted as the cult-like Society of Muslims did, to mean that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society. But he also opposed interpretations which sought to blunt the political-revolutionary implications of his brother's ideas. It's a measure of Sayyid Qutb's influence that the less militant tendencies in Egyptian Islamism, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s, still tried to interpret his ideas in ways favorable to their approach.

1. "Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" by John O. Voll in Fundamentalisms Observed (1991) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.

2. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna (2002)

3. Is This the Man Who Inspired Bin Laden? by Robert Irwin Guardian (UK) 11/01/01

4. Islam by Karen Armstrong (2000)

5. The Koran, N.J. Dawood, translator; 1974 Penguin edition

6. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh by Gilles Kepel; trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild (1985). Kepel's book uses the translation Signposts as the name for Milestones.

7. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terrorism" by Paul Berman New York Times Magazine 03/23/03

8. Sayyid Qutb's America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality NPR 05/06/03. This has more details about Qutb's stay in the US, which was mostly in the conservative town of Greeley, Colorado.

9. Truly, Madly, Deeply Devout by Jonathan Raban Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

Additional Web sites:

Young Muslims, a Canadian Islamic site with links to an English-language text of Qutb's Milestones. The NPR site above links to the Milestones text. It's perhaps a general indication of the perspective of this site that one of the two articles on Qutb currently featured on this page says that describing Muslim extremist violence as "terrorist" is the practice of the "mouthpiece of the zionist establishment in America."

The 9/11 Commission Report mentions Qutb briefly in Chapter 2. The brief analysis there is not too impressive.


Tags: islam, islamic fundamentalism, islamic law, jihadism, muslim fundamentalism, sayyid qutb, sharia