Ideas have a habit of outliving their human originators.

In 1966, the Arab nationalist regime in Egypt headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser executed the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Nasser hoped that Qutb’s death would mean the demise of Qutb’s ideas as well. Qutb had formulated a narrative that claimed that Egyptian society was “falling into apostasy” and was therefore “a legitimate target of jihad.”

Nasser’s demise in 1970 saw power fall in the hands of Anwar Sadat. After the 1973 Arab-Israel War, Sadat pulled Egypt out of the Soviet orbit and restored the country’s ties with the US and Saudi Arabia. On the insistence of the Saudi monarchy, Sadat lifted the ban on Islamist organisations.

These organisations were now free to proliferate Qutb’s ideas through print media, and groups active on campuses. The ideas managed to permeate various segments of the Egyptian intelligentsia, state and society. Qutb’s writings also became popular among jihadists fighting an insurgency against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Ironically, Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by militant Islamists who too were inspired by Qutb’s ideas.

Often outliving their originators, ideas often morph to take new and different forms. Before they become detrimental to constitutional politics, however, they must be constrained, neutralised and demystified

Interestingly, whereas the Egyptian state was largely unable to fully eradicate Qutb’s ideas, these ideas were successfully challenged by Islamists whose actions had previously been inspired by Qutb’s writings. In 2010, the once notorious Egyptian Islamist Abdel-Moeim Moneeb published Murjeeat al-Jihadiyeen [Jihadist Renunciations] which cataloged the counter-narrative of former Islamist ideologues.

They rationalised the need to adopt peaceful (and even democratic) means to achieve political and social goals. The former jihadists also critiqued and reassessed Qutb’s ideas of armed jihad.

In England, a lot of the rhetoric of right-wing pro-Brexit groups contained ideas that were first popularised by Enoch Powell in the 1960s. The Cambridge-educated Powell was an articulate British scholar and politician, who became fluent in various languages, including Urdu. In 1968, he suddenly shot to notoriety when he delivered a speech against the Race Relations Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race.

Powell angrily lamented that the way the British government was allowing thousands of South Asian and West Indian immigrants into the country was like “watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He said the Race Relations Act was discriminatory towards the native (white) population.

Nevertheless, Powell spent the next many years insisting he wasn’t a racist but a realist. In a 1969 interview, he said that he would have similar views even if Russians or Germans were allowed to migrate to Britain in the manner in which West Indians and South Asians were.

Powell’s 1968 speech was converted into a narrative woven by UK’s right-wing anti-immigration groups and by Eurosceptics. Nigel Farage is an example. He was one of the main architects of the Brexit movement, which successfully campaigned to pull Britain out of the European Union.

Farage’s Brexit Party modified Powell’s anti-immigration and Eurosceptic ideas to convince the electorate that Brexit would work as a bulwark against immigration, and against the influence of the European Union on British politics and economy. According to Farage, “Powell’s language may seem out of date now, but his principles remain good and true.” In June 2016, 51.9 percent of Britons voted in favour of Brexit.

Veer Savarkar was the founder of ‘Hindutva’, a Hindu supremacist ideology. He had formulated it in 1922 as an antithesis of not only Muslim nationalism, but also Indian nationalism, which was mostly being shaped by secular Hindu ideologues.

Savakar’s desire to form a ‘Hindu rashtra’ [Hindu nation] was often understood as a political-theocratic idea, even though Savarkar was an atheist. He explained Hindus as a people whose ancestors were born in the region and then subjugated and subdued by outsiders. He saw Hindus [as opposed to Indians] as a national whole, but not as a homogeneous theological entity, as latter-day Hindu nationalists do.

Read: What is Hindutva?

It was the more theologically-minded Hindu nationalists who adopted Savarkar’s ideas. But these ideas remained on the fringes of Indian society, and were systematically kept away from the political mainstream by the country’s founding party, the Congress. Savarkar passed away in 1966, and his name almost vanished from public life and memory.

From the 1990s onwards, however, his ideas exploded into the mainstream with the weakening of Indian secularism, and a rise in popularity of Hindu nationalism in India. In 2001, a film was released on Savarkar’s life and ideas and, in May 2022, the Indian PM Narendra Modi paid tribute to Savarkar, calling him “the hardworking son of Maa Bharti [Mother India].”

In Pakistan, many commentators have compared Imran Khan’s style of politics with that of Z.A. Bhutto’s. According to them, Khan’s ways are inspired by the brash manifestations of masculine populism and demagogic displays of brinkmanship that Bhutto often exhibited.

This style of politics was shaped by Bhutto with the aid of ideas that were largely forgotten. In the 1940s, some aspects of the ‘Pakistan movement’ were bolstered by expressions of masculine/muscular populism. This saw the emergence of slogans such as ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya, la ilaha il-Allah’ [What does Pakistan mean, there is no God but Allah], even though Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah was not very comfortable with this.

But the most interesting example in this regard was the publication of a pamphlet called ‘Scheme’. It was authored by Abdus Sattar and Ibrahim Chishti and, in it, they put forward the idea of a ‘Khuda Mard’ [the faithful strongman, a fusion of Muhammad Iqbal’s shaheen or falcon and Nietzsche’s Übermensch or superman].

In boastful, macho language, ‘Scheme’ predicted the rise of a ‘Khuda Mard’ after the Muslims would “cleanse” themselves from within and “renew their mission for world domination.” The ‘Khuda Mard’ had no issues in calling people of other faiths, “worse than animals.” Sattar and Chishti issued an image of the ‘Khuda Mard’ mounted on a white horse and standing on top of a globe.

Consciously or otherwise, Bhutto and Khan saw themselves as the ‘Khuda Mard’ — gallant, macho saviours who would slay Pakistan’s and Islam’s enemies. Indeed, such ideas and fantasies are detrimental to constitutional politics. But these ideas don’t end with the end of their carriers. They need to be kept in check through constitutional means and neutralised through the demystification of the romanticised histories present in our textbooks.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 14th, 2022