1
Mimesis and the Logic of Repetition in Islamic Extremism: The Cosmic Shari’a in the Works of Sayyid Qutb and
the Brethren of Purity
Vincent J. Cornell, Emory University
“But isn’t everything here green?” asked Dorothy. “No more than in any other city,” replied [the Wizard of] Oz, “but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you. The Emerald City was built a great many years ago, for I was a young man when the balloon brought me here, and I am a very old man now. But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes for so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City, and it certainly is a beautiful place, abounding in jewels and precious metals, and every good thing that is needed to make one happy.” (L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)1
IRONY AND REPETITION IN IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION
Nearly 50 years ago, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)
stated in his book Introduction to Modernity that the most fitting role for the critical
theorist was that of ironist. Having gone from being the favored ideologist of the French
Communist Party to his expulsion from the Party in 1957 for supporting the anti-Soviet
revolt in Hungary, Lefebvre saw himself as a leftist Socrates or Jeremiah, whose chief
task was to warn both Marxist and liberal intellectuals against the “Thing” that they had
created. The “Thing” that he decried was a Frankenstein monster cobbled together from
ideological debates about politics and civil society, a misshapen creature from the realm
of the undead that ravaged what for Lefebvre was the “beauty” that the West had
inherited from Athens. He warned Western intellectuals that like the inhabitants of Oz,
they viewed the world through tinted glasses. Seeing only what they wanted to see, they
failed to realize that the freedom and progress they thought they enjoyed was an illusion,
1 L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 critical edition and reprint of 1900 first edition), 189
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“that political society, the city, had more freedom than its citizens, and that the unity of
the political state and of civil society made men’s private lives more subservient than if
they were slaves.”2 Rather than witnessing the power of the state wither away as Karl
Marx had predicted, Lefebvre saw Hegel’s totalitarian image of the state rise once again
like a Phoenix from the ashes of ideological conflict. Out of all the ironies of modernity,
this was the great irony of the Marxist experiment. Partly as a result of Marxism’s own
critique of the state and its institutions, the state had become even more powerful and all
encompassing than before.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx famously stated, “Hegel
says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add:
‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’”3 For Lefebvre, the chief farce of the twentieth
century was that Marxism, which presented itself as a radical critique of ideology that
was to prepare the way for the end of ideology, had transformed itself into the very type
of ideology that it opposed. Marxist philosophy now resembled a religious creed more
than a critical method and state-supported Marxism acted like a state-supported church.
“Infallible, the authorities defined what was orthodox. Heretics were weeded out and
executed, without even a nod to the secular channels of justice. It interpreted the holy
texts. The masses and the militants had access only to carefully expurgated compilations
. . . [Marxism] expressed itself through taboos and prohibitions. No problems except
minor ones. A sacred history no one was allowed to touch. Myths. And then little
2 Henri Lefebvre, “On Irony, Maieutic and History,” in Introduction to Modernity, translated by John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 1995 translation of 1962 original), 15 3 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Project Gutenberg EBook #1346, www.gutenberg.org, 2006), 6 (pagination varies according to formatting)
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touches of piety: offerings and gifts, prescribed rituals and ceremonies, atonement and
initiations, acts of humility and abnegation.”4
But the transformation of Marxism into a quasi-religious creed was only one of
the ironies in this farce. Just as a newly “consecrated” Marxism took on the features of a
religion such as a mythology and a simulated sacredness, religion itself began to change.
According to Lefebvre, as Marxism became more sacralized, religion became less
spiritual and more materialistic. “Official religion gradually discontinued its relentless
appeals to faith, revelation, and transcendence. It became— or more precisely, became
once more— an overt political power, a political ideology, the inspiration for Parties and
states.” 5 In other words, if Marxism had compromised itself by becoming a pseudo-
religious ideology, then religion compromised itself by becoming “a political ideology
and a pseudo-religion.”6
Lefebvre coined the term pseudo-repetition to describe how competing ideologies
sometimes take on each other’s attributes.7 For Lefebvre, pseudo-repetition is a
dialectical product of radical critique. The ironic fate of competing ideologies as they are
debated in radical critiques is that they do not wither away but become stronger and more
extreme as a result of these debates. For this reason, one of the most important tasks of
the critical theorist is to strip away the colored spectacles of ideological myths and
demonstrate that the supposedly “new and better” worlds created by ideology are often
nothing but revised versions of previous models. The de facto co-dependency of Marxist
ideology and bourgeois religion in the Cold War period is an example of such pseudo-
4 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 25-26 5 Ibid, 27 6 Ibid 7 Ibid, 21
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repetition. Just as Marxist ideology took on the sacredness of religion, so religious
ideology acknowledged the materialist premises of Marxism. “We cannot separate the
facets of this dual movement,” said Lefebvre. “[On one hand], a critique of religion
forced to establish a political strain of the sacred— [on the other hand] religion
forbidding critique and desecrating itself in political events and realities.”8
Lefebvre’s Introduction to Modernity was first published in 1962, at the
beginning of a decade in which several prominent French intellectuals were preoccupied
with the subject of repetition. In the previous year, 1961, René Girard also raised the
question of repetition (which he eventually termed mimesis) in his first major work,
Mensonge romantique, Verité romanesque (Romantic Lie, Novel-Like Truth). In this
work, Girard noted that rival characters in novels often mimic each other under the
mediation of an exemplary model. Using an approach based on a combination of
psychoanalytic theory and dialectics, he examined the process of what he termed
“triangular desire” while critiquing Romantic notions of uniqueness and individuality.
Far from affirming a unique and singular identity, Girard concluded, “The Self imitates
constantly, on its knees before the mediator.”9
In his later work Violence and the Sacred (1972), Girard extended his study of
repetition, imitation, and the dialectics of desire to the subject of religion.10 In this work,
he introduced the concept of mimetic desire, the notion that desire for a highly valued
8 Ibid. 27. A contemporary observer might add that religion also took on the materialism of Western capitalism, as evidenced by the discourse of so-called Prosperity Gospel televangelists from Reverend Ike in the 1970s to Joel Osteen today. 9 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: the Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 298. For Girard’s notions of repetition and “triangular desire,” see 1-52 and 290-314. 10 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
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object leads to a form of rivalry so intense that rivals come to mimic each other in their
competition for it. According to Girard, mimetic desire is fundamental to most aspects of
human culture, including religion. In the context of mimetic rivalry, the value of an
object grows in proportion to the resistance one meets in acquiring it. Likewise, the
value of the rival who competes for the object grows as the object’s value grows.
Eventually, the rival becomes a model for the subject and the competition between them
takes on a similar character on both sides. The logic of imitation leads the subject to
misinterpret the true nature of the rivalry, thus giving both the rivalry and the model an
importance they do not actually deserve. Because of this fantasy, the subject
“transfigures” the triangular relationship of subject, object, and model-as-rival into a
“metaphysical” desire that is taken to define the very selfhood of the subject. Caught in a
vicious circle of misapprehension and fancy, the subject falls into a “mimetic frenzy” of
imitation that may lead to extreme measures, including violence, in its efforts to attain the
desired object. “Mimetism is the contagion which spreads throughout human
relationships,” says Girard. “Everything that one of the partners to violence experiences,
thinks about, or carries into action at a given moment, will sooner or later become
observable in the other partner. In the last analysis, there is nothing that can be said of
any one partner that must not be said about all partners without exception. There is no
longer any way of differentiating the partners from one another. This is what I call the
relationship of doubles.”11
Although Henri Lefebvre is not cited in Violence and the Sacred, the similarity
between Lefebvre’s notion of pseudo-repetition and Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is
11 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987 translation of 1978 original), 299
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striking. This similarity extends even to the metaphors that both theorists use to discuss
these concepts. Lefebvre speaks of the product of pseudo-repetition as an ideological
“Thing” or monster that is engendered by the dialectics of radical critique. Similarly,
Girard speaks of the simulacrum that is the product of mimetic conflict as the “monstrous
double.” Taking his cues from Greek tragedy and anthropology, he likens the monstrous
double to a masked character in a Greek play or a sacred ritual, whose role is to cover up
the social tensions caused by mimetic desire.12 For both theorists, the monster or double
is the product of an unconscious process of repetition that arises out of the dialectics of
conflict. The chief difference is that for Lefebvre, the monstrous double is an ideological
product of radical critique; for Girard, ideology itself is the product of mimetic desire.
“The subject watches the monstrosity that takes shape within him and outside him
simultaneously. In his efforts to explain what is happening to him, he attributes the
origin of the apparition to some exterior cause. Surely, he thinks, this vision is too
bizarre to emanate from the familiar country within, too foreign in fact to derive from the
world of men. The whole interpretation of the experience is dominated by the sense that
the monster is alien to himself.”13
Girard’s emphasis on alienation and misinterpretation in his theory of mimesis
brings to mind the third important French theorist of repetition to appear in the 1960s.
This is Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), who in 1968 published Difference and Repetition,
the first of two dissertations that he wrote for the Doctorat D’Etat degree. This work was
written as a critique of the metaphysics of identity, and its object was to overturn
culturally sacrosanct notions of identity. One of the notions that Deleuze overturns in 12 See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 164: “Under the heading monstrous double we shall group all the hallucinatory phenomena provoked at the height of the crisis by unrecognized reciprocity.” 13 Ibid, 165
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this book is that identity is founded primarily on the recognition of difference. According
to Deleuze, repetition, not difference, is what is truly transgressive: “If repetition is
possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law, against the similar
form and the content of the law. If repetition can be found, even in nature, it is in the
name of a power which affirms itself against the law, which works underneath laws,
perhaps superior to laws . . . In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law
into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favor of a more profound
and more artistic reality.”14 For Deleuze, the irony of repetition is not that it is a sign of
the failure of a critique, but rather that it is essential to the process of critique itself.
However, just as Girard failed to cite Lefebvre in his writings, Deleuze cites
neither Girard nor Lefebvre in Difference and Repetition. Instead, he bases his approach
to repetition on the writings of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who saw
repetition as a “Danish” subject, and the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904),
who claimed that repetition was a “French” subject.15 An important contribution that
Deleuze made to the theory of repetition was his stress on the economy (or better, the
anti-economy) of repetition, a point that Girard hints at but does not make explicit in his
notion of repetition as founded on mimetic desire. “Repetition as a conduct and as a
point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities,” says
Deleuze. “Reflections, echoes, doubles, and souls do not belong to the domain of
resemblance or equivalence; and it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to
substitute real twins for one another. If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 2-3 15 Ibid, 313-314, n. 3
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gift are those of repetition. There is, therefore, an economic difference between the
two.”16
Following Kierkegaard and similar to Girard (who does not cite Kierkegaard),
Deleuze defines repetition as “the transcendent correlate shared by the psychical
intentions of contestation and resignation.”17 Also following Nietzsche (and again like
Girard, who does cite Nietzsche), he associates repetition with human aggression and
acquiescence to a fate that is imagined as external to the subject. As noted above, a key
notion of his philosophy is the opposition of the logic of repetition to the logic of the law
and the attempt of the law to enshrine similarity and regularity (habitus) as general
norms. Without mentioning Lefebvre, Deleuze uses Lefebvre’s concept of pseudo-
repetition to characterize the law as an extension of the “little Self within us” that
struggles “to extract the new— in other words, the general— from the pseudo-repetition
of particular cases.”18
Despite their differences, there are obvious similarities (if not actual mimesis) in
the theories of Lefebvre, Girard, and Deleuze. Taken together, their critical analyses of
repetition, difference, and mimetic desire open up new ways of thinking about religion,
violence, ideology, and the construction of identity. Can these theories shed any light on
the subject of religious extremism? Clearly, they deal with issues that are central to the
understanding of extremism. Questions of violence, ideology, and identity formation
have all been posed in theoretical discussions of religious extremism. In particular,
violence or the threat of violence is often thought to be a common denominator of
16 Ibid. 1 17 Ibid. 7 18 Ibid.
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extremism. One of the most important insights to emerge from the conference on
religious extremism that led to the present volume was that a dynamic of repetition or
imitation was characteristic of many types of religious extremism. It appears that not only
do religious extremists use the same tactics as their opponents, but they also make use of
similar ideological constructs. This suggests that the works of Lefebvre, Girard, and
Deleuze may provide important theoretical tools for the study of religious extremism.
As a thought experiment, let us imagine for a moment how we might use these
theories to study Muslim and Jewish extremism in the conflict over Palestine. Some
years ago, I participated in a hevrutah (study) session at the Shalom Hartman Institute in
Jerusalem at a conference on the challenge of fundamentalism in world religions. In this
session, we studied texts written by ideologues of the Israeli Gush Emunim Settler
movement. As a scholar of Islam, I was struck by how the language and logic of these
texts were virtually indistinguishable from the language and logic of texts written by Al
Qaeda activists. In fact, the similarity between them was so great that an outsider not told
that they came from Gush Emunim would have thought that Al Qaeda activists had
written them. What could account for this similarity? Gush Emunim activists could not
have used Al Qaeda texts as models since these texts predated most Al Qaeda writings.
Similarly, it is unthinkable that Al Qaeda activists in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Pakistan
would have consciously used Gush Emunim texts as models. Clearly, the similarity of
their discourses could not have been due to mimesis in the sense of imitation-as-copying.
However, one might imagine how this “mimetic effect” could have been caused by other
factors, such as when competing radical critiques create pseudo-repetitions of discourses
(Lefebvre), or when doubles are created from the context of mimetic rivalry (Girard), or
10
when the artistic use of repetition enables radical critics to transcend the limitations of
tradition (Deleuze).
The mimetic relationship between Israeli Settler discourses and Muslim extremist
discourses is even more apparent when Settler discourses are compared with those of the
Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. According to Girard, mimesis results from competing
desires for the same object. The Settler movement in Israel is an outgrowth of the Whole
Land of Israel movement that arose among Messianic Zionists after the 1967 and 1973
Arab-Israeli wars. Fundamental to this movement are the beliefs that the “whole land” of
ancient Israel is holy and that Israeli victories over the Arabs signaled that the time had
come for all of ancient Israel to be possessed by the Jews. The Hamas movement was
founded in 1987 as an outgrowth of the Syrian and Palestinian branches of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Where Hamas differs markedly from other branches of the Brotherhood is
in the holiness that it bestows on the “whole land” of Palestine as an Islamic waqf, a
religiously endowed and consecrated territory. Article 11 of the Hamas Charter (1988)
states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] believes that the land of Palestine has
been an Islamic waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no
one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country or the
aggregate of all Arab countries, and no Arab King or President or all of them in the
aggregate, have that right, nor has that right any organization or the aggregate of all
organizations, be they Palestinian or Arab, because Palestine is an Islamic waqf
throughout all generations and to the Day of Resurrection.”19
19 For the text of the Hamas Charter, see: http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html.
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This desire to sanctify all of Palestine in God’s name is a striking innovation
when compared with the views of traditional Islam, for which the only truly sacred land
in Palestine is the city of Jerusalem. The Hamas Charter appears to overturn all land
tenure laws that were in effect before the creation of Israel by claiming that the entirety of
Palestine, as a waqf, is the property of God. The “artistic” logic of this argument is based
on the view— also unsupported by traditional Islamic jurisprudence— that all lands
conquered in the name of Islam are waqf properties (“it is similar to all lands conquered
by Islam by force, and made thereby waqf lands upon their conquest, for all generations
of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection,” Article 11). In an irony that Lefebvre, Girard,
and Deleuze would all have appreciated, this doctrine makes Hamas a “monstrous
double” of the Whole Land of Israel movement. This can be seen in its sacralization of
the whole land of Palestine, in its desire to secure sole ownership of the land in the name
of God, and in its “artistic” masking of innovation behind a veneer of traditional law.
Even more, Hamas’ designation of Palestine as a waqf not only sets the stage for a
perpetual mimetic conflict between the religions of Islam and Judaism, but it also
prepares the ground for a future totalitarian state that possesses all of the land in God’s
name.20 Hamas’ mimesis or pseudo-repetition of the ideology of the Whole Land of
Israel movement suggests that serious consideration of the theories of Lefebvre, Girard,
and Deleuze in the comparative study of religious extremism may give rise to questions
that are both thought provoking and ironic. For example, how might our understanding
20 This totalitarian view of property as usufruct as opposed to personal ownership is consistent with the theories of Sayyid Qutb as presented in Social Justice in Islam (1948). In this book, Qutb states that the cardinal principle of Islam with respect to personal ownership is that the individual is not the owner but the steward of his property on behalf of society. “Property in the widest sense is a right that can belong only to society, which in turn receives it as a trust from Allah who is the only true owner of anything.” Idem, Social Justice in Islam, translated by John B. Hardie and Hamid Algar (Oneonta, New York: Islamic Publications International, 2000 revision of 1953 original translation), 132
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of the Israel-Palestine conflict change if we thought of Hamas as an “Islamic Zionist”
organization?21
MIMESIS AND REPETITION IN THE MORAL AND COSMIC ORDERS
It follows that the wretched, since, in so far as they are wretched, they are obviously not in a state of peace, lack the tranquility of order, a state in which there is no disturbance of mind. In spite of that, because their wretchedness is deserved and just, they cannot be outside the scope of order. They are not, indeed, united with the blessed; yet it is by the law of order that they are sundered from them. And when they are free from disturbance of mind, they are adjusted to their situation, with however small a degree of harmony. Thus, they have among them some tranquility of order, and therefore some peace. But they are still wretched because, although they enjoy some degree of serenity and freedom from suffering, they are not in a condition where they have the right to be serene and free from pain. They are yet more wretched, however, if they are not at peace with the law by which the natural order is governed. (St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God 19:13)22 You [Americans] are the nation who, rather than ruling by the sharia of God in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature that affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for God the Almighty to fashion His creation, grant men power over all creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives? (Osama Bin Laden, To the Americans, October 6, 2002)23
Another example of the “dual movement” of pseudo-repetition identified by Henri
Lefebvre can be found in the appeal of modern religious fundamentalisms to a universal
moral order. As the above quotations demonstrate, Muslim extremists are not the only
ones to call for a divinely inspired polity founded on transcendental truths. In the first
quotation, St. Augustine of Hippo (340-430 CE), who is usually not thought of as an
21 I am grateful to Alan Godlas of the University of Georgia, who first suggested to me the concept of “Islamic Zionism” as a byproduct of the Israel-Palestine conflict. 22 St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, translated by Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 870-871 23 Bruce Lawrence editor and James Howarth translator, Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama Bin Laden (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 167
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extremist, equates the Christian moral order with the natural law of the universe. For St.
Augustine, since natural law is God’s Law, and since Christians are the only true
followers of God, then Christian morality and natural law must be equivalent. In the
second quotation, Osama Bin Laden, who is almost always thought of as an extremist,
issues virtually the same challenge to America that St. Augustine issued to the pagans
and heretics that challenged the Roman Church. According to Bin Laden, the United
States is an unjust country because of its willful ignorance of God’s Law, which for him
is equivalent to the Islamic Shari’a. Since the Shari’a is God’s law, it must be equivalent
to the natural law of the universe, which is also created by God. Bin Laden’s statement
can thus be characterized as a pseudo-repetition of St. Augustine’s statement because
both are based on a similar notion of the equivalence of the moral law to the law of the
universe. The details of their models are different but their logical structure is the same.
Gilles Deleuze observed that conscience “can be conceived only by supposing the
moral law to be external, superior and indifferent to the natural law; but the application of
the moral law can be conceived only by restoring to conscience itself the image and the
model of the law of nature.”24 This is what St. Augustine does in the above quotation
from City of God. As Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba in Algeria) when
heresies such as Donatism and Arianism threatened the integrity of Christianity, he was
concerned to demonstrate that the moral law as defined by the Church was more in
conformity with both God’s will and the natural order than either paganism or heretical
Christianity, despite their popular appeal. Osama Bin Laden faces a similar challenge
today. He argues for the application of the Islamic Shari’a in a world where the authority
24 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 4
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of religious law is threatened by democracy, a political philosophy based on a social
contract in which those who are governed make their own laws. Because he is unaware
of the theological foundations of social contract theory and other models of democracy,
Bin Laden argues against democracy by stating that the moral order and the natural order
are equivalent and that people must follow the Shari’a just as they must follow the laws
of nature.25 By conceiving of moral law in this way, both Bin Laden and St. Augustine
commit what Deleuze called the “Stoic error”: the assumption of a direct equivalence
between the moral law and the natural order. In such a scheme says Deleuze, “the wise
must be converted into the virtuous; the dream of finding a law which would make
repetition possible passes over to the moral sphere.”26
The creation of a City of God or a virtuous society where divine wisdom can be
translated into moral virtue has been a goal of Perfectionist ideologies since the time of
Plato. For example, the Christian Perfectionist doctrine of Reconstructionism seeks “to
remove the political and institutional barriers to God’s law in order to impose the rule of
God’s law.”27 Pseudo-repetitions of this ideology can also be found among Islamists, as
we have seen with Hamas and Al Qaeda above. A similar phenomenon can also be
observed in Judaism. Aviezer Ravitsky has noted that Messianic Zionists conceive of
Israel as an “integral theopolitical whole, the very existence of which aims at the
25 See, for example, Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84-85 26 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 3 27 Charles Kimball quoting Gary North, The Theology of Christian Resistance (1983), in When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002), 118. There is also a close relationship between the doctrines of Reconstructionism and Dominion Theology. “Dominion Theology is a grouping of theological systems with the common belief that society should be governed exclusively by the law of God as codified in the Bible, to the exclusion of secular law. The two main streams of Dominion Theology are Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. Though these two differ greatly in their general theological orientation (the first is strongly Reformed and Neo-Calvinistic, the second is Charismatic), they share a postmillenial vision in which the kingdom of God will be established on Earth through political and (in some cases) even military means.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Theology).
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realization of a Jewish City of God here on earth.”28 By equating the community of
Israel (Medinat Yisrael) with the present-day country of Israel, Messianic Zionism blurs
the conceptual boundary between Israel as a people and Israel as a state, thus “sanctifying
the sociopolitical structure, transferring it to the realm of the absolute and bestowing
upon it a transcendent validity.”29 According to Ravitzky, even Ultra-Orthodox and anti-
Zionist Haredim agree on the necessity of a “Torah state.”30 Examples such as these
indicate that if Reconstructionism and other Perfectionist doctrines are viewed as general
ideological concepts instead of as creeds specific to individual traditions, they can be
identified in numerous guises across different religious traditions.
In Introduction to Modernity, Henri Lefebvre argues that the enforcement of a
universal moral code is one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism. “What characterizes this
kind of social ethic,” he observes, “is not that it seeks to eradicate all offenses, but that it
draws attention to them and arranges them in a hierarchy. It involves a rigid conformism
defined by the values, norms, and regulatory behavior patterns of society. In this way,
and beyond all hope, it accomplishes the moral project which the religious and secular
ethics of ‘Western’ societies have failed to achieve: the perfect adaptation of the
individual to society.”31 This type of conformism can be termed “extremist” when the
desire to adapt the individual to universal norms verges on Utopian social engineering.32
According to Lefebvre, a totalitarian social ethic is particularly apt to arise in societies
28 Aviezer Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, translated by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83 29 Ibid. 83-84 30 Ibid. 66-70 31 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 32 32 In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt notes that the Nazis admired Soviet methods of social engineering because both the Nazi and the Communist systems were based on the concept of the “ideological state” (weltanschauungsstaat). See idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Inc., 1968) 309 n. 12.
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where the level of economic and technological development is weak. In such societies,
not only do political ideologies become tinged with religiosity, but also, in a further
ironic reversal, politicized religiosity becomes the dominant ideology of political parties
seeking control of the state. Lefebvre describes this situation in a way that anticipates
Girard’s concept of mimetic conflict: “While Marxism [as a totalitarian ideology]
degenerates in this way towards religiosity and moralism, religion itself adapts to the
conditions of the modern world and becomes an organized social force, a political
institution. Thus ideologized Marxism and anti-Marxist ideology stand face to face,
confronting each other on the same level, in societies which oppose each other but find
themselves at more or less the same level of development.”33
Although Lefebvre did not discuss the Muslim world in Introduction to
Modernity, his description of Post-Stalinist Marxism also provides can also be applied to
the ideological climate of Egypt in the 1960s, when the Society of Muslim Brothers
opposed Gamel Abdel Nasser’s secular version of state socialism. During this period, the
Brotherhood developed a rigorously integrist ideology that closely paralleled Bruce
Lawrence’s definition of fundamentalism: “The affirmation of religious authority as
holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction; it is expressed through
the collective demand that specific creedal and ethical dictates derived from scripture be
publicly recognized and legally enforced.”34 This definition of fundamentalism fits well
with Lefebvre’s notion of the pseudo-repetition of ideological structures because— just
as in Nazism, Stalinism, or Maoism— both state and civil authority depend on an
equivalence of the moral and natural orders that is expressed in a fetishized notion of the 33 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 32 34 Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: the Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1989), 27
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Law. All forms of totalitarianism depend for their maintenance on a conservative moral
code in which, to quote Lefebvre once more, “any deviation from behaving in a [so-
called] ‘decent’ way will be easily identified as a crime against society— in other words,
against the state.”35
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideology in the 1960s depended on an ideology
that denied human beings the ability to create justice on Earth. For this reason, it saw
justice as accessible only through divine revelation as manifested in the Islamic Shari’a.
As Lefebvre might have predicted, Brotherhood ideology in Egypt, as promoted by its
chief exponent Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), shared with Marxism intolerance for both
“magical” (read “mystical”) and secular-democratic notions of truth.36 Thus, Muslim
Brotherhood ideology placed both Egyptian secularists and Sufi mystics outside the
boundaries of “decent” society. In the “Islamic System” (al-nizam al-Islami) that the
Brotherhood promoted, the boundaries of acceptable behavior were drawn by a
revolutionary vanguard that served as the guardians of God’s Law. Whatever “magic”
might dwell in the Islamic state, could only reside in the Shari’a as the locus of divine
authority.
Ironically, this ideological reification of the Shari’a depended on a repetition or
mimesis of classical Islamic tropes that was more mystical than rationalistic, despite the
Brotherhood’s rejection of mysticism. In the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Shari’a is
depicted as a hierophany, a manifestation of the sacred embodied as moral law. As René
35 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 32 36 For Qutb, mysticism was even more dangerous than magic, despite his family’s background in Shadhili Sufism. While he maintained an ambivalent attitude toward magic throughout his life, he was strongly opposed to Sufism even during his secular period as a writer and literary critic. See Adnan A. Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 33-35.
18
Girard might have noted, the Shari’a thus becomes a defacto double of the Qur’anic
revelation as a source of truth. In practice, this means that the portion of the Shari’a that
derives from tradition (Sunna) has a truth-value equivalent to those that derive from the
Qur’an. In a previous article, I termed this reification of the Shari’a Shari’a
Fundamentalism.37 In what Deleuze might have called an “artistic” departure from the
casuistry of traditional Islamic jurisprudence, Shari’a Fundamentalism reinterprets the
Law as both an idealized expression of the divine will and as the ultimate locus of truth
for human society. Both the Shari’a and its textual sources are seen by Shari’a
fundamentalists as “holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction,”
thus confirming Bruce Lawrence’s definition of fundamentalism as an absolutist
approach to moral law. As a politically active Muslim once stated at a conference in
Southern California, from the perspective of Shari’a Fundamentalism, “Islam is all about
the Shari’a.”
REPETITION AND THE COSMIC SHARI’A
Chapter Seven of Sayyid Qutb’s famous manifesto Milestones (Ma’alim fi al-
tariq) is titled “A Cosmic Shari’a” (shari’a kawniyya). In this chapter, Qutb argues, like
St. Augustine before him and Osama Bin Laden after him, that the moral law as ordained
by God is equivalent to the cosmic law by which God governs the universe.38 By using
the term “cosmic” (kawniyya), Qutb means more than just to say that the Shari’a contains
37 See Vincent J. Cornell, “Reasons Public and Divine: Shari’a Fundamentalism, Liberal Democracy, and the Epistemological Crisis of Islam,” in Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin Editors, Rethinking Islam Between Theory and Practice, University of South Carolina Press, due to be published in 2010. 38 This is not to say, however, that for Qutb the law of nature is the same as the law of the jungle. In a 1946 article entitled, “The American Conscience and the Situation of Palestine,” he draws an explicit distinction between “God’s Shari’a” and “the shari’a of the wilderness of beasts.” This last phrase is a euphemism for what Qutb sees as the savage (mutawahhish) morals of the West. By contrast, “God’s Shari’a” refers to natural law as a reified form of the moral order. Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad, 92
19
universal truths. Rather, he argues that the Shari’a as a moral code is derived directly
from the natural law of the universe. Says Qutb, “[The Shari’a] goes back to its most
comprehensive origin in its decisive role in all of existence, not just in human existence
alone, and in its application to all of existence, not in its application to human life
alone.”39 Just like Bin Laden, Qutb replicates the argument used by St. Augustine in City
of God. The only significant difference between Qutb and Augustine is over whose
shari’a is most equivalent to the cosmic order— the shari’a of Christianity or the Shari’a
of Islam.
For Qutb, the moral order is literally “a chip off the block” of the natural
law by which God governs the universe. “The human being is part of this cosmic
existence; thus, the laws (qawanin) that govern his inborn nature (fitra) are not to
be separated from the cosmic order (namus) that governs existence as a whole.”40
According to Deleuze, the logic of equivalence that lies behind such a reification
of the moral law depends on a central paradigm or habitus on which human
actions are modeled.41 That Qutb has such a habitus in mind is revealed when he
posits a one-to-one correspondence between the life-pattern of the human being
and the motions (harakat) of the universe. “The ‘Shari’a’ that God has prescribed
for the human being to order his life is a cosmic law in the sense that it is related
to the general law of the universe and is in symmetry with it (mutanassiqa
39 Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Beirut: Dar al-Sharq, 2000), see also the English translation, Seyyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus: Dar al-Ilm, n.d.), 87-90. In this widely distributed English edition, many of Qutb’s key concepts are paraphrased rather than translated directly from the Arabic. At times this distorts the meaning of Qutb’s concepts significantly. For this reason, page references to Ma’alim will only be for the Arabic edition unless a specific variant in the English text is cited. 40 Ibid. 110. The root of the Greek word nomos, from which the Arabic term namus is derived, is nemo, meaning “to order” or “to allot.” Thus, it conveys the idea of a just order, which corresponds both to the notion of law or justice, and to the law of nature, understood as the natural order. 41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 4-5
20
ma’hu). Therefore, the requirement to obey it derives from the necessity to
establish a correspondence between the life of the person and the motions of the
universe (harakat al-kawn) in which he lives.”42 Since human beings are not
capable of creating a legal system that is harmonious with the order of the
universe, they need the guidance of the Shari’a to provide this harmony. Thus,
any legal system that is not based on the Shari’a is nothing but a vain fantasy
(ahwa’ al-bashar).43 It is on this basis that Qutb rejects all other political and
legal systems as jahili— as ideologically “ignorant” expressions of human vanity
and arrogance.44
In his discussion of the Cosmic Shari’a, Qutb falls into the “Stoic error” in large
part because he takes the resemblance between the moral order and the cosmic order too
literally. By contrast, St. Augustine preserves a sense of the open-endedness of the
divine law by discussing the relationship between the moral law and the cosmic order
metaphorically. In City of God he states that the key to the divine law is in the ethic of
reciprocity, as in the biblical saying, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18),
and in Christ’s statement, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Luke
6:31).45 For Qutb, however, the Shari’a cannot be reduced to a set of aphorisms. This is
because the Shari’a is a fundamental part of the order of existence and shares in its
complexity. Because the moral order is derived directly from this cosmic paradigm,
obedience to the Shari’a is even more fundamental than conversion to Islam itself. “To
42 Qutb, Ma’alim, 111 43 Ibid. 112 44 Qutb took the notion of jahiliyya from the published writings of the South Asian Islamist Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979) and from correspondence with Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (1914-1999), with whom he developed a personal relationship. See Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad, 150-153. 45 St. Augustine, City of God, (19:14) 873
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act by the Divine Shari’a (al-Shari’a al-Ilahiyya) is an established rule,” says Qutb.
“This stands even above the requirement to establish Islam as a creed.” 46 As a corollary
to this rule, rejection of the Shari’a is the worst sin in Islam because it denies God’s
power to determine what is best for the human being. Thus, Qutb’s doctrine of the
Cosmic Shari’a reflects what Deleuze, following Kierkegaard, called the “error of
aesthetic repetition”: the attempt “to obtain repetition from the laws of nature by
identifying with the legislative principle, whether in the Epicurean or the Stoic
manner.”47
In the Introduction to the book Strong Religion, Gabriel Almond, Scott Appleby,
and Emmanuel Sivan remark on the tendency of religious fundamentalists to “ransack a
tradition’s past, retrieving and restoring politically useful doctrines and practices and
creating others in an effort to construct a religio-political ideology.”48 As we have seen
above, Gilles Deleuze similarly suggested that in the economy of repetition, theft rather
than equivalence is the currency of exchange. One cannot help but think of such
statements when considering the similarity between Sayyid Qutb’s concept of the Cosmic
Shari’a and the Brethren of Purity’s concept of the “Divine Shari’a” or “Universal
Cosmic Order.”
The Brethren of Purity and Intimates of Loyalty (Ikhwan al-safa’ wa khullan al-
wafa’) were a secret society of Muslim intellectuals who lived in the Iraqi city of Basra in
the tenth century CE. Their writings were strongly influenced by Neo-Platonist thought
46 Qutb, Ma’alim, 111 47 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 6; Karl Popper also uses Kierkegaard’s notion of aestheticism to criticize Utopian perfectionists for their fondness for elegant theories that ultimately prove to be impractical or inimical to the concept of an open society. See idem, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 166-178. 48 Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10
22
and many scholars believe that they were Ismaili Shiites. The anonymously written
treatises (rasa’il) of the Brethren of Purity were copied and studied throughout the
Islamic world and influenced such varied figures as the philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina,
d. 1037 CE) and the Sunni theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111 CE). However,
other Sunni scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE), condemned them as heretics.49
Following Ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb also criticized Neo-Platonic philosophers for their
“unrealistic” views that “polluted” Islam with a welter of useless theories.50 Thus, it is
surprising to find that his theory of the Cosmic Shari’a parallels that of the Brethren of
Purity in many ways.
The similarity between the Brethren of Purity’s doctrines and those of Sayyid
Qutb has so far escaped scholarly notice. This is an important oversight because a Salafi
ideology like Qutb’s, which claims Islamic authenticity based on strict adherence to the
Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, would be compromised if it can be proved that he
“ransacked” this doctrine from a group that epitomized the rejection of the Sunni Islamic
ideal. However, the problem with jumping to such a conclusion is that Qutb neither cites
the Brethren of Purity in his works nor is there any unequivocal biographical evidence
that he was closely acquainted with their doctrines. This presents the contemporary
researcher with a dilemma. On one hand, the resemblance between their two notions of
the Cosmic Shari’a is significant and needs to be accounted for. However, if Qutb did
not take this concept from the Brethren of Purity, where did he get it? One possibility is
49 Seyyed Hossen Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, revised edition, 1993), 36 and n. 53 50 See Sayyid Qutb, Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview, Translated by Rami David (North Haledon, New Jersey: Islamic Publications International, 2006), 179-201. Originally titled Muqawwimat al-tasawwur al-Islami, this work was written by Qutb in prison and was only published in Arabic in 1986, 20 years after his death.
23
that he learned it from a third source, such as the writings of the founder of Salafi
reformism, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897). Because of his background in the
Shaykhi sect of Shiism, Afghani was strongly influenced by the Islamic philosophers and
especially the Neo-Platonists.51 It is well known that Qutb was acquainted with
Afghani’s works, although like most Sunni writers in the first half of the twentieth
century, he was unaware of Afghani’s Shiite background.
A more easily proven possibility is that the logic of Sayyid Qutb and the Brethren
of Purity was so similar that it led to the pseudo-repetition of concepts in the manner
predicted by Henri Lefebvre. At the present time it is impossible to determine
conclusively whether the similarity between Qutb’s doctrine of the Cosmic Shari’a and
that of the Brethren of Purity was due to pseudo-repetition or to outright appropriation.52
However, in the absence of clear proof of appropriation, we are forced to rely on the
possibility of pseudo-repetition as more likely, in that the logic of their thinking led them
to create similar models. Therefore, in the remainder of this chapter Qutb’s mimesis of
the Brethren of Purity’s notion of the Cosmic Shari’a will be treated as a case of pseudo-
repetition. The main question we will ask is the following: What can the repetition of
this concept tell us about the phenomenon of religious extremism in general?
Although the Brethren of Purity were formed as a political association, the
political aspect of their identity is usually ignored by modern historians and their political
writings have rarely been studied. Scholars— particularly in the West— typically treat
51 Shaykhism combined both rationalist and mystical trends of Islamic philosophy. Nikki Keddie has noted that two of the earliest works copied in the hand of Jamal al-Din Afghani were works of Shaykhi authors. See Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), 19-20. 52 According to the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, the concept of the Cosmic Shari’a can be found both in Shiite writings and in the works of Afghani. He believes that Afghani was the most likely source of this concept for Qutb. (Personal communication, December 24, 2008)
24
the Brethren as an idiosyncratic group of Neo-Platonist philosophers and discuss their
ideas with little or no regard for their political ramifications.53 This approach is
shortsighted because the Brethren themselves make a point of stressing that their ideas
can only be understood if one follows their complete program, which includes their
political ideology.54 Significantly, the concept of the Cosmic Shari’a comes up in the
most political of the 52 treatises of the Brethren of Purity corpus.55 To give just one
example: the “Sixth Treatise on the Sciences of the Shari’a” gives prominent attention to
both the Divine Law or cosmic order (al-namus al-ilahi) and the Divine Shari’a (al-
shari’a al-ilahiyya).56 However, the subject of this text is not the Cosmic Shari’a itself
but “The Implementer of the Shari’a” (wadi’ al-Shari’a), a political figure whose role is
to establish a spiritual society (madina ruhaniyya) on Earth. In addition, this treatise
seems to call for the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order by an elite vanguard of
Brethren activists. Its unorthodox nature is further proven by the claim that the
Implementer of the Shari’a speaks to angels and sees disembodied spirits.57 Claims of
53 A typical example of this approach is Ian Netton’s book on the Brethren of Purity. While Netton mentions in passing political figures in Brethren writings such as the Implementer of the Shari’a, he refutes the contention that such figures refer to actual political leaders. Instead he concurs with a description of the Rasa’il as “the draft of deliberations by a learned society composed by a well-educated secretary.” See Ian Richard Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’) (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 3. The best introduction to Brethren metaphysical doctrines is in Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, 25-106. 54 For example, in “The Second Treatise on the Sciences of the Divine Cosmic Order and the Shari’a on the Essence of the Way to God the Glorious and Mighty,” the Brethren state, “One cannot assimilate our teachings without two prerequisites: One of them is purity of soul and the other is perseverance in the Way.” See Rasa’il ikhwan al-safa’ wa khullan al-wafa’, edited by ‘Arif Tamir (Beirut and Paris: Manshurat ‘Awidat, 1995), vol. 4, 7. 55 The political nature of these texts is typically overlooked because contemporary scholars have labeled the section of the Rasa’il in which they appear “theological.” See, for example, Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, 43. 56 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Rasa’il, vol. 4, 107-119 57 These “spiritual entities” (wujudat nafsaniyya) are described as being at times disembodied, at times embodied, and as taking on both human and animal forms. As such, they seem to resemble the Shape Shifters of certain Native American mythologies. See Ibid, 113.
25
supernatural abilities such as these are more often associated with Shiite extremism than
with Sunni Islam.
The similarity between Sayyid Qutb’s doctrines and those of the Brethren of
Purity is both conceptual and terminological. First, for both Qutb and the Brethren, the
Cosmic Shari’a is the metaphysical basis of moral theology. Second, the Brethren of
Purity speak of the Cosmic Shari’a as a system or order (manhaj). Qutb uses similar
language: both the religion of Islam and the universe are described in his works as a
system (manhaj). Both also stress the importance of reason (‘aql) as a guide to the truth
and assert that God created reason so that human beings can conceptualize (tasawwara)
God’s laws. The notion of conceptualization (tasawwur) is prominent in Qutb’s writings
and the term appears in several of his titles.58 Also noteworthy is the parallel use of the
phrase, “our father Abraham” (abuna Ibrahim) when referring to the primordial religion
of Islam and Islam as a confessional community (milla).59 Another parallelism is the
characterization of those who deny God’s laws as having fallen into bestiality (Brethren:
inhatat ila al-bahimiyya; Qutb: al-dark al-hayawani).60 Finally, as noted above, the
Brethren of Purity discuss the goals, methods, and attributes of their group and its leader
in ways that recall Qutb’s famous concept of the Vanguard (al-tali’a).
In the treatises of the Brethren of Purity, the Science of the Divine Cosmic Order
and the Shari’a (‘ilm al-namus al-ilahi wa al-Shari’a) is the central paradigm for Islam as
a moral system and is identified with the Prophet Abraham. This concept is so important
58 See, for example, Khasa’is al-tasawwur al-Islami wa muqawwimatihi (The Characteristics and Components of the Islamic Concept, 1962), Muqawwimat al-tasawwur al-Islami (Components of the Islamic Concept, 1962), and al-Taswir al-fanni fi-l-Qur’an (Artistic Conceptualization in the Qur’an, 1945). 59 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Rasa’il, vol. 4, 110 and Qutb, Ma’alim, 115 60 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Rasa’il, vol. 4, 119 and Qutb, Ma’alim, 123
26
for the Brethren that it defines the meaning of the word “Muslim,” in the sense of an
obedient worshipper of God. Sayyid Qutb makes a similar contention in the chapter on
the Cosmic Shari’a in Milestones. Unlike Qutb, however, the Brethren of Purity
acknowledge a trans-confessional and Abrahamic connection between primordial Islam
and the religion of Judaism through the teachings of the Prophets and the wisdom of the
Rabbis and Sages. By doing so, they imply that the Implementer of the Shari’a, whose
role is to establish the Cosmic Shari’a in the Post-Prophetic age, is a quasi-messianic
figure for Muslims and Jews alike.
Know that the affair to which we refer our brothers and urge our friends is neither a newly created affair nor an innovated school of thought. Rather, it is a primordial vision (ra’y qadim) that has been followed by the Sages, the Philosophers, and the Elect. It is the way of the Prophets (peace be upon them) and the method of the Successors of the Prophets (khulafa’ al-anbiya’) and the Guided Imams. By means of it the Prophets judge those who have submitted to God (alladhina aslamu) among the Jews, the Sages (al-rabbaniyyun), and the Rabbis (al-ahbar), according to what they have learned from the Book of God. Its religious community (milla) is that of our father Abraham and because of it we were called “Muslims” (al-muslimin) in times past (min qabl).61
Metaphorically, the Shari’a that governs human affairs can be compared to the
natural law that governs the universe by comparing electricity in a home to the electricity
that comes from a power plant. The massive amounts of electricity generated by a power
plant can only be made suitable for human use through the mediation of sub-stations and
step-down transformers. Similarly, for the Brethren of Purity, the Cosmic Order through
which the Universal Soul (al-nafs al-kulli) governs creation only becomes suitable for
human beings by being converted into the “Divine” or Cosmic Shari’a (al-Shari’a al-
ilahiyya). This conversion is put into effect by the reasoning power of the human
intellect (‘aql). Through the faculty of reason, the intellect acts as a sort of sub-station to
61 Ikhwan al-Safa’ Rasa’il, vol. 4, 109-110
27
transform cosmic truths into natural dispositions. Because the natural disposition (fitra)
of Islam conforms to reason and reason demands order, the intelligent human being
naturally gravitates toward the Shari’a as the paradigm for the moral life.
Know that the Cosmic Shari’a is a spiritual disposition (jibla ruhaniyya) that is manifested in the individual soul (al-nafs al-juz’iyya) of each human body by the power of reason (bi-quwwatin ‘aqliyyatin) through an effusion of the Universal Soul that God Most High allows to occur periodically and from time to time. Through it, individual souls are motivated and are purified from [the materiality of] individual human bodies through separation from their bodies on the Day of Resurrection.62
In Milestones, Sayyid Qutb says much the same thing in a passage that
characterizes the Cosmic Shari’a— now in the guise of natural law— as “hard-wired”
into the human disposition.
The human being is part of this universal existence (al-wujud al-kawni); thus, the laws (qawanin) that govern his nature are not to be separated from the Order (laysat bi-ma’zilin ‘an dhalika al-namus) that governs existence in its entirety. For God created [the human being] as He created this universe. In his physical formation he is of the clay of this earth, but God has bestowed characteristics upon him that make him more than the material clay out of which He made the human being; He has granted [the human being] power and esteem. However, from the perspective of his bodily existence, [the human being] humbles himself before the natural order (al-namus al-tabi’i) that God has laid out for him.63
A comparison of these two passages reveals that Qutb’s perspective differs from
that of the Brethren of Purity (as it did from St. Augustine as well) primarily in its
literalism. In his discussion of the equivalence of the Shari’a to natural law, Qutb omits
the Neo-Platonic concepts of the Universal Soul and the separation of souls from their
bodies at resurrection because they disagree with Sunni Islamic theology. However, by
62 Ibid, 111 63 Ibid. 110
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eliminating the Universal Soul in particular, he also eliminates a step that is logically
necessary for “translating” the Cosmic Shari’a into a moral order that can be applied to
human beings. It has already been pointed out that Deleuze would consider Qutb’s
doctrine of the Cosmic Shari’a inadequate because of his inability to distinguish between
repetition and equivalence and because of his tendency to fall into the error of the Stoics.
One might also add that the literalism of Qutb’s perspective deprives his logic of a
necessary tertium quid. It is no exaggeration to say that for Qutb, his metaphysics is
scarcely different from his physics. Because the human being lives in the physical
universe, she must obey the laws of the universe that govern her existence. So far, this is
not a problem. However, Qutb takes this conclusion too far by saying that God created
for the human being a “Shari’a” (quotation marks in the original) “to order his volitional
life with an order (tanzim) that is in complete symmetry with his natural life.” The
Shari’a that Qutb refers to in this passage is not a metaphor; instead, it is the actual
Shari’a-as-system-of-laws that is to be applied in a Shari’a-based Islamic state. This
Shari’a, says Qutb, is a literal “portion” (iqta’) of the Divine Universal Law (al-namus al-
ilahi al-‘amm) that governs the inborn nature of the human being and the nature of
universal existence alike” (alladhi yahkumu fitrat al-insan wa fitrat al-wujud al-‘amm).
Thus, both the Shari’a and the Divine Law of the universe “consist of a single
[undifferentiated] totality (wa yunassiquha kulluha jumlatan wahidatan).”64
Qutb’s theory of the Cosmic Shari’a came rather late in his career and does not
figure in his earlier works, such as Social Justice in Islam (al-‘Adala al-ijtima’iyya fi al-
Islam). However, even in Social Justice, the holistic and absolutist view of the natural
64 Ibid. The last sentence of this passage is omitted altogether from the English translation of Ma’alim fi al-Tariq. See Milestones, 88.
29
order that frames his notion of the Cosmic Shari’a is already well developed. In contrast
with Christianity, which in Qutb’s view posits an opposition between human society and
the world of the spirit, “Islam saw one embracing unity, which took in the universe, the
soul, and all human life. Its aim is to unite earth and heaven in one world; to join the
present world and the world to come in one faith; to link spirit and body in one humanity;
to correlate worship and work in one life.”65
Written in 1964, Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones is arguably the most influential
political manifesto to appear on the world stage since the publication of Karl Marx’s
Communist Manifesto in 1848. Its intended audience was an Islamist vanguard that was
to take Qutb’s teachings as “signs along the road” toward the creation of an Islamic
society under the aegis of the Shari’a.66 Predating Milestones by 1000 years, the treatises
of the Brethren of Purity were written for a similar purpose, and were similarly intended
for an Islamic vanguard that would build a new “City of the Spirit” (madina ruhaniyya)
on Earth. For this reason, some of the political texts of the Brethren were also written as
manifestos that urge the Islamic vanguard to expend their wealth and even their lives in
the service of the Implementer of the Shari’a.
In the “Third Treatise on the Sciences of the Divine Cosmic Order and the
Shari’a,” the Brethren are encouraged to strive for the time when they can “separate from
the Earth for the kingdom of the Master of the Greater Law (sahib al-namus al-akbar);
then we will witness our spiritual city elevated in the air, as we mentioned in the second
treatise. It is this city from which our father Adam and his wife and children were
65 Qutb, Social Justice, 42-43 66 See the Introduction to Qutb, Ma’alim, 11-13.
30
expelled when their enemy Iblis cheated them.”67 In this text, a spiritual City of God is
posited both as the original home of humanity and as the Utopia to which the Brethren of
Purity aspire. Rhetorically, it is modeled on an Islamic topos that equates the Garden of
Eden with the city of Mecca.68 As a once and future Eden, this Spiritual City represents
the habitus that is the paradigm for the natural moral order of humanity, and as Mecca, it
symbolizes the utopian goals of the Brethren of Purity as a political movement.
However, by making Mecca (the city of Abraham and Ishmael) the paradigmatic
City of God instead of Medina (the city of the Prophet Muhammad), the Brethren of
Purity stake claim to a different heritage than do reformers of Sunni Islam, such as
Sayyid Qutb and his predecessors. Although the Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca
and it is the religious center for Muslims, what is popularly known as the “City of the
Messenger of God” (madinat rasul Allah) is not Mecca but Medina. For Sunni Muslims
in particular, Medina is more important than Mecca as both habitus and Utopia because
the first Islamic state was created there. From this point of view, Mecca, as a primarily
religious paradigm, is more comparable to Jerusalem than to Medina. Although its
sacred character is unquestioned as the geographical locus Islamic devotion, Mecca does
not provide an adequate paradigm for political reform or social engineering. If Medina is
the city of the Prophet Muhammad, Mecca is the city of Abraham. This is because in
Islamic tradition Abraham and his son Ishmael built the first temple to the One God in
Mecca. Thus, whereas Medina represents Islam as an historical and sectarian religion,
Mecca represents Islam in its more universal Qur’anic sense, as the seat of the primordial
67 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Rasa’il, vol. 4, 19-20 68 On Islamic legends and tropes that link Mecca to the Garden of Eden, see Brannon Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), especially 85-87.
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Religion of God (“Verily the religion of God is Islam,” Qur’an, 3:19). For this reason,
unlike Sayyid Qutb, who allows entry into the City of God only for those who are Sunni
and Salafi Muslims, the Brethren of Purity open the gates of the City of God much wider
and encourage Jews and Christians to find refuge within this Utopia as new Muslims who
can feel at home in Islam as the once and future religion of Abraham.
TOTALITARIANISM, NAÏVE MONISM, AND THE LOGIC OF EXTREMISM
Despite their more inclusive interpretation of the Abrahamic heritage, the
Brethren of Purity must be considered religious extremists according to the modern
understanding of the term. First of all, their ideology was totalitarian and fostered a cult
of personality centered on their leader. The Implementer of the Shari’a was an
omniscient leader in the mold of both political leaders like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and
Kim Il Sung and of cult leaders like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, David Koresh, and Jim
Jones. According to the Rasa’il, he knew the personal affairs of every one of his
followers, “whether young or old, male or female, free or slave, high-born or low-born,
scholar or ignoramus, rich or poor, strong or weak, near or far, such that he knows each
and every one of them by his name, his lineage, his works, his behavior, his personality,
his means of livelihood, his dominant characteristic whether it is excellence or
mediocrity, and his morals whether good or evil.”69 Such a cult of personality is
commonly seen as a defining characteristic of totalitarianism. Another characteristic of
totalitarianism is the tendency of the state or controlling body to mold the private life,
soul, and morals of its subjects to a dominant ideology. This too can be seen in the
Brethren of Purity’s description of its social body as a single person with a single mind,
69 Ikhwan al-Safa’, Rasa’il, vol. 4, 115
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body, and soul. “The Implementer of the Shari’a acts among [the Brethren of Purity] as
the head is to the body, and they are to him like the limbs of the body that carry out the
will and the decisions of the Implementer of the Shari’a upon their souls, just as the
power of thinking governs the powers of the senses. In this way they become of one
opinion, one goal, one objective, and one strength.”70 No task is more important than
following the Implementer of the Shari’a.71 As the executor of God’s Law, he possesses
unerring knowledge. In addition, he has complete understanding of divine Truth and acts
on it with a unique wisdom, strength, effectiveness, and power. “He is the proximate
cause of all extant affairs (huwa ‘illat jami’ al-mawjudat) and he governs and directs [his
followers] with what is appropriate to each and every one of them.”72 Clearly, the usual
academic view of the Brethren of Purity as a harmless group of Neo-Platonic
philosophers is badly misinformed. Instead, a more careful reading of their political
treatises reveals them to be more like a cult or a revolutionary vanguard.
In his book Leaderless Jihad, Marc Sageman remarks that the concept of
terrorism is “a little like obscenity: people believe they know it when they see it, but
cannot define it.”73 Although this statement is technically incorrect because terrorism has
been defined by such organizations as the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and
the FBI, it is certainly accurate when the word “terrorism” is replaced by “extremism.”74
The problem with the term “extremism” is that it is exonymic: others apply it to a group
rather than the group labeling itself. Self-references to extremism, such as in Presidential 70 Ibid. 116 71 Ibid. 111 72 Ibid. 113 73 Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 15 74 For formal definitions of terrorism, see Jonathan R. White, Terrorism and Homeland Security (Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006), 4-7
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candidate Barry Goldwater’s famous 1964 statement, “Extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vice,” are usually ironic or made for rhetorical effect. The most common
antonyms for the term “religious extremist”— words like “moderate” or “orthodox”—
are equally difficult to define. Their meanings more often have to do with the doctrines
and practices of those in power than with any set of objective criteria. As the history of
world religions abundantly demonstrates, yesterday’s extremist can often become today’s
moderate.75
Shlomo Fischer of Tel Aviv University has defined religious extremism as
“violent and coercive religion.”76 The issue of violence brings up an interesting question
about the definition of extremism. Do groups have to actually perform violent acts in
order to be extremist? For example, the ideology of the Brethren of Purity was certainly
coercive; however, it is not clear that they ever engaged in acts of violence. Fischer also
identifies other common denominators of extremism that are as much political as
religious. These include a predilection for revolutionary avant-gardism and totalitarian
philosophies of the general will. Despite the fact that these tendencies are usually seen as
“modern,” they are far more visible than violence in the writings of the Brethren of
Purity. These tendencies can also be found in the writings of contemporary Muslim
extremists, such as Sayyid Qutb and his followers. The persistence of such tendencies
over a time-span of more than a millennium suggests that ostensibly “modern” ideologies
may actually be less modern and more universal than is generally supposed. If this is the
75 In a recent book the Canadian religious studies scholar Shadia B. Drury claims that the roots of Christianity are fundamentally extremist and are based on the “metaphysics of terror.” She states: “In my view, the political crimes committed in the name of Christianity were not historically contingent accidents; they were a logical consequence of Christian beliefs.” See idem, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), xiii. 76 See Shlomo Fischer, “The General Will, Charisma, Prophecy and the Politics of the Avant-Garde: Yehuda Etzion and the Theology of the Jewish Settler's Underground,” pp. ?
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case, then something more than the “ransacking” of tradition by modern ideology is at
work in the repetition of such models. Similarly, something deeper and more basic may
be involved than Deleuze’s concept of “artistic theft” or Girard’s notion of “mimetic
desire.” As the historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan once remarked, “A ‘leap of
progress’ is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is
a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next.”77 In Sunni
Islam in particular, the importance of tradition demands that all reformers go forward by
revisiting the past: in popular parlance, “What goes around comes around.” Sayyid
Qutb’s pseudo-repetition of the Brethren of Purity’s notion of the Cosmic Shari’a
followed the same paradigm. In order to make a “leap of progress” toward a reformed
vision of Islam that was religiously authentic and in synch with the natural order, he had
to go through not only the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, but also
through premodern Islamic theories of nature and morality, including, apparently, those
of the Brethren of Purity.
When we observe mimesis and pseudo-repetition in the writings of religious
extremists, we need to be mindful that the pitfalls of anachronism and historicism are
interrelated. Just as we cannot automatically apply modern concepts to pre-modern ideas,
we must also not assume that everything we consider “modern” is truly new. Although
attempts have been made in Islamic thought to de-legitimize the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb
by branding them as modern and hence untraditional, this argument is misplaced.78 As
we have seen, it is possible to argue that a tendency toward some form of totalitarianism
77 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 81 78 See, for example, the Saudi-based web site that seeks to link the revolutionary vanguardism of Sayyid Qutb to the doctrines of Vladimir Lenin: www.islamagainstextremism.com/articles/iayry-sayyid-qutb-marxist-socialism-and-the-leninist-revolutionary-vanguard.cfm.
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is common to extremism in general, whether it is religious or secular, or whether it is in
the present or the past.
A common conceit of academic historicism is the notion that the advent of the
modern age was caused by a “Great Western Transmutation” that changed the culture of
the world forever.79 An important corrective to this view can be found in the works of
the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), whose critique of historicism
in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957) may
also be read as a critique of modern exceptionalism. The Open Society and Its Enemies
is valuable for the study of Islamic thought in general and is particularly valuable for the
study of Islamic extremism. Because this work was written with a view to refuting
secular totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism and Communism, it is often overlooked
that Popper’s insights may be applied just as well to both modern and pre-modern
varieties of extremism in the so-called Abrahamic religions. Against the historicist
notion that ideologies are organically dependent on their social and historical settings,
Popper proposes a “tropics of extremism” that is based on a critique of Plato.80
According to Popper, “the spell of Plato” in politics and religion is visible in the
continuing popularity of certain tropes and concepts that are deeply embedded in the
cultural imaginary of Western civilization. Since the “spell” of Plato was cast over
79 On the concept of “The Great Western Transmutation,” see Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Volume 3, The Gunpowder Empire and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 176-222. 80 The term “tropics of extremism” is derived from Hayden White’s term, “tropics of discourse.” White defines discourse in the following way: “A discourse is itself a kind of model of the processes of consciousness by which a given area of experience, originally apprehended as simply a field of phenomena demanding understanding, is assimilated by analogy to those areas of experience felt to be already understood as to their essential natures.” This comes very close to what Popper envisages as the “spell” cast by Plato over Western thought. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 5.
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Christianity, Islam, and Judaism alike in the late antique and medieval periods, all three
religions are equally subject to Popper’s critique.81
Popper’s works are also relevant to the present discussion because they show that
close approximations of Lefebvre’s concept of pseudo-repetition and Girard’s concept of
mimesis can be found in Plato, and that Lefebvre’s “monster” of late Marxism, where the
individual becomes the microcosm of the state and not the other way around, appears to
have originated in Plato’s Republic.82 His work also reveals that what Deleuze called the
“Stoic error,” in which the moral order was seen as equivalent to the natural order, was
due to the fallacy of “naïve monism,” the inability to distinguish logically between the
natural and the conventional.83 As Popper points out, in the actual world of social
practice, the moral standards that govern society are not derived sui generis from nature
but are matters of convention. “Nature consists of facts and regularities, and is in itself
neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in
this way introduce morals into the natural world.”84 By fallaciously theorizing
backwards from the “given” to the “normal” and from the “normal” to the “natural,”
naïve monism mistakes the conventional for the arbitrary, which in turn is condemned as
“unnatural” and hence “sinful.” If the moral products of social convention are seen as
arbitrary and if nature is viewed as epiphenomenal, then it stands to reason that natural
law will be seen as paradigmatic of the moral order. According to Popper, the ethical
positivism that results from naïve monism is the philosophical basis of the conservatism
81 Many of Popper’s arguments can be applied to non-Western forms of religious extremism as well. However, in the latter case, “the spell of Plato” is more indirect, in that it is due to the influence of modern Western ideologies. 82 See, for example, Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 81-83. 83 Ibid, 61-63 84 Ibid, 63
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and authoritarianism of utopian movements in general, whether or not they are
religious.85 If he is correct, then it is hardly surprising to find, as Lefebvre did, that
materialist forms of Utopianism such as Communism and spiritual forms of Utopianism
such as Christian Reconstructionism or Dominion Theology share much in common. The
same could be said, of course, for the Islamic “Dominion Theology” of Sayyid Qutb and
the Brethren of Purity. Could it be that the resemblance between radical leftist morality
and religious morality is caused as much by a common failure of logic as by Lefebvre’s
theory of radical critique?
The heuristic value of Popper’s tropics of extremism is that it allows us to submit
religious extremism to philosophical critique and to add logical fallacies such as naïve
monism to violence, coercion, and totalitarianism as defining characteristics of extremist
thought. From this perspective, what makes a fallacy such as naïve monism “extreme” is
not only that it leads to coercive authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but also that it is
demonstrably wrong. Popper’s view that moral norms should be seen objectively as
matters of convention is not, in itself, an attack on either religion or God. The important
question to ask is whether a theology can be found to suit empirical reality. Clearly, in
some cases the answer is “yes.” For example, John Locke’s notion of the “democratic
intellect,” mentioned earlier in this chapter, clears a theological space for the human
creation of moral norms by asserting that the act of reaching a moral consensus is
divinely guided. As Popper correctly points out, the only religion that the notion of
morality-by-consensus truly threatens is “the religion of blind authority, of magic and
tabooism. But I do not think that it is in any way opposed to a religion built upon the
85 Ibid, 73
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idea of personal responsibility and freedom of conscience.”86 In the final analysis, says
Popper, “It is we, and we alone . . . who must distinguish between the true prophets and
the false prophets.”87
For Popper, a doctrine that promotes personal responsibility and freedom of
conscience is correct because these concepts best reflect the highest potential and
aspirations of the human spirit. One can add that the advocacy of personal responsibility
and freedom of conscience may also be read in an authentic way into the scriptures of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and probably into other religions as well. Theologically,
one can summarize this point by saying that for Popper, the reasonableness of freedom is
proof of its orthodoxy. Because the naïve monism that lies behind religious extremism is
logically fallacious and hence unreasonable, it may justifiably be placed in the categories
of heterodoxy or heresy. A historicist might object to this assertion by saying that
questions of orthodoxy and heresy are not questions of logic but of power. In actual
practice, what is philosophically illogical or unreasonable may in fact become politically
dominant, and hence “orthodox.” This is certainly true, but it does not change the
fallacious nature of doctrines that cannot be supported by cogent arguments. According
to Popper, doctrines that do not pass muster in philosophical terms have no other recourse
but to rely on coercive power to ensure their dominance. In short, the “violent and
coercive religion” that defines religious extremism for Shlomo Fischer and many other
scholars is for Popper a symptom of “bad religion” that uses violent and coercive means
to maintain a set of beliefs that is ultimately untenable.
86 Ibid, 67 87 Ibid
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This last point highlights the common thread that links the theories of such
disparate figures as Lefebvre, Girard, Deleuze, and Popper with respect to the concept of
religious extremism. All three French thinkers support, in their own way, Popper’s
assertion that extremist doctrines are unreasonable because they are self-contradictory.
The “Thing” that Lefebvre decried, the modern totalitarian union of state and society that
destroyed the political legacy of Athens, was a product of self-contradiction. To Popper,
this would have been but another example of the fallacy of naïve monism. For Lefebvre,
the critical theorist must be an ironist because only an ironist can negotiate a world that is
full of self-contradictory ideologies. To Popper, most of these contradictions result,
either directly or indirectly, from an aesthetic of Perfectionism that goes back to the
political works of Plato. René Girard’s “monstrous double” is the product of a self-
contradictory delusion created by mimetic desire. His book Violence and the Sacred was
based to a large extent on psychoanalytic theory because the violence that he saw at the
heart of religion could only be understood in terms of the illogical logic of desire. Popper
would agree with this, but would respond: Why bother with complicated mythical and
psychoanalytic theories of illogical logic? Is there not a simpler and more systematic
way to discuss the principles that lie behind religious doctrines? Finally, Deleuze’s
notions of the “economy,” aestheticism, and “creative theft” of repetition are also based
on a logic that was premised on the prior assumption of self-contradiction. For Popper,
the solution to the problem of repetition, pseudo-repetition, mimesis, or whatever else it
is called is simple: Structures get repeated because they conform to a common logic.
Sometimes theories of historicism, mythologies, and archaeologies of knowledge act as a
smokescreen to obscure this basic fact. Therefore, might it not be the time to use this
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insight to reintroduce the rigorousness of philosophical theology into the study of
religious extremism?
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