A System of Life by Hartung Jan-Peter;

Author:Hartung, Jan-Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

a) Jāhiliyya and Islām

The most important term which Quṭb is likely to have inherited from Mawdūdī, and which, in its radicalised form, was soon to take a prominent place in the thinking of especially violence-prone Islamists in the aftermath of Quṭb, is without doubt the concept of ‘jāhiliyya’, which is inseparable from ‘Islam’ as its ‘asymmetrical counterterm’. Compared with other dual concepts, however, we do not have solid textual evidence that Quṭb had indeed adopted these terms from Mawdūdī. Therefore, Damir-Geilsdorf might be correct to assume that Quṭb’s attention to the concept of jāhiliyya was drawn rather from Abū ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī’s Arabic Mā-dhā khasira al-ʿālam bi-inḥiṭāṭ al-muslimīn? Indeed, in his preface to the second edition from 1952, Quṭb happily acknowledged that:

the author consistently used the term ‘jāhiliyya’ whenever he speaks of the depravity of mankind after the Muslims ceased in its leadership. It is a term that points exactly to the author’s understanding of the true difference between the spirit of ‘Islam’ and the materialistic spirit [al-rūḥ al-māddī], which dominated the world before Islam, and which dominates it [also] today, after Islam had forsaken [its] leadership. This is the true nature of ‘jāhiliyya’.39

To complicate matters even further, the notion of ‘jāhiliyya’ as asymmetrical counterterm to ‘Islam’, even if still rather vague, appears to have been somewhat present in the mind of Muslim intellectuals in Egypt even before Quṭb’s encounter with Nadwī.40 This point had already been stressed, if only in an embryonic form, in an article by William E. Shepard, but is most vigorously emphasised by Sayed Khatab.41 Although the later outlined the presence of the concept of ‘jāhiliyya’ in the Arabic literature of the late 1920s and 1930s, and attempted to show that Quṭb had developed a however rudimentary understanding of jāhiliyya already during that early period,42 the clear topological meaning that the term had assumed around 1960 seems still to be down chiefly to Mawdūdī’s so far unprecedented systematic considerations.

It shall nonetheless be conceded here that, although not fully spelt out, a certain understanding of temporal and spatial invariance of characteristics that Quṭb would later attribute to the jāhiliyya had indeed already existed in his thought as early as 1939, when he first published his first major religious treatise on Qurʾānic aesthetics, al-Taṣwīr al-fannī fi’l-qurʾān.43 In conclusion to his attempt to develop a typology of the various human characters (namādhij insāniyya) that appear in the Qurʾān, and which include hypocrites (munāfiqūn) and ‘those who reject the truth (al-ḥaqq)’, Quṭb stated that:

These types [namādhij], which we have established this way, are dispersed without a particular order, and they are dispersed in the folds of society at all times and places. The Qurʾānic language has portrayed them most clearly and the eye cannot be fooled, considering that this mankind remains the same throughout all times.44

Quṭb’s reference to the temporally and spatially invariant existence of unbelief and hypocrisy might indeed be considered the fertile humus on which a typological concept of jāhiliyya could soon be cultivated. For the time being,

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