Love has to be taught, and few ever learn it. Hatred needs no teacher. The surest way to command a man is not to forbid his hatred but to bless it: give it a target, call it righteousness, and promise it a reward. The teacher who tells him to love his enemy will be admired and ignored. The teacher who tells him that God hates the same people he does will be obeyed to the death.
The Dance in Greeley
In the summer of 1949 a slight, formal Egyptian of forty-two arrived in the town of Greeley, Colorado, to study American methods of education. Sayyid Qutb was a literary critic and a civil servant, a bachelor who wore a three-piece suit in all weathers and loved classical music. His ministry had sent him abroad partly to cool his politics.
Greeley was about as wholesome a town as America could offer. It had been founded as a temperance colony, and alcohol was banned within its limits. The lawns were trimmed. The churches were full.
Qutb was appalled by all of it. He was appalled by the lawns, which he took as proof that Americans cared for nothing but their property. He was appalled by the haircuts, the jazz, and the talk of cars and money. Above all he was appalled by a dance.
One Sunday evening he attended a social in a church basement. The pastor, he wrote afterward, dimmed the lights to encourage the young people and put a romantic song on the gramophone. The room filled with couples. In his account the scene becomes something close to an orgy: arms around waists, lips near lips, the air thick with desire. By any other description it was a chaperoned church dance in a dry town, but he saw the end of civilization in it.
He went home in 1950 a changed man. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood. When the Egyptian state turned on the movement he was arrested and tortured, and in a prison hospital he wrote the book that would outlive him. It is called Milestones, and its argument is very simple. The whole world, he said, has fallen back into the pagan ignorance that preceded Islam. That includes the West, and it includes every society that calls itself Muslim while living by man-made law. Between that ignorance and true faith there can be no compromise or coexistence. A vanguard of real believers must separate itself from the corrupt world and then return to destroy it.
The Egyptian government hanged him in 1966. His book has never been out of print. The founders of al-Qaeda were raised on it.
5 more minutes: Interpretation, The Statesman's Solution, The Sermon at Clermont, The Lesson
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.