This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

Now he was about to be offered a new home, a place where he would belong perfectly because it didn’t yet exist, an Islamic state. Each week Rashad and the other members of his study group would immerse themselves in Hizb’s founding texts, which laid out in stunning detail every aspect of what the ideal Islamic state should look like. There were books on law, government, ethics, on how reality was shaped by a priori thoughts. Hizb had been founded in the 1950s by a Palestinian Islamic scholar, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, who had previously been a senior member of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. For al-Nabhani, the creation of Israel was a sign that Muslims were weak, unable to stand up for each other, corrupted by Western notions such as “the nation,” which had splintered them into different countries. It was the very language and concepts through which people saw the world that had to change. At the foundation of Hizb’s approach was the “Islamic personality.”5 This concept held that a person had natural instincts that had to be fulfilled, but training yourself to think in the correct way would channel those instincts into the “right” behavior. So, for example, man has a natural instinct for security, which was articulated in the search for acquiring things and property. Marxism suppressed that instinct and was therefore destined to failure. Capitalism, however, overindulged it and undermined another instinct, procreation, which expressed itself as the need to feel part of a c...