The essential charter of the jihad movement – its "Mein Kampf" – is Sayyid Qutb’s "Milestones" (1964). Before Qutb toured the United States, between 1948 and 1950, he was best known as an Egyptian novelist, poet, and critic. After his time here, he became famous as an Islamic ideologue and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based think tank and home of theocratic revolution. He achieved martyrdom in 1966, when he was executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. His book lives on. It can be found, in whole or in part, on many of the Internet sites created by Muslim students. 

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Qutb didn’t join the Muslim Brotherhood until 1952 – three years after the assassination of the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, and two years after Qutb’s spell of expatriation in the United States. Firsthand experience of Western jahiliyyah seems to have transformed Qutb from a devout but orthodox believer into the architect of worldwide jihad. His American writing (fragments of it were translated and published by John Calvert last year in the journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations) shows him as a lonely naïf, adrift in a world of lewd temptations. Although Qutb was forty-two when he sailed from Alexandria for New York in 1948 (the Farouk regime was paying him to study American education methods), his voice sounds painfully young. On the voyage out, a "drunken, semi-naked" woman showed up at the door to his cabin, an American government agent, dispatched by Langley expressly to corrupt him – or so he told his Egyptian biographer years later. Qutb’s sense of extreme moral precariousness comes to the fore in every encounter. Few men past the age of forty can ever have felt their immortal souls to be in such danger at a church hop as Qutb did when he attended one in Greeley, Colorado. The pastor, doubling as disk jockey, lowered the lights to impart "a romantic, dreamy effect," and put on a record of "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" (presumably the Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban version, from the soundtrack of the 1949 hit movie "Neptune’s Daughter"). "The dancing intensified…The hall swarmed with legs…Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love." We’re in the psychodrama of temptation here – the language tumescent with arousal, even as it affects a tone of detachment and disdain.

–My Holy War by Jonathan Raban 

You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom…You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

-Osama bin Laden, Letter to America . 

The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn’t a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.

It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife."…One prime objective of England’s Christian warriors in the 1720’s was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground…

–Contra-Contraception by Russell Shorto, in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 7, 2006

You should go read Contra-Contraception, if only to disabuse yourself of any notion that the religious right’s war on abortion has anything whatsoever to do with being pro-life.  It was never about being pro-life.  It was always about being anti-sex.  Ayn Rand said often that the totalitarians of the world were united against one thing and that one thing was the human mind.  Like a lot of her philosophical sermonizing it’s close, but not quite on target.  What they’re united against is the Self, and you never see it more clearly, then in their furious condemnations of sex for its own sake.  If there is anything, any one point, you can get all the tinpot dictators of the world to agree on, secular communist, fundamentalist theocrat, or cult-of-personality strongman, it’s that nobody should ever be allowed to have, as Tristero puts it, "the ecstatic, transgressive, transcendent, life-affirming, overwhelmingly selfish and also ego-obliterating ecstasy that is sex" without their permission.

It’s all about control, and much, much more then control of your body.  Never mind the politics of abortion and who owns your body.  The fight is over ownership of your inner self.  Does your spiritual and emotional life belong to you, or some nebulous outside agency that may be god, or may be society, but is always in the final analysis someone who says they speak for god, says they speak for society.

Humans are fallen creatures, so the rhetoric goes, and we cannot be trusted to manage our own intimate affairs without making a mess of things.  So we must be guided in the paths of righteousness…apparently by other fallen humans who somehow just happen to be less fallen then everyone else.  Rand had a great line about that in Atlas Shrugged:

You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: That you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others – that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omipotent ruler…

Kinda…doesn’t make sense when you think about it.  But that’s exactly what they’re saying to the rest of us.  It’s a fallen world…present company excepted.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous…

State legislatures are debating dozens of bills surrounding emergency contraception, or the "morning-after pill": whether pharmacists have the right to refuse to fill orders; whether it should be made available over the counter; whether Catholic hospitals may decline to provide it to rape victims. To the dismay of many public-health officials, and following the will of conservative Christian organizations, the Bush administration has steadily moved the federal family-planning program in the direction of an abstinence-only-until-marriage program…

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex…

It was just a tad over forty years ago, that states could outlaw the sale of contraceptives, even to married couples, never mind the fornicating heathens.  If you think the American taliban considers promiscuity in the same way the rest of us do, think again.  The war on sex goes right into the bedroom of married couples too.  They think they have the god given right to tell even that fundamental god ordained unit of society, husband and wife, how and when to have sex, and more importantly…why.  Just because you’re a married heterosexual that doesn’t mean you get to enjoy sex either.  You have sex to make babies and for no other reason.  Not to nurture the intimate bond between a couple, and especially not for its own simple joyful pleasure.  Taking pleasure in physical intimacy, let alone emotional and spiritual intimacy, is immoral, because it is selfish.  And selfishness is sinful and wrong because next thing you know, they’ll stop obeying us.

I am not a Randian.  In my early twenties I was enthralled by her books and at 52 it embarrasses me now to go back and read them.  Rand was not an artist.  She was a pamphleteer.  A very, Very verbose pamphleteer.  But she had a profound insight into what morality is, and also into the totalitarian mindset and this passage from The Fountainhead I think is relevant here. 

Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone.  They recognize him at once.  By Instinct.  There’s a special kind of insidious hatred for him.  They forgive criminals.  They admire dictators…The independent man kills them – because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know.

There it is.  And it isn’t envy, it is fear.  The fear of those of us who can cope with the world as it is.  We of the "reality based community".  Yes, sometimes we are afraid too.  Sometimes this poor world frightens us with its cruelty and meanness.  We witness our proudest achievements turned into machineries of death.  We watch appalled as greed destroys what we’d hoped to build. Yet still we try, slowly, painfully, sometimes at great personal cost, to see at the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, because we know we must.  And that is why they hate us.  Not for our sins.  But for our courage.

The past several decades have seen fantastic technological achievements in science and technology.  What was once power that only a handful of large corporations and big governments could house in vast computer rooms, now rests on desktops in homes all over the world.  Music plays from devices that clip to our belts and which have more computational power in them then the computers that worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s.  Information about nearly anything one would want to know in the form of text, images, video, is literally at our fingertips.  Our spacecraft explore the solar system and beam images of distant planets back to us at the speed of light.  Our telescopes reach out and gather light from near the dawn of time.  It can be utterly overwhelming.  As Carl Sagan said it at the end of his novel Contact, for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only though love.  It should surprise no one then, that in our time religious fundamentalism shouts a terrible noise of death and destruction back at civilization, back at love.

They fear the world because they cannot cope.  They fear us because we can, and they hate us for our courage.  So they must control us.  So they must enslave us.  And the only way to completely enslave a person is from within.  Take away from a person all the awe and joy, all the wonder and exuberance of life, and the emptiness you’ve left inside of them might be yours to fill.  That is why there is a war on sex, a war on human intimacy, a war, ultimately, on love.