Read Online Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani - Free Book Online

with its own “armies, hospitals, schools, factories and enterprises,” the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser’s prisons, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prison. The experience of such brutal repression under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a radical orientation in Egyptian Islamist thought. The second influence, a more theoretical one, came from Marxism-Leninism, already the most important alternative to political Islam in intellectual debates on how best to confront arepressive secular state that had closed off all possibilities of democratic change.
    Sayyid Qutb is the most well known among the intellectual pioneers of radical political Islam, a movement that now stands for a radically reformulated notion of jihad , a doctrine shared by all Muslims, and now hotly contested. The debate around radical political Islam is thus increasingly a debate on the meaning of “jihad.” Concern for the umma, the Muslim community, is part of the five pillars (rukn) of Islam and is binding on every Muslim. The Koran insists that a Muslim’s first duty is to create a just and egalitarian society in which poor people are treated with respect. This demands a jihad (literally, effort or struggle) on all fronts: spiritual and social, personal and political. Scholars of Islam distinguish between two broad traditions of jihad: al-jihad al-akbar (the greater jihad) and al-jihad al-asghar (the lesser jihad). The greater jihad, it is said, is a struggle against weaknesses of self; it is about how to live and attain piety in a contaminated world. Inwardly, it is about the effort of each Muslim to become a better human being. The lesser jihad, in contrast, is about self-preservation and self-defense; directed outwardly, it is the source of Islamic notions of what Christians call “just war,” rather than “holy war.” Modern Western thought, strongly influenced by Crusades-era ideas of “holy war,” has tended to portray jihad as an Islamic war against unbelievers, starting with the conquest of Spain in the eighth century. Tomaž Mastnak has insisted, “Jihad cannot properly be defined as holy war“: “Jihad is a doctrine of spiritual effort of which military action is only one possible manifestation; the crusade and jihad are, strictly speaking, not comparable.” At the same time, political action is not contradictory to jihad. Islam sanctions rebellion against an unjust ruler, whether Muslim or not , and the lesser jihad can involve a mobilization for that social and political struggle.
    Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a “just struggle” has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan—until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century.
    The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Senegambia had been the first African region to come into contact with the Atlantic trading