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The Martyr -Sayyid Qutb
"The
white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy," he
declared. "The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our
children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble
objectives We are endowing our children with amazement and
respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us. Let us
instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of
these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are
soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should
destroy him at the first opportunity."
Modern values—secularism, rationality, democracy,
subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance,
materialism—had infected Islam through the agency of Western colonialism.
America now stood for all that. Qutb's polemic was directed
at Egyptians who wanted to bend Islam around the modern world. He
intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incompatible.
His extraordinary project, which was still emerging, was to
take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity
and return Islam to its unpolluted origins. For him, that was a state of
divine oneness, the complete unity of God and humanity. Separation
of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, science and theology,
mind and spirit—these were the hallmarks of modernity, which had
captured the West. But Islam could not abide such divisions. In Islam,
he believed, divinity could not be diminished without being destroyed.
Islam was total and uncompromising. It was God's final word. Muslims
had forgotten this in their enchantment with the West. Only by
restoring Islam to the center of their lives, their laws, and their government
could Muslims hope to recapture their rightful place as the dominant
culture in the world. That was their duty, not only to themselves
but also to God.