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How Islam Has Been Hijacked
(Wall Street Journal) Aly Salem - Sayyed Qutb was the principal theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood and the intellectual impetus behind the Islamist parties it spawned. Qutb's ardent disciples included Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri of al-Qaeda. It is not an exaggeration to say that Qutb is to Islamism what Karl Marx is to communism. Qutb concluded that the reason for the Muslim world's decline were external cultural and political influences that diluted Islam. The only path to an Islamic renaissance was to cleanse Muslim societies of these contaminants and restore Islam to its seventh-century purity. Today, Qutb's outlook - Islamism - is the dominant political ideology in most Muslim-majority countries. Polls by the Pew Research Center indicate that in many Muslim countries, the population is overwhelmingly in favor of veiling for women, the death penalty for leaving Islam and stoning as punishment for adultery; rabid anti-Semitism is rampant. In Egypt, veiling was virtually extinct until the Islamists resurrected the practice in the 1970s. Today an estimated 90% of Egyptian women are veiled.