Religion and violence

Ibn Khadun^[1], an observer and well-informed analyst of society in his time made clear the importance of exterior influences on religious conduct: these might depend on what generation you belonged to, your background or your class. Now, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Egyptian society had for some decades experienced major economic and social shocks from urbanisation, industrialisation, the increasing integration of its economy into world markets, new forms of education, and the significant presence of a European population occupying government posts as well as an influx of population from the Near East. Two social processes began to converge: that of Nahda^[2] and that of Islah^[3] .

The search for reform led to the emergence of dozens of Islamic groups, from the most moderate to the most violent. The Muslim Brotherhood movement was, therefore, not the only one, but it was certainly the most important. At its heart, it was Sayyid Qutb who justified and theorised the recourse to violence in order to 'defend Islam': “If I had my way”, he wrote, “I would have founded a school of revolt.” His most important work was entitled In the Shadow of the Qu'ran. He defined the battle as a struggle for internal purification. The most significant section was his introduction to Surah 8, Anfal , and to Surah 9, Tawba. In his essays entitled Social Justice in Islam and Waymarks, he took from Maududi the concept of hakimiyya^[4] which led him to reject the notions of 'legislative power' and 'executive power' assimilated in pre-Islamic practices. He developed the double category of takfir wa hijra^[5] . For Qutb, man must consider himself to be uniquely the substitute for God on earth, he must return to his original natural state and think of himself only in the collective community of Islam, having rejected all other forms of distinction, notably country, nation and 'ethnicity'.

These references were taken up, simplified and amplified, by his disciples from the 1970's: for them, all forms of human sovereignty, at whatever level, were opposed to God's, and many practices and beliefs should be fought against because they were suspected of being idolatry. After 1979, inspired by the success of the Iranian revolution, whose objectives could not all be shared as the new regime was founded on explicit reference to Shi'ism, they believed that the time had come to overthrow those regimes which were weakened by authoritarianism and corruption. The intellectual Faraj Fuda^[6] , who was the target of militants of 'political Islam' and who was its victim, distinguished three trends in the 1980's:

- the traditional tendency, moderate in its attitude to violence, which considered it was possible to achieve its objectives primarily in winning the support of the populace, but whose final objectives seemed elusive .

- the revolutionary and putschist tendency, a section which had broken with precedent and branched out into several organisation, the most powerful of which was Al-Jihad. Its leaders affirmed that force and violence was necessary in the process of change.

- The institutional tendency, benefiting from state support and increasing financial resources. Its representatives had been successful notably in Saudi Arabia and they believed it would be possible to install in Egypt a similar system to that which pertained in the Wahhabi Kingdom founded in 1932. They defended economic liberalisation where the only tax was a religious one (zakat^[7] ), thus allowing business and the wealthy to enrich themselves and give generously to the people, whose sole concern should be scrupulously to fulfil religious requirements in order not to risk falling into moral depravity.