Brushfire of Freedom
The Irritable Pundit
Hello all!
Get a cup of coffee. This is a history lesson, a view of liberal academia, and an examination of an apologist for Islamic terror. It is going to take some time.
Got that cup? Good.
Now, I’m going to tell you about someone, and in doing so, show the most extraordinary thing. A non-religious religious woman, who crusades for women but defends those who actually abuse and brutalize them. Picture this woman with a coveted “Freedom Prize” in hand as she paves the way for greater enslavement. Now further imagine this oddity lecturing us on terrorism, getting it wrong, and being celebrated for it.
Careful, you almost burned yourself. Welcome to the liberal mindset.
You see, according to this person, our war on terror (foolish in the first place) should not be with Wahhabi Islam as they are not and have never been our enemies. Bin Laden, she specifically points out, was not a Wahhabist. He followed the teachings of Qutb, so he is actually a Qutbist. So we foolish right leaning reactionaries don’t even realize we are fighting a noble and wronged-by-us people and religion.
OK. Got that you rubes? Bin Laden wasn’t a Wahhabi fundamentalist follower of Islam (sometimes also called Salafi, just to confuse John McCain) and Wahhabism isn’t the issue anyway. The only problem is, it is a lie. Let’s call her out on the lie, shall we? Oh! Did I not mention her name yet? Karen Armstrong.
What? You’ve never heard of her?
Don’t stress, she is easy to overlook. A dowdy old English Schoolmarm type, a bit too much jam on the crumpet over the last few decades, and far too much faith in her own brilliance. She is the proto-typical leftist with a twist. The twist is that Karen Armstrong is a leading religious voice among the left, just as long as you ignore the distinct absence of anything remotely resembling actual religious belief.
Come again?
Yes, you heard me correctly. She is one of the greatest religious thinkers of the “Stalin was too conservative” crowd. But she doesn’t believe in an actual supreme being (Tish Tosh!), so much as the supreme light and truth within all person-kind. (insert new age music and rainbows here). One of my favorite examples of this was a statement (In Foreign Policy) that Homo Sapiens are actually “…Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions.” Spot the difference? We are wired to create religions, not actually created by a greater entity. To Karen Armstrong, “We are meaning-seeking creatures”. “Meaning” that Karen Armstrong is actually an old fashioned lefty humanist, wrapped in an ex-believer’s Catholic clothes and speech patterns. A non-believing humanist, defending God without actually believing in God. Wow! How can she not be authoritative on the subject?
There are few awards she hasn’t been given by the glitterati and beautiful crowd. She has become one of the left’s leading voices to explain religion in general and most specifically, Islam. She spends quite a bit of time on that subject actually, having become one of its chief apologists. With an extraordinary mixture of excellent writing skills, reasonable tone, and no small amount of deconstructive feminism, she manages not only to gloss over the extremes of Wahhabi Islam, but also to blithely inject relative arguments condemning all religions (and generally men) as being at fault. This seems to happen most often when something specifically awful happens near the house of Saud. I should also mention she writes for the UK based paper, the Guardian, quite often. Her screeds go over quite well in the Madrassas and Minarets overlooking London. They will doubtless continue to do so right up to the moment Karen Armstrong is forced into a Burqa.
“Call for Schadenfreude, line one!”
Now listen folks. The reason I bring this up is I’ve heard that lie about Bin Laden not “really” being a fundamentalist follower of Islam, but actually a follower of Qutb, repeated several times recently. It’s starting to grate on my nerves.
Most of us know, or think we know, a thing or two about Islam.
Some of us know, or claim to know, a thing or two about Wahhabi fundamentalism.
Very few of us know, or ever even heard of, Qutb.
But for someone to understand the link between them all, then claim ignorance, well that irritates me. Karen Armstrong is entirely too well educated not to realize she lied, that her lie would be used by militant Islam, and that it would be repeated by idiot talking heads.
So, ready for the history lesson?
(ahem)
Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was born somewhere around 1700 (sources differ) and was a bit of a mensch. He was angered by all of the Indian, Bedouin, Persian and other cultural changes somehow becoming a part of Islamic practice. All those new fangled ideas, wealthy and ostentatious dress, houses of worship, shrines, festivals, veneration of this teacher or that Imam, and pilgrimages to the burial ground of so and so. All this happiness and wealth, it was just becoming a bit too much. So this cheerful fellow decided he was going to “unify” everyone, and bring them back to the real roots of their belief! That of their forefathers! Yeah baby! So after studying some 13th century writings, “al Wahhab” (Big Al to his friends… ok not really) gathered together a group of followers and went about the unification tour!
His adherents call themselves Muwahhidun ("Unitarians" or "unifiers of Islamic practice.") I have to point out here that his followers never recognized the irony that by following al Wahhab so devotedly, they were actually making the exact mistakes they wanted to stamp out (veneration of an Imam). Just as well they didn’t see it. They would not have laughed about it, as that was frowned upon. Yes, I’m serious. Can’t you just imagine those guys were great to have at a party? Bottom line: Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was essentially just a fundamentalist reformer.
With a big knife.
You see, apostate Muslims, as well as the usual Christians and Jews, were to be put to death with immediate Paradise promised to his men if they fell in battle. There you go. Problem solved. All unified! How can you not love that logic?
For quite some time al Wahhab travelled from region to region stirring unrest, leaving occasionally by command or threat of death from the local rulers. But you can’t keep a good Imam down, especially after al Wahhab converted the great Mahommed ibn Sa'ud (yes, you read that right, this is the Saud connection) and even married his daughter. He and his descendents became a power to be reckoned with and eventually their belief system controlled much of Arabia, with its influence spreading as close as Egypt and as far as North Africa. Of course all things moderate over time. Wahhabism is no exception.
Fast forward. While it never fully went away, sometime around the 1920s, a Wahhabi revival began under Al Saud rule (three guesses where?). Much like the noted American “Great Revival”, the populace as a whole turned back to the teachings of al Wahhab. This revival brought those quaint teachings (many of which are not actually in the words of the Prophet) back into vogue throughout the middle east. No booze, no smoke, no fancy dress, no education for women, beheadings for rape victims, sometimes no music, occasionally no loud laughing, no crying at funerals. Yes, that sounds like so much fun doesn’t it? Regardless, Wahhabi beliefs have managed to spark mini-revivals everywhere to this day.
The plot thickens. Fast forward again.
One of those revivals happened when an Egyptian Sunni firebreathing terrorist-to-be came the United States, went to school in Colorado, struck out with the hot chicks in the mile high city, got disgusted by it, and went home to join the Muslim Brotherhood. “Who were the Muslim Brotherhood?,” you ask? Let me give you a hint: they blew things up. Anyway, this Firebreather’s name was Sayyid Qutb (pronounced Q-tip, well not really but it’s funny). Anyway, Qutb wanted to fight all modernity, by calling for the killing of those who didn’t go back to the true Islamic teachings of the forefathers. No fun, no booze, no sex, Burqas… sound familiar? Yep! He became a follower of the methods and beliefs of a Wahhabi. “Bag all the babes Achmed!” (love ya always Dennis Miller) “ That will show that Alpha Kappa Alpha Greeley Colorado unholy temptress!”
Qutb was imprisoned for going just a bit too far from time to time, which really cheesed him off. He wrote about it and his ideas for the total cessation of fun in several long and painful screeds to bitterness and bad behavior, most notably ”Signposts in the Road” (1964). Signposts quickly became the ultimate “how to” guide for modern Sunni terrorism. That would have been bad enough on its own, but Sayyid Qutb’s calls for action unfortunately included calls for action against his own government, likely as they had committed the “Faux pas” of having arrested him. Bad move. Egypt took that particular call personally and had him executed, August 25, 1966, for sedition.
Now, let’s state upfront that Bin Laden, a wealthy Sunni scion of the prominent Saudi bin Laden family, and follower of Wahhabism, read and admired the writings of Sayyid Qutb, as he did many others of the same ilk.
From this one truth, Karen Armstrong goes on to make the startling claim in a Guardian article that, “Bin Laden was not inspired by Wahhabism but by the writings of the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by President Nasser in 1966. Almost every fundamentalist movement in Sunni Islam has been strongly influenced by Qutb, so there is a good case for calling the violence that some of his followers commit "Qutbian terrorism." Qutb urged his followers to withdraw from the moral and spiritual barbarism of modern society and fight it to the death.”
See? It isn’t Wahhabi Islamic teachings at fault for the last 200 years of repression of women or violence against non-believers, it was an Egyptian writer who died in 1966! Why? Because he wrote a book about Jihad, that Bin Laden read! Yeah! Oh and that means that Bin laden isn’t REALLY doing all this in the name of Wahhabi Islam either! They are Qutbian! (Hey, can we just forget to mention that whole Saud/Sunni/Wahhabi connection thing?)
By the way, it is true that some observers in the West say those things. Observers like…Karen Armstrong. It is worth noting that Wahhabi followers do not call themselves Qutbian, they call themselves Wahhabis. But what do they know?
Give me a break.
Wahhabi Islam not being the driving force for Bin Laden is a lie. It is a lie based on Karen Armstrong’s awareness that few (if any) have the patience to sift through 200 years of history, to study a half dozen family lines (half of whom have someone named Mohammed in every generation), or to question the celebrated liberal academic masterminds as they happily give each other awards and accolades.
Happily, you have the Irritable Pundit to do it for you. Also, you now have things you can Google away on, and you will not believe the lie when you hear it next.
See you next week!
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