ProfessorMurder

Reading up on UBL, one (thin) connection seems to be overlooked that might explain alot.

Landscapes of the Jihad: militancy ... - Google Book Search
(Find Word "sufi") Ch. Mystics, Heretics, and Messiahs
(Similarities between sufi and taliban)



Searching for Sufis < Killing the Buddha
(The Secrecy and Co-opt other religions)

From 1917 to about 1929, the Sufis inspired Islamic rebels (the Russians
called them basmachi -- bandits) to fight the modern era’s first jihad.

That some weathered old Sufi, a master for decades at
evading the secret police, would suddenly emerge after 70 years underground just for me?

But guess what? I’d been hoodwinked.

I met an American diplomat, perhaps a spook. Certainly a senior Asia hand,
fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Urdu, a former academic with a PhD in Persian
literature. He noticed my little grapes amulet, still faithfully pinned to my only
sweater. He asked where I’d gotten it and I explained.

“In the book bazaar? You mean the little shop on the left? Down the stairs?”

Yes. But how did he know?

The diplomat was an expert on classical Persian poetry, most of it religious,
so he knew the Sufis well. Where I’d met the handsome bookseller, he said,
was the understated headquarters of a Sufi order that had inspired the
basmachi. The ones I’d set out to find. I thought I’d found no Sufis, yet they
had found me, before the train I’d taken to reach them had even left the
station. Hidden so well, I didn’t notice even when he pinned his logo right above my heart.


Jesters, indeed. He had made me the fool in a mystical fable. I could find
what I was after only by looking at myself.

Later, of course, more questions arise. For example: Why grapes? One
answer came in Sheikh Idries Shah’s book The Sufis, which has a whole
chapter called “The Travelers and the Grapes.” It includes this famous Sufi tale:

Four traveling companions, one Persian, one Arab, one Greek and one Turk,
become hungry. With just a coin between them, they begin to argue.

“I want angur,” says the Persian.

“I want uzum,” says the Turk.

“I want inab,” says the Arab.

“But I want stafil,” says the Greek.

A Sufi takes their coin and shortly, returns with grapes - angur in Persian,
uzum in Turkish, inab in Arabic, stafil in Greek.

The Sufi Side of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda Brothers

November 23, 2005 Printer Friendly

Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) in 1928 founded the Egyptian Society of the
Muslim Brothers (also known as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Brotherhood,
Brothers), which is Egypt’s oldest and most influential fundamentalist Sunni
Muslim group. An offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, called the Egyptian Islamic
Jihad (led by Sunni Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri), fused with Al Qaeda (led by
Sunni Saudi Osama bin Laden) to form Qaeda al-Jihad in June 2001. What is
less well known to some people is that the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda—
and their fusion group Qaeda al-Jihad--are Sufi-based Islamist movements
and that they became so through the influence of Sufi-Sunni Egyptian Hasan
Al-Banna. The strong Sufi influence helps explain the “disciplined
emotionalism” of Qaeda al-Jihad leaders and their disciples, and its rejection
of science, knowledge, and learning as the way to better the lives of Muslims
around the world.
Hasan al-Banna launched the Society of Muslim Brothers in March 1928.
Though immersed in Sufism for most of his life, he determined that Sufism
was not perfect. By contrast, he came to understand that Sufism inspired
and justified a spiritual withdrawal from life that eventually led to a socially
useless existence.

Al-Banna also moved away from Sufism during his middle years because it
was a movement within Islam that tended to divide the umma.

Al-Banna thus transferred his Sufi ardor from “isolated spirituality” to “social
spirituality.” For the Muslim Brothers, this meant that in
addition to the mystical aspect of the dhikr and the spiritual discipline
gained thereby, there was an obligation to enter the
world and exert effort (which he called “jihad")
towards the solution of social problems affecting
Muslims.


Otowi: bin Laden the Sufi

What Sect Does Osama Bin Laden Really Belong to?


"…But if one man deserves the title of intellectual grandfather to Osama bin
Laden and his fellow terrorists, it is probably the Egyptian writer and activist Sayyid Qutb."


- Robert Worth, The New York Times


As a result of the wealth which the Bin Laden Corporation generated, Osama
Bin Laden used his family's money to live a carefree and luxurious lifestyle.
Because of this, he never managed to exert himself to sit with any of the
Muslim scholars, really seek knowledge, or ground himself in the fundamentals
of Islamic beliefs. This state of ignorance continued even after he became
religious and went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. The fact that
he failed to take advantage of studying under the guardianship of the elder
scholars of Saudi Arabia led him to mix instead with the Qutbists, a newly
arisen sect.

Eventually, he completely dismissed the methodology of the "Wahhabis" and
expelled many of its people from the fold of Islam. Therefore, how could it be
considered correct to say that Osama Bin Laden is a "Wahhabi"? In actuality,
Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement are not "Wahhabis", but rather,
Qutbists.


The Existence of Qutbism as an Ideology


In an article titled "Terror, Islam and Democracy," Ladan and Roya Boroumand
correctly state that "Most young Islamist cadres today are the direct
intellectual and spiritual heirs of the Qutbist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood."

They state that: "When the authoritarian regime of President Gamel Abdel
Nasser suppressed the Muslim Brothers in 1954 (it would eventually get
around to hanging Qutb in 1966), many went into exile in Algeria, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Morocco. From there, they spread their revolutionary
Islamist ideas - including the organizational and ideological tools borrowed
from European totalitarianism."


Expanding upon the link between European revolutionary ideologies and the
dogma of Qutbism, The Independent's John Gray argues in an article
entitled "How Marx turned Muslim" that Qutbism is not rooted in the Islamic
tradition, but rather, is very much a Western based ideology.


He explains that Sayyid Qutb "incorporated many elements derived from
European ideology into his thinking," and as such, Qutbism should be seen as
an "exotic hybrid, bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic
intelligentsia with radical western ideologies."


Gray explains that Qutbism is a modern revolutionary movement and
unrepresentative of the orthodoxy of true Islam:


"The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Quran, but the current
of western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard
and Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical
Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century Europe's
experience of 'the death of God' as to anything in the Islamic tradition.
Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist ideology, it is
unmistakably modern."


Speaking about the incontestable link that exists between Bin Laden and
Qutbism, the Arab News' Amir Taheri said: "In time, Maudoodo-Qutbism
provided the ideological topos in which Bin Ladenism could grow."

Shaykh Rabee' ibn Hadi al-Madkhali, the renowned Salafi scholar who has
written several books refuting the mistakes of Sayyid Qutb, concludes the
following about Qutbism: "The Qutbists are the followers of Sayyid Qutb…
everything you see of the tribulations, the shedding of blood and the
problems in the Islamic world today arise from the methodology (of this man)."



Introduction to Sufism
(Sufi Lodges, Orders, Fraternaties, Initiations, Hand Holding, Mystics,
Esoteric, Sufi Initiate pledge to a Sufi-master, The ritual of "initiation" into
the order is ordained by the Sufi master of that particular order.
Sufism is correctly referred to as Islamic mysticism)

__________________
"No contaban con mi astucia!"