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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?