Islamists might have their own agenda

Something that you do not see everyday on Comment is Free, an article pointing out that Islamists might have their own agenda. He reached this radical departure for a person writing for the guardian through using a technique new to the pages of that august institution. He took the Islamists as actually meaning what they say, and not imposing a narrative of imperialist opression on top of them. Shocking.

His [Qutb's] extraordinary project, which is still emerging, was to take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins. For him, that was a state of divine oneness, the complete unity of God and humanity. Separation of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, science and theology, mind and spirit - these were the hallmarks of modernity, which had captured the west. But Islam could not abide such divisions. In Islam, he believed, divinity could not be diminished without being destroyed. Islam was total and uncompromising.

A system that forces people to live in one certain way, a system that is total and uncompromising, totalitarian. And like all totalitarian systems Islam is based around placing the supposed needs of the collective far above the individuals that it contains.

one of the most powerful of such ideologies has been, in very different forms, an appeal to oneness: oneness of nation and ethnos (Nazism); one-ness of class and party (communism) and oneness of faith, state and thought (Islamism).