Free Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Page A

servitude to other humans. It seeks to abolish all those systems and governments that are based on the rule of some men over others, or the servitude of some to others. When Islam liberates people from these external pressures and invites them to its spiritual message, it appeals to their reason, and gives them complete freedom to accept or reject it.
    Indeed, “Islam does not force people to accept its belief, but it wants to provide a free environment in which they will have the choice to believe.”
    Here there is more than just a passing resemblance to the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism. Qutb argued that jihad is a process beginning with the organization of a vanguard, followed by a withdrawal that would make possible both study and organizationand then a return to struggle. Here, Qutb echoed a key dictum of Leninism: “How to initiate the revival of Islam? A vanguard must set out with this determination and then keep going, marching through the vast ocean of jahaliyyah which encompasses the entire world…. I have written Milestones for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.”
    The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi’a identity as the identity of the oppressed, as a project for a humane and just Islamic society. The struggle in revolutionary Iran did not pit just the clergy against non-Islamic intellectuals but also Islamists who were secular against those who were not. Recognizing the threat to the authority of the ulama from an autonomous intellectual reinterpretation of Islam, the nonsecular clergy transformed Shi’ism. In an effort to reorganize the ulama as an institutional hierarchy, Ayatollah Khomeini created an entirely new institution, vilayat-i-faqih , government by jurists. Acting as a trustee of the sovereignty of God, this institution was to function in parallel to civil government, accountable only to the ulama, of whom there were almost one hundred thousand in Iran at the time.
    In the history of the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Sayyid Qutb is identified with the ascendancy of radical Islam in contrast to Hassan al-Banna’s moderation. The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. Had fifteen years of hard labor in Nasser’s camps convinced Qutb that religious and secular intellectuals could not live at peace in the same society? To what extentwas his renunciation of reform through coexistence—and the conviction of the need for a vanguard to wage a fight to the finish—an echo of other contemporary schools of political thought, such as Marxism-Leninism?
    In their preoccupation with political identity and political power, Islamist intellectuals were like other intellectuals, whether religious or not. Islamist intellectuals crafted their ideologies through encounters not only with the ulama but also with these secular intellectuals who ignored the Islamic tradition and drew on other intellectual sources, such as Marxism or Western liberalism. Through this double encounter, they developed political Islam in multiple directions, both emancipatory and authoritarian. Just as it is historically inaccurate to equate political Islam with religious fundamentalism, it also makes little sense to equate every shade of political Islam with political terrorism. Of the four Islamist intellectuals written about here—Mohamed Iqbal, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Abdul A’la Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb—only Mawdudi was an unabashed advocate of creating an ideological Islamic state as the true subject of history. In contrast, Qutb’s thought was more