Islam and Logos by E. Michael Jones

Author:E. Michael Jones [Jones, E. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Fidelity Press
Published: 2016-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Philosophy of Salafism: The Islamic Image of Neo-Conservatism

In his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly sees a connection between the voluntarism of the Ash’arite school of Islamic thought, the voluntarism of modern western philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche, and the voluntarism which underpins the philosophy of Salafism, which is the ideological driving force behind Islamic terrorism. According to Tony Corn: “In the past thirty years, one particular brand — pan-Islamic Salafism — has been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the failure of pan-Arab Socialism and, in the process, to marginalize the more enlightened forms of Islam to the point where Salafism now occupies a quasi-hegemonic position in the Muslim world.”

The main proponent of Salafism is Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian author, educator, Islamist theorist and poet, who was convicted of plotting the execution of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and executed by hanging. Qutb’s writings expressed what can be called without exaggeration, hatred of the United States as obsessed with materialism, violence and sexual pleasure, a hatred which Qutb’s brother Muhammed conveyed to Osama bin Laden, who was his student at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The Islamism that Qutb promoted is based, according to Reilly, “upon a deformed ideology that nonetheless shares in the classical ideological conflation of heaven and earth into one realm.” The goal of Islamism is “to reestablish the Kingdom of God upon earth” or “to create a new world.” In spite of his aversion to Marxism, Qutb was influenced by its teaching, something which caused the Islamists to mix the totalitarian program of the Communists with the Ash’arite interpretation of Islam. Reilly sees a “nearly complete ideological affinity” between the Nazi or Communist revolutionary points of view and the Islamism of Qutb. His logic in linking the three, however, is less than persuasive because the ideology of race, which is common to Nazism and Zionism, is absent from Islam and Communism.

In his analysis of the closing of the Muslim mind, Reilly fails to see that Sayyid Qutb is the uncanny ideological Doppelgaenger of Leo Strauss, and that Salafism is not only the Islamic world’s mirror image of Neoconservatism, it is also a creation of Neoconservatism. If there had been no Neoconservatism, Qutb would have languished in the journals of Middle East Studies departments. Because of the Neoconservative takeover of American foreign policy during the Reagan Administration, and in particular because of Bill Casey’s mobilization of the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Qutb’s ideas became the marching orders for America’s proxies in the war to topple the Soviet Union. After the successful conclusion of that war, Qutb’s ideas, spread by American assets like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, would become the basis of Islamist terrorism campaigns throughout the Arab world. Whenever Qutb’s Islamism was in danger of failing because of its penchant for murder, terror, and violent wretched excess against Muslims, the Neoconservatives would rehabilitate it to act as a tool of American foreign policy, as in Afghanistan, Libya, and then Syria, or as a foil that made their efforts seem necessary for America’s survival.

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