From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 22:02:05 MDT
Worth a read. URL in excerpt below.
> IS THIS THE MAN WHO INSPIRED BIN LADEN?
>
> Robert Irwin on Sayyid Qutb, the father
> of modern Islamist fundamentalism
>
>
> Thursday November 1, 2001
> The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,584478,00.html
>
> As the west struggles to get to grips with its newest enemy, pundits,
> scholars and journalists have combed every inch of Osama bin Laden's life
> story for clues to what turned an apparently quiet and unexceptional rich
> Saudi boy into the world's most feared terrorist. But the most useful
> insights into the shaping of Bin Laden may lie not in the rugged
> mountains
> of Afghanistan, or the rampant materialism of 1970s Saudi Arabia, but the
> biography of a long dead Egyptian fundamentalist scholar called Sayyid
> Qutb.
>
> Qutb, regarded as the father of modern fundamentalism and described by
> his
> (Arab) biographer as "the most famous personality of the Muslim world in
> the
> second half of the 20th century", is being increasingly cited as the
> figure
> who has most influenced the al-Qaida leader. Yet outside the Muslim
> world,
> he remains virtually unknown.
>
> Qutb was the most influential advocate in modern times of jihad, or
> Islamic
> holy war, and the chief developer of doctrines that legitimise violent
> Muslim resistance to regimes that claim to be Muslim, but whose
> implementation of Islamic precepts is judged to be imperfect.
...snippage...
> ·Robert Irwin is Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement
-- I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 08 2003 - 22:18:14 MDT