/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17430645]

Scruton vs Qutb, who was right?


>Our national narrative may change, but what underlies it is something that remains always in place: the secular law. [...] In his parables, Christ emphasized that the secular law is to be obeyed, and that our duty to God does not require us to defy or to replace it. Nor should we pay too much attention to the finicky edicts of the Torah, since ‘the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’.

>To someone raised on the doctrine that legitimate law comes from God, and that obedience is owed to Him above all others, the claims of the secular jurisdiction are regarded as at best an irrelevance, at worst a usurpation. Such is the message of Sayyid Qutb’s writings, and of Milestones (ma‘alim fi’l tariq, 1964) in particular. In that book, Qutb denounces secular law, national identity and the attempt to establish a purely human political order without reference to the revealed will of God: all are blasphemous in Qutb’s eyes. Qutb’s followers have included Osama Bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri

>In what follows, therefore, I shall be appealing to people who identify their political rights and duties in national terms, and who have learned to put God in the place where He belongs.


Qutb
>During my stay in the United States, there were some people of this kind who used to argue with us-with us few who were considered to be on the side of Islam. Some of them took the position of defense and justification. I, on the other hand, took the position of attacking the Western Jahiliyyah, its shaky religious beliefs, its social economic modes, and its immoralities: "Look at these concepts of the Trinity, Original Sin, Sacrifice and Redemption, which are agreeable neither to reason nor to conscience. Look at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury and whatever else is unjust in it; at this individual freedom, devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under the force of law; at this materialistic attitude which deadens the spirit; at this behavior, like animals, which you call 'Free mixing of the sexes'; at this vulgarity which you call emancipation of women, at these unfair and cumbersome laws of marriage and divorce, which are contrary to the demands of practical life; and at Islam, with its logic, beauty, humanity and happiness, which reaches the horizons to which man strives but does not reach. It is a practical way of life and its solutions are based on the foundation of the wholesome nature of man."