The End of Time by David Horowitz

Author:David Horowitz [Horowitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, 9781594030802
ISBN: 9781594030802
Google: aMZ3AAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 1594030804
Goodreads: 254265
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2005-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

THREE

On Earth As It Is in Heaven

L OVE DEATH. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect named the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A Muslim disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence that Mohammed Atta actually wrote down was this: “Prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself? The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, but the summons to holy war had been planted in Arab hearts more than a thousand years before. The prophet Mohammed created the Muslim faith and claimed he was fulfilling the gospel of Christ. But Mohammed was a warrior and Jesus a man of peace who instructed his followers to shun the path of history and separate the sacred from the profane. His kingdom was not of this world. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Mohammed summoned his followers to make the world a place for God, which meant conquering Caesar himself.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who was executed for treason in 1966, is recognized as the intellectual father of the Islamic jihad. His brother Mohammed was a teacher of its leader Osama bin Laden and his texts are read by would-be martyrs in madrassas across the Muslim world. The hope that consumed Sayyid Qutb’s life was to establish the rule of Islam throughout the heathen nations and the Islamic umma, to make the world a holy place.

Sayyid Qutb regarded Christianity as a threat to this Islamic redemption. He condemned the Christians for their separation of the sacred from the profane, God’s world from Caesar’s. He called this division a “hideous schizophrenia,” which reflected the very corruption he set out to correct. Christians had created liberal societies, Qutb said, in which “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” Islam’s task was “to unite the world and the faith.” It was what Jewish mystics called tikkun olam, a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth.

Qutb wrote this prescription in one of his most famous texts, which he titled Social Justice in Islam. The mission of Islam, he explained, was “to unite heaven and earth in a single system.” To make the world one.

This is the totalitarian idea. When the wave of redemption is complete, nothing will remain untransformed, nothing unholy or unjust.

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