While reading a Guardian profile of Ayatollah Khamenei by Jason Burke, I stumbled across something very interesting. Ali Khameini, the Iranian Supreme Leader, an avid reader of Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck, was also the first translator of Syed Qutb into Farsi.
“He met thinkers who sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create new ideologies, and liked works describing the ‘westoxification’ of his country”, writes Burke.
Qutb, whose most famous ideological disciples include Abdullah Azzam, Al Zwahiri, and Osama Bin Laden, was a descendant of Indian migrants to Egypt. As an Arabic magazine editor, he supported the initial career of none other than the celebrated Egyptian writer and Nobel Laureate Nagib Mehfouz.
I remember reading about his two year stint in Greeley, Colorado, as a middling Egyptian education department bureaucrat, for the first time in Martin Amis’ four part essay post-9/11, ‘The Age of Horrorism’.
Not surprisingly, the Mahaguru of Jihadists, also delved into the works of historians Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Tonybee, whose main theme was the decline of western civilization.
Influenced in America
A Muslim Brotherhood leader, and one-time ally of Gamel Abdel Nassir, Syed Qutb was hanged in 1966 for a plot to assassinate the Egyptian leader. Over the years, the legion of his Islamist disciples would take his clarion call of Jihad against the West too seriously.
Just like Wang Huning, the Chinese communist party top leader who wrote a fierce polemic on America in the 90s – and following the long tradition of French writers, beginning with Alexis De Tocqueville, who wrote critical travelogues on America – Qutb wrote a short book titled ‘The America I Saw’ in 1950( it’s available to download on the CIA website).
Qutb’s rambling obsessions ranged from Julius Evola style tirades against modernism, to empty spaces, to proclaiming America as a window to a pre-fabricated soulless future. But the primary fixation of this life-long celibate was American women and their conduct. There are prurient anecdotes ranging from a coquettish nurse to a drunk woman who almost fell over him at a university party.
What Qutb feared most was not the churches or evangelicals. They have been labelled as crowd gatherers and theatre managers. The nascent burgeoning of sexual freedom in America and its percolation across the nation was the biggest source of dread for him. This was the era when Betty Paige was the most popular pin-up girl, and the pill revolution was around ten years ahead.
The American essayist Mary Eberstadt has written a book Primal Screams where she blames the Sexual Revolution for the rise of identity politics in America. In a somewhat similar fashion, the fear & loathing of Qutb and the first batch of Pan Islamists was not American pizzas, Coca-cola bottles, or canned sardines but the incipient sexualization of mass culture, and its wholesale export.
The modern Islamist fear and obsession with women’s attire and the imposition of black burkha, which translates into cordoning women from public spaces, dictating life choices, and routine misogyny, is also most vividly expressed by Syed Qutb.
“The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in the expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, the shapely thighs, sleek legs, and she shows all this and does not hide it”, writes Qutb in his travelogue. Prima facie it reads like an excerpt from a pornographic magazine.
He further continues his lurid gazing, “She knows it lies in the clothes: in bright colours that awaken primal sensations, and in designs that reveal the temptations of the body – and in American girls these are sometimes live, screaming temptations”.
Martin Amis called Qutb’s book Milestones, the ‘Mein Kampf of Islamism’. The roots of the Iranian regime’s fixation with the mandatory Hijab in the face of severe protests trace all the way back to Qutb.
Instagram Reel Politics
Emily Ratkajowiski, the ‘My Body’ writer feminist model and performer, who got famous as a ‘sex symbol’ following the Robie Thickie song Blurred Lines, has shared a pic with Zohran Mamdani, while wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’. She has over 30 Million followers on Instagram, and goes without saying, from every corner of the globe.
America doesn’t just export weapons, technology, and dollars, it also exports the culture of narcissism, libidinal economy, and its political pathologies, anxieties, and indulgences. This is one reason why people globally take excessive interest in the US political theatre, or why Mamdani is global news.
The Hitchens dictum, which he borrowed from Trotsky, of America simultaneously being the most conservative as well as the most radicalizing influence on the whole world, is undeniable.
Allama Iqbal said about the Islamic state that politics & religion can never be separated, and if they are, the end result is barbarianism( Juda Hota hai Deen Siyasat se toh Rehjaati hai Changezi). Similarly, in the US, it’s money and the eros, the ultimate signal of power and glory.
Whether it’s the old hawk Henry Kissinger dating Hollywood actresses Jill St. John and Shirley McLaine(The Red Diary Vogue photoshoot fame), and pronouncing ‘Power is an aphrodisiac’, or Madonna titillating male Democrat voters, or the new space voyager Katy Perry telling to reward fuck your partner if he does household chores in a podcast, glamour and sex are an integral part of US pop discourse. And whether in pop culture, or cinema, the contagion spreads.
Michael Clouscard, the French philosopher, wrote a book Le Capitalisme de la séduction in the 1970s which loosely translates into Seduction Capitalism. The book remains untranslated into English till date.
In the era of attention economy, it can certainly offer cues into the commodified mass culture of desire, longing, and the interplay of political and pop culture.
