Emmanuel Sivan, professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, sets out to explore three things: What the Sunni fundamentalists of Egypt and Syria diagnose as the ills confronting Islam, the cure they propose, and how they suggest administering it. He succeeds brilliantly in this gem of a small book.
The litany of specific fundamentalist complaints is as varied as it is long. It includes the frivolous and anti-Islamic fare of the mass media in Egypt and Syria, the non-Islamic nature of education in those countries, the absence of Islamic laws, the mingling of the sexes, the prevalent commercial ethos, their decrepit Islamic establishments, and the repression suffered at the hands of their governments.
In sum, the fundamentalists maintain, Moslems have reverted to the level of ignorance and barbarism—known in Arabic as jahiliya—that existed before the revelation of the Prophet Mohammed. They have deviated from their teachings to the point where they can no longer be considered true followers of the faith, and more of them are lured by Westernization all the time.
Sivan shows that fear of daily losing battles has imbued the radicals with a particular sense of urgency: Unless something is done quickly, it will be impossible to stem the rot.
The cure, he explains, is believed to reside in militant political action. The state has allowed anti-Islamic measures to draw Moslems away from their religion, extremists reason, and it could also bring them back. Thus they call for rebellion to replace the state's pernicious influence with a wholesome one. Although that may strike outsiders as hardly shocking, taking up arms against the ruler directly violates longstanding Sunni tradition. Mohammed is supposed to have said "Better a lifetime of tyranny than a moment of anarchy." Convincing Sunni Moslems to oust their rulers, therefore, required the development of a whole new line of thought.
That was precisely the achievement of Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the Egyptian writer noted for borrowing many of his ideas from the medieval thinker Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328). Ibn Taymiya argued that "he who forsakes the Law of Islam should be fought," regardless of whether he considers himself an obedient Moslem. Qutb applied this principle to modern leaders who abandon the Law in pursuit of Western ways, and concluded they had to be overthrown. The impact of his thought was attested by Sadat's assassins. They justified murdering the President while he sat watching a parade with the assertion that "the apostate must be killed even if he is in no position to fight."
As Sadat's death made clear, however, eliminating the man at the top will not by itself bring about a properly Islamic society; beyond punishing transgressors, the radicals need to actually seize the government. To accomplish this in the face of powerful and repressive states, they have organized counter-societies—self-contained and isolated groups living in strict accordance with Islamic precepts. (One Egyptian group went so far as to live in desert caves.) These radicals form a vanguard of True Believers who challenge the state first through violence and over the long term through education.
Radical fundamentalist thought generally follows predictable paths, yet Sivan notes several unexpected developments. Despite an intense loathing for Israel, for example, the radicals are in no rush to conquer Jerusalem. They see no point in fighting in today's armies ("How can a ruler governing his people with a whip triumph on the battlefield?"), insisting on a new order in their own camp before dealing with an external enemy.
Rather surprising, too, is the virulence felt toward President Hafez al-Assad and the other Alawi rulers of Syria. Harking back to Ibn Taymiya's condemnation of them as "worse than Jews or Christians, worse even than pagans," and his railing against their "history of treason to Islam," the Sunni radicals reserve their harshest criticism for Syria, terming it the "Alawi terror state" and portraying Assad as a "defector from Islam clad in Moslem garb."
In addition to delineating the extremists' thinking—and offering some striking quotations from their writings—Sivan looks at two other Egyptian and Syrian groups in relation to the radicals: conservative Moslems and Leftists. The former share many of the radicals' beliefs but continue to live in normal society, and consequently find themselves being pressured from both sides. The state uses them to battle the radicals on their own terms; the radicals act as their bad conscience, pointing out the compromises and inconsistencies they tolerate to stay in the mainstream. Sivan believes them vulnerable to the second message: "There is reason to expect that many conservatives will be drawn one day to despair, possibly to radicalism."
Meanwhile, the recent powerful appeal of fundamentalism has prompted the intellectual Left of Egypt and Syria to engage in orgies of self-analysis. A significant number of Leftists have concluded that they made a terrible mistake in ignoring Islam during the years they were riding high. As one of them who turned a Khomeinist put it, the Left "must either try to take hold of Islam and save it from the reactionaries who exploit it ... or be relegated to the marginal role of observers of the historical storms due to be unleashed." The author agrees, remarking that Islam is "so intimately interwoven into Arab life that to escape from it one can only take refuge in a fringe sectarian existence."
Sivan writes clearly, dispassionately and with enviable command of his subject. His book makes a large and almost entirely new body of information available.
Professor, U.S. Naval War College; author, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power.
