Sayyid Qutb on the 60th anniversary of his martyrdom (II): a thought in the shadow of experience and the concept of jahiliyya

Almost every stage of Sayyid Qutb's life, which approached sixty years, passed amid intense search, debate and struggle. For this reason, reading his thought only through the logical fabric of the texts he wrote remains incomplete. For Qutb's ideas are not theories produced at a desk in the course of ordinary academic activity; they are ideas formed in constant interaction and dialogue with the experiences he lived. His life changed his thought, and his thought gave direction to his life; between the two there was a powerful exchange that continued to the very end.

One of the most overlooked points about Qutb is that, although he drew an extremely sharp distinction between Islamic society and jahili (pre-Islamic, ignorance-based) society, he persistently refrained from offering a ready-made and detailed model of an Islamic society. This is surprising at first glance. Yet his persistent refraining stems not from his having no answer to give but from his finding it wrong to try to give that answer.

For, unlike those who try to derive a detailed "Islamic state model" from Qutb, in his thought there is no frozen schema of society prepared in advance and waiting to be applied onto history.

The reason for this is simple but extremely important: the Islamic order cannot be designed on paper like a utopia before the formation of the Muslim subject and Muslim society.

Here Qutb's approach to Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) comes into play. Fiqh is not an abstract legal engineering produced in a vacuum and then applied to society. A real Muslim society emerges, encounters real problems, and fiqh produces its answers within this living social experience.

For this reason, Qutb's historicity is not a historicity in the sense advocated by some Islamic modernists, one that means confining the rulings of revelation to past historical conditions. On the contrary, it is a dynamic historicity born of the encounter between the fixed reference of revelation and the changing historical experience of the Muslim subject, consisting of the answers revelation gives to that historical experience.

This point needs to be dwelt on separately. For it is perhaps one of the places most missed by readings that reduce Qutb's thought merely to the debates over "jahiliyya," "hakimiyya" (sovereignty) and "takfir" (excommunication).

What Qutb is after is, before any ready-made state project, a human being and a subject rebuilt in the shade of the Qur'an. Society and politics come after this. For it is Muslims who live Islamic fiqh. If there is no Muslim society that has rightly understood Islam, God, itself and other people, then there is no ground on which Islamic fiqh could become meaningful and be applied.

Indeed, the concept of jahiliyya must be understood within this wholeness of Qutb's thought. Most interpretations find a frightening radicalism in this concept, but the concept, as we stated in the previous article, is not an epithet used to condemn others but a distinction that makes the claim to truth possible. It is the name of the boundary between truth and falsehood, between servitude to God and servitude to a human being, between a person's grounding his existence in reference to God and his absolutizing other authorities. When this distinction is abandoned, Islam can be reduced, within the existing world, to a harmless and comfortable cultural identity, to a handful of symbols and personal rituals. Qutb's objection is precisely to this. According to him, Islam is not a religious belonging a person places in one corner of his life but the re-signification of the whole of his existence by relating it to God.

For this reason, directly identifying Qutb's concept of jahiliyya with the concept of takfir is a facile reduction. His real concern is not to measure individual people's faith one by one and to rule on who is or is not a Muslim. Jahiliyya describes, first of all, a condition of existence, values and social order. A way of life that does not place God at the center of life, at the reason for existence and at the ultimate reference of human actions means, for Qutb, one that has strayed from the logic of Muslim existence. Moreover, that those who do this call themselves Muslims does not in itself invalidate this diagnosis. On the contrary, one of the most important addressees of Qutb's critique of jahiliyya is Muslim societies themselves. In this respect the concept is, before it excludes those outside, a call to awakening and coming to oneself addressed to those inside: it puts to the Muslim the question, "You say you are a servant of God; but are you truly building your life with the consciousness of this servitude?"

Therefore, the severity in Qutb's concept of jahiliyya should not necessarily be read as a severity aimed at expelling people from the circle of Islam. The distinction here is first of all not between Muslim and non-Muslim, but between the existence that servitude to God requires and forms of existence that claim independence from God. A Muslim, too, may in some areas of his life remain under the influence of jahili values, may take part in a jahili social practice, or may transfer to other authorities the absolute authority that should belong to God. Qutb's call in this case is not to cast him out immediately but to call him back to the consciousness of his servitude to God. Indeed, that Qutb himself characterized his own intellectual past with the concept of "jahiliyya" is extremely meaningful in this regard. Had jahiliyya been only a place where "the others" are found, there would have been no sense in his applying the concept to his own past. Seen in this way, jahiliyya becomes, before being an accusation directed at someone else, a category of self-reckoning a person can direct at himself.

What those who find this conceptualization of Qutb's too sharp or "radical" sometimes overlook is that nearly all strong philosophical and religious thought, proceeding from its own claim to truth, produces similar distinctions about the human being's present condition. If a thought makes a serious claim about truth, it inevitably names departure from truth as well. The contents of the concepts here are of course entirely different from one another; but the intellectual operation itself is not foreign.

Let us proceed by unpacking the examples we gave in the previous article: Heidegger's portrayal of modern man as one who has forgotten Being and, immersed in everydayness and das Man (the "They"), has moved away from his authentic existence: how comprehensive a diagnosis of "heedlessness" is this, within his own philosophical language, directed at contemporary man? Heidegger of course does not call this jahiliyya; but he says that modern man has forgotten the fundamental question of his own existence and has therefore deviated from his authentic humanity.

Marx, far more explicitly, sets out to analyze an entire capitalist society through relations that produce alienation, commodity fetishism and false consciousness. People cannot see the true nature of the social world they live in; indeed, the relations they themselves have produced stand before them as though independent powers. Marx's critique too is not merely to blame a few bad capitalists; it is a radical diagnosis of how an entire social order shapes human consciousness and relations. Likewise Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence, while shaking the claim that truth can be grasped as pure, unmediated and wholly "here and now," questions a very long tradition of Western metaphysics by accusing it of having fallen into metaphysical deviation.

None of these says the same thing as Qutb's concept of jahiliyya; but all of them are radical diagnoses, within their own intellectual frameworks, saying that the existing state of consciousness and existence cannot be taken as correct in itself.

Then, instead of regarding Qutb's use of the word "jahiliyya" as a scandal in itself, would it not be more meaningful to ask what he describes with this concept? What really needs to be debated is not whether a thinker can distinguish between truth and non-truth, but by what criteria he makes this distinction and what conclusions he draws from it.

Qutb's criterion is clear: servitude to God. Does the human being recognize God as the source of his existence, the ultimate meaning of his life and the fundamental reference of his actions; or does he transfer the absoluteness that belongs to God to other human beings, powers, ideologies, desires or social structures?

For this reason, reading his jahiliyya discourse merely as a language that "excommunicates the other" misses perhaps the most important dimension of the concept. Qutb's call is not a classification of societies but a continually renewed possibility of self-criticism, in a sense a call for the Muslim to remember his Muslimness anew. What the concept of jahiliyya targets, before ruling on the identity of others, is the Muslim human being's forgetting of his position before God. The idea of "liberation from all servitudes other than servitude to God," which meets us again and again throughout his thought, also gains meaning precisely here.

For Qutb, liberation from servitude to human beings is possible only through the human being's remembering anew to whom he belongs and why he exists.