Beyond Fundamentalism by Reza Aslan

Author:Reza Aslan [Aslan, Reza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60424-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

October 6, 1981. As Egypt’s president, Anwar al-Sadat, Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s handpicked successor, stood on a platform watching a military parade march before him in commemoration of Egypt’s war with Israel in 1973, a lieutenant in the Egyptian army named Khalid Islambouli, along with three other men, suddenly broke formation and rushed toward the presidential platform, lobbing grenades and firing wildly. “Death to the pharaoh!” Islambouli was heard shouting as he emptied his rifle into Sadat’s chest.

Khalid Islambouli was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), one of dozens of Jihadist organizations centered in and around Cairo University, a place brimming with radical activists of every stripe. Most of these groups had little in common, save for their hatred of the government and their sense of betrayal by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had become increasingly accommodating in its interactions with Egypt’s political establishment. The members of the various organizations were mostly young, middle-class professionals—scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, bureaucrats—the best and brightest of Egyptian society. But they were also profoundly dissatisfied with the spiritual decline of Egyptian society and were prepared to lash out against those whom they felt were sullying the purity of the Muslim community. One group in particular, Takfir wal-Hijra, led by two shadowy Jihadist figures known as Sayyid Imam (aka Dr. Fadl) and Shukri Mustafa, had so fully absorbed the practice of takfir that they began kidnapping and executing members of the religious establishment whom they deemed to be apostates.

In the wake of Anwar al-Sadat’s assassination, more than three hundred members of these radical organizations were rounded up and thrown into prison. At their trial, prosecutors presented an unusual document, written by one of Islambouli’s coconspirators, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, entitled “The Neglected Duty.” This brief and somewhat convoluted pamphlet had never been intended for public consumption. It was, rather, an internal document brimming with a jumble of legal and theological arguments meant to justify Sadat’s murder and answer the objections that were bound to arise from Egypt’s clerical class, particularly the scholars of al-Azhar, that this was a legitimate act.

Faraj based his justification for the assassination squarely on the writings of ibn Taymiyyah. “The rulers of this age are in apostasy from Islam,” he wrote, channeling the famed Hanbali jurist. “They carry nothing from Islam but their names, even though they pray and fast and claim to be Muslim.” According to Faraj, even Mongol rule would be better than “the laws which the West has imposed on countries like Egypt and which have no connection with Islam or with any other revealed religion.” Faraj argued that by signing a peace treaty with Israel (the 1978 Camp David Accords) at the urging of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Sadat had committed a grave sin. He had forfeited the right to be called a Muslim. He was a kafir; it was now the duty of every Muslim to shed his blood.

“The Neglected Duty” laid out, for the first time, the aspirations of the nascent Jihadist movement. Chief among these

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