The Black Banners

the Soviet Union. The events of the previous year, 1979, had a big impact on the way that he and countless other young Muslims across the region saw their countries, their religion, and their role in the world—and it shaped their worldview and subsequent actions.”

“And those events were?”

“The Iranian revolution, the signing of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Iranian hostage crisis, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. They all happened in 1979.”

With the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of the shah, an Islamic state was established under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was the first success of a political Islamic movement in modern history, and its effect was felt across the Muslim world: Shiite communities elsewhere now had a protector as well as a similar goal to aim toward, and Sunnis—especially the more radical groups in Egypt and Saudi Arabia—dreamed of repeating the revolution within their own framework. Other Sunnis saw a Shiite theocracy as a threat to Sunni Islam’s dominance in the region and were motivated to try to counter it and strengthen their own influence.

Khomeini’s seizure of power was itself a revolution in Shiite political thought. The traditional view is that an Islamic regime can’t be established until the return of the twelfth, “missing” imam. Until then the ideas of Islam can be used to bring about a just society, but not an Islamic state. Khomeini broke with this traditional view, and he justified his actions—over the objections of dissenting clerics—by advocating the doctrine of Velayat-e faqih, or rule of jurisprudence. He argued that religious leaders can be ambassadors of the twelfth imam and therefore can establish an Islamic regime prior to his return.

Of course, modern political Islam wasn’t created by Khomeini alone. He drew many of his ideas and religious justifications from Sunni Islamic thinkers, chief among them the Egyptian author and intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906 –1966).

Qutb was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, when Banna was a twenty-two-year-old teacher of Arabic. The Muslim Brotherhood sought ultimately to create a state based on Sharia, or Islamic law. Its aim was to build its own social network by providing social services to the lower classes. The movement arose, in part, to challenge the rule of King Farouk, who was seen as corrupt and without sympathy for the poor. The Brotherhood was organized into small cells of five-member units, making it difficult for the king’s security services to penetrate it—if one cell was cracked, the rest of the group would remain untouched. When the government officially tried to disband the Muslim Brotherhood two decades after its founding, the organization’s membership rolls numbered more than a million.

Qutb joined the group shortly after Banna’s death and through it met Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and other military leaders plotting to overthrow King Farouk. They were looking for allies, and the Brotherhood, with its strong support among the lower classes, seemed ideal. Together the military officers and Brotherhood leaders carried out the successful 1952 coup.

While both groups wanted to replace the king, their ideas for what should come next differed, with Nasser planning a secular government (and championing the idea of Arab nationalism) and the Brotherhood seeking an Islamic government (and pushing political Islam). Although it was Nasser who took power after the king’s fall, he offered Qutb a position in the cabinet, as minister of education. Qutb declined, saying that the position wasn’t senior enough for him, and began publicly challenging the regime, calling for an Islamic state.

In 1954 a member of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Abdel Latif, attempted to assassinate Nasser, firing eight shots at him from twenty-five feet away. All of them missed. While panic broke out in the assembled crowd, Nasser remained calm and simply declared: “If Abdel Nasser dies… each of you is Gamal Abdel Nasser… Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.” The crowd cheered him and the event was widely reported across the country, causing Nasser’s popularity to soar. He used the opportunity to crack down on the Brotherhood, throwing many members, including Qutb, in jail.

Qutb was reportedly severely tortured, and the experience drove him to write his most influential work, Milestones—Ma’alim fi al-Tariq—which he had friends and family smuggle out of prison and circulate. In the book, he argues that according to Islam only God has sovereignty, and that for an ordinary person such as Nasser to serve as sovereign is the equivalent of idolatry. Such a system, Qutb writes, results in jahiliyya—the state of ignorance that preceded the life of the Prophet Muhammad. To Qutb, the modern state and Islam were incompatible, and those behind the modern state were pulling Muslims in the wrong direction.

Qutb’s doctrine held that those who tortured him and his fellow prisoners, and indeed any citizens of the state (who by implication authorized the torture), could not be real Muslims—no real Muslim would inflict torture on another. Therefore, he argued, the torturers were kafirs, or nonbelievers, deserving of a sentence of apostasy, or takfir.

The background to sentencing someone as a kafir lies in the mid-seventh century, when Imam Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, decided, as caliph, to compromise with a political opponent rather than engage in a war. His action prompted a rebellion by the Kharijites, who assassinated Ali and declared that only they were the true Muslims—all others were apostates and must be put to death. The Kharijites called themselves al- Shurat (“the buyers”), a reference to their buying a place for themselves in the next world. Kharijites (“those who went out”) was the name given to the group by other Muslims because of their extreme views. Charges of apostasy and other measures imposed by the Kharijites had no scriptural basis: according to the Quran, only those who worship idols and who persecuted the Prophet and the early Muslims can be considered apostates. Hence the Kharijites took to manipulating Quranic passages and Islamic doctrine to justify their deeds.

Qutb also drew on radical thinkers such as the Pakistani Sayed Abul A’ala Maududi, his contemporary, and much earlier figures, such as Ibn Taymiyyah. One target of Ibn Taymiyyah’s theological wrath was the Arab Muslims’ Mongol conquerors, converts to Sunni Islam. He charged them with apostasy and declared, furthermore, that anyone who dealt with them or even so much as stood near them when they were being attacked could be killed—even if they were pious Muslims. His rationale was that if the bystanders were sinful Muslims, then it was fitting that they were killed, and if they were devout Muslims and unworthy of death, they’d simply go straight to heaven—thus no harm would be done by killing them. Either way, according to his logic, the killers were committing no sin by killing bystanders.

One doesn’t have to look far in Islamic theology to see how wrong this view is: the Quran states that anyone who kills an innocent person shall be treated “as if he had murdered all of mankind.” That refers to any human being, regardless of religion. It also states: “As for anyone who kills a Muslim deliberately, his repayment is Hell, remaining in it timelessly, forever. God is angry with him and has cursed him, and has prepared for him a terrible punishment.” To this day Ibn Taymiyya’s arguments are used by takfiri terrorists—those who accuse other Muslims of being apostates—to justify the killing of innocent people. Some who subscribe to it don’t have enough knowledge of Islam to know how wrong it is, and others knowingly misuse it to justify violence.

Qutb was hanged in 1966. Beforehand, the regime offered him mercy on the condition that he recant his views, but he refused, allegedly telling his sister, “My words will be stronger if they kill me.” He surely was right in that sense, as his ideas have been used by everyone from Khomeini to bin Laden. Khomeini was fond of employing Qutb’s imagery and conceptual arguments: just as Qutb, for example, compared Nasser (whom he viewed as a tyrant) to Pharaoh, Khomeini likened the shah to the biblical Pharaoh, and by his logic whoever challenged the Pharaoh took on the role of Moses. Given Khomeini’s international prominence as the leader of Iran, his use of Qutb’s ideas and arguments gave them wide circulation in the Muslim world.

In March 1979, one month after the Iranian revolution, Egypt and Israel signed the peace treaty that formally completed the Camp David Accords of the previous year. In the Middle East, the agreement was seen as a betrayal of the Palestinians and undermined the Arab world’s solidarity against Israel. As a consequence, Egypt faced isolation throughout the Muslim and Arab world and was suspended from the Arab League. Islamist radicals in Egypt were enraged: Sadat, in the years before his assassination by extremists in 1981, had tried to sell himself as a religious president, in contrast to Nasser, who battled the Islamists and imprisoned Qutb.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian students attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage in retaliation for the United States’ having allowed the shah into the country for cancer treatment. The failed U.S. rescue attempt in April resulted in the hostages being scattered around Iran; they were not released until January 1981—444 days after they had been seized. While the student leaders who overran the embassy hadn’t sought Khomeini’s approval before they acted, he supported them once it became clear that they were loyal