Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 2004, page 90

Book Review

Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern

By John Gray, The New Press, 2003, 145 pp. List: $22.95; AET: $17.

Reviewed by Hugh S. Galford

Al-Qaeda is the contemporary bête noire, the unknown and unknowable monster that strikes without rhyme or reason. The ultimate “other,” the group represents an anachronistic Muslim attempt to bring about global purification through blood. They hate us for our freedom and for our ideals. They are but the latest incarnation of the long line of Muslim groups with total disregard for life, liberty and progress.

Or so goes the conventional wisdom.

In Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, John Gray presents an alternative view of the group, its motives and its philosophical underpinnings. Rather than being a throwback to medieval barbarism, al-Qaeda is a modern movement, one of a number of descendents of the Enlightenment. Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, brings his prodigious knowledge to bear on the issues of modernity, progress and coexistence.

Al-Qaeda, in fact, makes but limited appearances in the book. Gray’s main point is to show that the movement is a by-product of modernization. As such, he looks at the modernization process and ideology as a whole, therefore focusing on its birth and growth in Europe. Moving with authority and ease from the Positivists to modern economists, Gray underscores that the West has experienced—at the hands of other Westerners—the salvational [messianic?] zeal that al-Qaeda demonstrates.

Gray begins his discussion with the Positivists, founded at the turn of the 19th century by Henri de Saint-Simon. For the Positivists, human society passes through a number of stages—from a religious worldview, to a metaphysical view, and finally to a scientific, or positive, stage. At each point, human knowledge becomes more definite and more systematically organized. In the end, when all societies have reached the positive stage, ethics will become an objective science, and the moral and political conflicts of the past will disappear.

In this utopian ideal, difference is to be abolished. As Gray points out, “[w]here there is no conflict, there is no need for power.” A lovely idea, perhaps, but an unsustainable one that led to some of the 20th century’s ugliest creations. It was this train of thought that underlay Marx’s philosophy of communism, an attempt to Westernize Russia through the destruction of the class system. Rapid industrialization—the application of knowledge to human society—and collectivization were meant to make all in society equal. When that equality was complete, the people would be able to define and provide for their needs, and the state would wither away. Of course, in order to attain this paradise, the Soviet Union had to construct its hell of Siberian gulags and exterminate the remaining “bourgeois” members of society.

The Nazis as well took the Positivists’ new religion of science as one of the bases of their ideology. Difference needing to be abolished, the Nazis undertook a massive eugenics campaign—science in the service of society’s good—and killed six million Jews, gypsies, handicapped and homosexuals, in an attempt to create a new, perfect mankind.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the neo-liberals of recent decades have used Positivist ideals in creating a global free-market system. For this group, science leads to the eradication of scarcity, thus eliminating wars over resources. The reality of globalization is much different, with disparities in wealth being exacerbated rather than lessened. Gray points to the disastrous practices of the IMF as an example. Following the mathematical (read, “scientific”) dictates of modern economics—an idea the classical economists never recognized—the IMF prescribes the same program of open and free markets, privatization and end of government controls, regardless of the specific situation. In every case, the given country’s economy has collapsed rather than expanded. Its people have become poorer rather than wealthier, thus increasing the threat of unrest and war.

For Gray, al-Qaeda is yet another example of the malaise produced by post-Enlightenment thought. He rightly points to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s main ideologue in the 1960s, as a basis for al-Qaeda’s philosophy. He also notes that Osama bin Laden was taught by Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid’s brother, in Saudi Arabia. While less extreme than his brother, Muhammad Qutb shared the view that only a proper Islamic worldview—with no dissent and no difference—was the basis for a new, perfect world.

While there are Islamic antecedents to Qutb’s thought, he was equally influenced, unconsciously, perhaps, by Western ideas. One of his central tenets, that of a vanguard of true believers to remake the world, is drawn straight from 19th-century anarchists. The idea that the world can be created anew through violence, an idea al-Qaeda put into practice on Sept. 11, 2001, is another modern construct. While the medieval period was witness to great violence, it was local in effect. The medieval world, despite its upheavals, held firm to the idea of authority. The modern period has worked to undermine, if not topple, central authorities, preferring instead an amorphous global whole.

While al-Qaeda’s main goal, the expulsion of non-believers from the holy land of Saudi Arabia, is local at heart, the Saudi government is supported by global forces and powers. Thus al-Qaeda’s actions are played out on the global stage. The ability to wield a privatized form of violence worldwide was impossible in the past.

Beyond the buildings and lives lost on Sept. 11, al-Qaeda destroyed the Western idea of modernity itself. As Gray writes, “Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign. As societies become more modern, so they become more alike. At the same time they become better. Being modern means realizing our values—the values of the Enlightenment, as we like to think of them.”

Gray shows that the Enlightenment idea of “humanity” is an empty myth. Rather, “there are only humans, using the growing knowledge given them by science to pursue their conflicting ends.” The best hope for the world, Gray argues, is the dismissal of the idea that there is one set of values that define modernity, and that those values must be accepted everywhere. He points to Buddhist India, the Ottoman Empire and Islamic Spain, and China as pre-modern societies where toleration of difference was practiced. Each country today, he argues, should be allowed to develop its own sense of “modernity,” with countries interacting on bilateral terms, respectful of each other’s difference.

“Can we not accept,” he writes, “that human beings have divergent and conflicting values, and learn to live with this fact? It is a strange notion that humanity is destined for a single way of living, when history is so rich in conflict and contrivance.”

Gray’s book is brilliantly and clearly written. Nonetheless, it does take some work—names, dates and ideas come fast and furious. It is also well worth the effort. Stepping back from the pundits’ bickering over specific policies and particular actions, beyond even the discussion of a “clash of civilizations,” Gray locates al-Qaeda and its ideals in the “modern” world’s construct of itself. Rather than a foreign anachronism, al-Qaeda is an entity that we helped create. While no one else has (yet) used al-Qaeda’s tactics on such a grand scale, the movement is a part of—rather than apart from—modernity’s view of what the world should become. Perhaps, Gray suggests, it is we who need to rethink our values.

Hugh S. Galford is director of the AET Book Club.