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

society centered. Iqbal sought to constitute the Islamic umma beyond the nation-state as a broad, borderless cultural community. Finally, Jinnah was a secular Muslim, for whom Islam had become a political identity in colonial India; he pursued a secular, not an Islamic, state ideal, one that would safeguard the democratic rights of both the Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minoritie.
    The single conviction that unites radical Islamist intellectuals is the preoccupation with taking power. They are convinced that the historical moment defined by the collapse of Communism is the moment Muslims must seize to advance Islam as a universal ideology of emancipation. This is how Sayyid Qutb opened his 1963 manifesto of radical political Islam, Milestones:
Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital values for its healthy development and real progress…. Democracy in the West has become sterile to such an extent that its intellectuals borrow from the systems of the Eastern bloc, especially in the economic sphere, under the name of socialism…. Marxism stands intellectually defeated and it is not an exaggeration to say that in practice not a single nation in the world is truly Marxist…. The era dominated by the resurgence of science has also come to an end…. All the nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies that have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories derived from them, have also lost their vitality. In short, all man-made theories, both individualistic and collectivist, have proved to be failures. At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived because it has the needed values.
    The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia (Islamic law) and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances and, therefore, different points of view. It makes for a substantive body of law constantly changing in response to changing conditions. The attitude toward ijtihad is the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered—and progressive from reactionary—Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern Islamic society,state-centered Islamists are determined that the “gates of ijtihad” remain forever closed. Iqbal called for the modernization and democratization of ijtihad, so the law could be interpreted by a body elected by the community of Muslims, the umma, and not just the religious ulama. The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and distinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement.
    The question we face today is not just why a radical state-centered train of thought emerged in political Islam but how this thought was able to leap from the word to the deed, thereby moving from the intellectual fringe to the mainstream of politics in large parts of the Islamic world. Culture Talk cannot answer this question, nor can even the best of its cultural critics, such as Karen Armstrong. Culture Talk sees a clash of civilizations as the driving force behind global conflicts; its critics point to the cultural clash inside civilizations as being more important than the clash between them. Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity—that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both