1970s and early ’80s the university’s lecture rooms were buzzing with some of the most radical and potentially subversive ideas to be heard in the Middle East.
For nearly twenty years, starting in the days of pro-Soviet President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the Saudi government had been giving refuge to the God-fearing opponents of the Arab world’s secular regimes—and particularly to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the underground soldiers of Allah who were at risk of torture and death in Nasser’s political prisons. It was a matter of policy, part of King Faisal’s strategy of combating godlessness at home and abroad. Sober, purposeful, and above all devout, the exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood provided the Kingdom with a disciplined cadre of teachers, doctors, and administrators at this formative moment in the country’s development. Thousands arrived to stiffen and staff the expanding Saudi infrastructure, particularly the ministries, universities, and schools, where they inculcated children with the need to be virtuous young Muslims. Female members of the Brotherhood, many of them from Syria, were particularly successful at persuading their teenage pupils to shun degenerate Western culture and to wear the full veil, the niqab.
The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was himself a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian who blamed the weakness of the Arabs on their failure to follow the “straight path” as commanded by God at the beginning of the Koran. The key to gaining strength, Al-Banna believed, was not to become more Western. Muslims should do quite the opposite, searching for their answer in the pure and original message that God delivered to the Prophet—though that did not stop Al-Banna from adopting some of the West’s political techniques. As he studied the success of the Communist and Fascist parties in 1930s Europe, he built the Brotherhood around a structure of self-contained cells (he called them usar— “families”), while using sport and physical fitness, Hitler Youth-style, to attract young recruits. He developed his own, Islamic form of the Boy Scouts, and he made sure, like Hamas and Hezbollah today, that those who supported the Brotherhood were supported in turn by a grassroots network of social facilities, particularly schools and health clinics. These were often more accessible and efficient than anything provided by the state.
Al-Banna founded the Brotherhood in 1928. The movement’s eloquent modern campaigner was Sayyid Qutub, also from the Egyptian school system, in this case a schools inspector who had been sent on a training course to America in the late 1940s and had returned home horrified at the moral laxity of the West. Qutub was particularly appalled by the sexually explicit style of Western women, which he noted in compulsive detail: “expressive eyes and thirsty lips . . . round breasts, full buttocks . . . shapely thighs, sleek legs.” His views were further soured by some unpleasant encounters in New York and Colorado when his Arab looks became the object of racial prejudice.
Hassan Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949, allegedly by King Farouq’s secret police, after building up his welfare network and a pious membership that came to number millions. Sayyid Qutub was imprisoned and eventually hanged by Nasser in 1966. But his brother Mohammed escaped to Jeddah, to be welcomed at Mecca’s university of Umm Al-Qura (“Mother of Villages”—one of the names bestowed on Mecca by the Prophet), where he gave lectures that propagated Sayyid’s call to reject the West:
Look at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury and so many other injustices. . . . Look at this “individual freedom,” devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law.
The Western habit of dispatching parents to retirement “homes” struck Sayyid Qutub as typical of what one Iranian critic would later describe as
For nearly twenty years, starting in the days of pro-Soviet President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, the Saudi government had been giving refuge to the God-fearing opponents of the Arab world’s secular regimes—and particularly to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the underground soldiers of Allah who were at risk of torture and death in Nasser’s political prisons. It was a matter of policy, part of King Faisal’s strategy of combating godlessness at home and abroad. Sober, purposeful, and above all devout, the exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood provided the Kingdom with a disciplined cadre of teachers, doctors, and administrators at this formative moment in the country’s development. Thousands arrived to stiffen and staff the expanding Saudi infrastructure, particularly the ministries, universities, and schools, where they inculcated children with the need to be virtuous young Muslims. Female members of the Brotherhood, many of them from Syria, were particularly successful at persuading their teenage pupils to shun degenerate Western culture and to wear the full veil, the niqab.
The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was himself a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian who blamed the weakness of the Arabs on their failure to follow the “straight path” as commanded by God at the beginning of the Koran. The key to gaining strength, Al-Banna believed, was not to become more Western. Muslims should do quite the opposite, searching for their answer in the pure and original message that God delivered to the Prophet—though that did not stop Al-Banna from adopting some of the West’s political techniques. As he studied the success of the Communist and Fascist parties in 1930s Europe, he built the Brotherhood around a structure of self-contained cells (he called them usar— “families”), while using sport and physical fitness, Hitler Youth-style, to attract young recruits. He developed his own, Islamic form of the Boy Scouts, and he made sure, like Hamas and Hezbollah today, that those who supported the Brotherhood were supported in turn by a grassroots network of social facilities, particularly schools and health clinics. These were often more accessible and efficient than anything provided by the state.
Al-Banna founded the Brotherhood in 1928. The movement’s eloquent modern campaigner was Sayyid Qutub, also from the Egyptian school system, in this case a schools inspector who had been sent on a training course to America in the late 1940s and had returned home horrified at the moral laxity of the West. Qutub was particularly appalled by the sexually explicit style of Western women, which he noted in compulsive detail: “expressive eyes and thirsty lips . . . round breasts, full buttocks . . . shapely thighs, sleek legs.” His views were further soured by some unpleasant encounters in New York and Colorado when his Arab looks became the object of racial prejudice.
Hassan Al-Banna was assassinated in 1949, allegedly by King Farouq’s secret police, after building up his welfare network and a pious membership that came to number millions. Sayyid Qutub was imprisoned and eventually hanged by Nasser in 1966. But his brother Mohammed escaped to Jeddah, to be welcomed at Mecca’s university of Umm Al-Qura (“Mother of Villages”—one of the names bestowed on Mecca by the Prophet), where he gave lectures that propagated Sayyid’s call to reject the West:
Look at this capitalism with its monopolies, its usury and so many other injustices. . . . Look at this “individual freedom,” devoid of human sympathy and responsibility for relatives except under force of law.
The Western habit of dispatching parents to retirement “homes” struck Sayyid Qutub as typical of what one Iranian critic would later describe as
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