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Friday, July 21, 2006

What they mean by "The Great Satan" 

The Ayatollah Khomeini applied the term to the United States, and it seems reasonable to look to the Qur’an to see what he meant.

Satan is depicted in the Qur’an. There he is neither imperialist nor exploiter, nor murderer nor destroyer - though the US is seen as all those things in Islamist eyes. In the Qur’an Satan is a seducer: "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men" (Qur’an CXIV, 4, 5).

Bernard Lewis (“The Crisis of Islam”) believes the accusation that degeneracy and debauchery is inherent in the American way of life is the most powerful anti-Western charge in the Islamist indictment sheet.

It has been so since before the Iranian revolution: since the 1950s writings of Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb in fact.

Qutb’s name may not - yet - be well-known nor -spelled in the West, but is revered and iconic through the ranks of Hamas, Qaeda, Hizbullah, LeT, JI and all places infidels are valued only as exploding tickets to paradise. Qutb spent 2 years in the United States (in the 1950s) on a study mission on behalf of the Egyptian government.

He returned with insights such as those regarding church hall dances “where people of both sexes meet, mix and touch”, held under the very eyes of ministers “who even go so far as to dim the lights to facilitate the fury of the dance … (T)he dance is inflamed by the notes of a gramophone (and) the dance hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.”

All noted with disgust and condescension. Also quoted by Qutb to support his condemnation of American debauchery are the Kinsey Reports. The terms “a good time” and “fun” are cited untranslated in his work as the shameless ideals most sought by Americans ... and those catered for by their churches.

It's tempting to imagine the power of Qutb's words and views in a western context. He being only one ideologue amongst squillions - like a Malcolm X to American Muslims, perhaps.

However, the Middle East reality is not quite like that. A UN-authorised report on Arab Human development compiled by Arab intellectuals in 2002 estimated that the accumulative total of books - in the Arab world and translated into Arabic - since the ninth century is about 100,000. That's about the average number that Spain translates into Spanish in a single year!

So opinions as powerfully expressed as Qutb's, particularly when they so nicely complement the views bankrolled by Wahabbi or radical Shiite petrodollars, can be assumed to have a fairly profound effect. More so on a population dismayed by the economic gulf between themselves and western countries, a fact brought home by satellite television pictures that visit them on a daily basis.

Little wonder, some say, that alcohol-stacked nightclubs and hotels are regarded as legitimate targets by exploding Islemmings, and that freedoms and equal rights afforded to females are seen as part and parcel of Western “debauchery”. One can easily imagine how the current debate over gay marriage rights must play in Islamist world.

Keep in mind that Usama Bin Ladin, he whose enormous image now adorns Gazan walls as Nasrallah's does Lebanese and Saddam's once did Iraqi, is said to have demanded in his 7-point "Letter to America" of 2002/11, at #2 spot (right after the demand that the US "embrace Islam"), that the US stop its "oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery".



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The Australian's (November 03, 2006) "Cut & Paste" section provided part of a transcript of a television interview (British author Martin Amis, with ABC Lateline's Tony Jones) in which the interviewee talked about the influence of Qutb:

JONES: You clearly don't think the word terrorism adequately describes the Islamist assault on the West. You've coined your own word, horrorism. Why?

Amis: It's a nice distinction, I think. When you are on your sleigh going through Siberia and you hear a wolf howl, that is fear or concern. When the wolf is pounding after your vehicle, then that's terror. And horror is when the wolf is actually there. I think Islamism has turned up the dial of terror, so it becomes horrific. That is their single achievement so far...

(The roots of Islamism) begin with Sayyid Qutb, this amazingly repressed and lustful thinker, so called, who came to America in 1948-49 and didn't like it. I think Islamism is the death agony of imperial Islam, the final twitch in that exploration, but I also think it was very much connected with the formation of the state of Israel and the defeat of six Arab armies simultaneously. I think this was the final straw (in) Islam's dreams of regaining its primary place on the planet, which it enjoyed for a good two or three hundred years...

Jones: You say Sayyid Qutb effectively wrote the Mein Kampf of Islamism. Within it, there are interesting psychological traits which emerge and you exploit them in your essay (The Age of Horrorism, published in The Guardian) to describe a man who appears to be both obsessed with and repulsed by Western sexual mores. How significant do you think those issues were for him and how do those themes go into Islamism today?

Amis: I think it lies very close to the heart of it. The patriarchal superiority of the male is the last bastion of Islam and it's that which horrifies them about modernity. You may be interested to know that in training camps in Afghanistan you'll spend the morning learning about suicide bombing and the afternoon will be spent with acids and asphyxias and so on. But the rest of the day is propaganda about how women are, as your mufti (Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali) pointed out, the troops of the devil. Instilling hatred of women is the other twin pillar of the Islamist project.

Jones: You seem to be suggesting that (Qutb's) mind, in effect, was poisoned by a few encounters with American women.

Amis: Well, yeah. I mean, it's hilarious ... It's almost as if self-examination of any kind is unmanly, unvirtuous, unrighteous. There he is clearly boiling with lust for these wanton American women. He is always talking about their bursting hips and their bulging breasts ... and when he does write about it, he goes into a kind of frenzy of hellfire, although he died a virgin. It is embarrassing to say so, but it does seem to be male insecurity on steroids.


// posted by spinbad @ 21.7.06