Unforgivable silence

„I always read the Economist magazine. I like many things about it, but I particularly cherish its book reviews. They are cogent and snappily written, and they often deal with books that I don't find reviewed elsewhere. An example is a forthcoming biography of one of contemporary Islam's most important thinkers, Sayyid Qutb. The book gets a good review. It's more than I can say for the Economist itself. Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called "Our Struggle with the Jews." It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons the New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb's views "as extreme as Hitler's." About all this, the Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it's not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as a secondary headline on the Economist review says, "the father of Islamic fundamentalism," and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb's anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe's Jews didn't give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

But so, apparently, are some others who write about him. In his recent and well-received book, The Arabs, Eugene Rogan of Oxford University gives Qutb his due "as one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the 20th century" but does not mention his anti-Semitism or, for that matter, his raging hatred of America. Like the Sept. 11 terrorists, Qutb spent some time in America - Greeley, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; and Palo Alto, Calif. - learning to loathe Americans. He was particularly revolted by its overly sexualized women. Imagine if he had been to New York!”