AT WAR: Treason of the Cleric:The spiritual father of bin Ladenism.

The September 11 terrorists lived for a long period with the certain knowledge that they were preparing their own deaths. Nineteenth-century nihilists and bomb-throwers and Bolsheviks also planned long term to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They moved in circles of poverty and desperation. It is the use of leisure time that separates out today's Islamic extremists from their predecessors in fanaticism and terror.

For a start the September 11 terrorists had plenty of other people's money and credit cards for the easy life. They hired cars and traveled. They bought expensive gadgets and communications systems. As Muslims, they were forbidden alcohol, but they frequented bars, and stood drinks all round. Again as Muslims, they were also supposed not to run after women, but they resorted to call girls and strip joints. A Florida lap dancer, the gorgeous Samantha, informs us that she displayed her charms a few inches from one terrorist, but the fellow then tipped her a lousy twenty bucks. What makes these men particular is that they were about to destroy what they were evidently enjoying.

This ambivalence feeds the hatred of the United States felt by Islamic extremists. In the Islamic world, religion and custom combine to provide strict codes of conduct in public and private life. Like all things human, respect for these codes varies according to time and place. It was the West that introduced Muslims to quite other codes of conduct affecting issues great and small in their society. The challenge seemed all the greater because the West had the power of its science and technology, and the social organization to make the most of this power. Western codes of behavior liberated, even as they alienated, Muslims.

Between the wars, Muslims began to rebuild their traditional code of conduct into systematic resistance to the West. Hassan al-Banna was born in 1906 in Egypt. He became a schoolteacher. The Western way of life, he taught, was materialistic, based on products, with nothing to offer man except "sin, passion, drink, women, noisy gatherings, and showy attractions." Democracy to him only spread degeneracy. As pressure to adopt or imitate Western codes of conduct mounted, al-Banna came to believe that the West intended to destroy Islam "in the hearts of the faithful." What made Muslims special, in his thinking, was their religion, and they had to turn it into a weapon for offense and defense. For that purpose, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant and conspiratorial group that by 1940 or so claimed to have 40,000 members. Al-Banna was shot dead in 1949, probably by the Egyptian secret police, but branches of the Muslim Brotherhood exist today in every Arab country. Some of these branches have joined the establishment, others are still revolutionary; and the secret police keep close watch on them all.

Sayyid Qutb was also born in Egypt in 1906, and he took over and extended the fanaticization of Islam as preached by al-Banna. In the 20th century probably no other Muslim intellectual was so influential. Nothing in his early life seems to explain his development. Intelligent, said to have been unfailingly polite, he spoke good English and passed as cosmopolitan. At Cairo University he studied literature, and afterwards became a modernist critic commenting on books of the day. He had strong opinions about the role of the state in education, and accordingly was sent by the government to the United States to write a report on American education.

From 1948 to 1950 he lived and traveled in America. It would be fascinating to reconstruct his life here. Like the al-Qaeda terrorists today, he seems to have had an enjoyable time, but this only hardened his view that he had discovered the source of all evil. Seventeenth- century Puritans had that cast of mind: Their concentration on rooting out the sins of the flesh acknowledges the almost irresistible force of the temptation they felt. Did some other gorgeous Samantha tantalize Qutb? Was he put down, or patronized? His inquiring politeness, at any rate, transformed into anger and enmity.

Fellow Muslims in America, he said, apologized for themselves "as though they were defendants on trial." He on the contrary was determined to speak out and polemicize. Radical Islam, a pioneering study by Emmanuel Sivan, describes the conclusions to which Qutb came. Christianity with its notions of sin and redemption "made no sense at all." Capitalism was "predicated on monopoly and interest-taking, money-grubbing, and exploitation." American individualism "lacks any sense of solidarity and social responsibility other than that laid down by the law." He attacked "that crass and materialistic perception of life, that animal freedom which is called permissiveness, that slave market dubbed 'women's liberation.'"

Returning to Egypt, he resigned his government job, and became a full- time writer, rising through the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood to become head of its propaganda section. As Islam revealed itself helpless against both American capitalism and Soviet communism, his outlook grew more and more pessimistic and violent. He expounded a doctrine that the whole world was in a state of jahiliyya, an Arabic word denoting pagan barbarity. Pagan barbarians came in three sorts: Westerners (and that included the Soviets), Muslims who had adopted Western ideas, and the Jews who were always conspiring.

Westerners were "culturally poisoning" Islam, and Qutb brought in witnesses to that effect ranging from Arnold Toynbee to (odd as it may seem) the spies and traitors Burgess and Maclean, then in the headlines as they defected to Moscow. The West offered Muslims a model of moral and social depravity. Islam had to wage all-out war against all the types of modernity on offer; no compromise was possible. Muslims who adopted ideas like nationalism or the sovereignty of the people were collaborators, stooges, traitors. More frightful still, these apostate Muslims were willing tools of the Jews, who were even more utterly beyond redemption. A "massive army of Jewish agents in the form of professors, philosophers, doctors and researchers-sometimes also writers, poets, scientists and journalists" were conspiring to weaken and deform Islam. He was the first to label them generically as "Orientalists." The Palestinian-American Edward Said later elaborated a more sophisticated version of this fantasy.

In the Egypt of the Fifties, Gamal Abdul Nasser was advocating nationalism as the basis of an Arab revival, but actually building a Soviet-style one-party state-as complete a dead end in its way as Qutb's Islamic rigidity. To the Muslim Brotherhood this was sacrilege, and they almost succeeded in assassinating Nasser. Qutb duly sanctioned such terror. The Egyptian president responded in kind, and had Qutb and some 20,000 other opponents arrested. Brought to court, Qutb drew attention to marks of torture on his body. In prison for nine years, he wrote books that continue to resonate throughout the Arab world. In 1966 Nasser had him hanged.

More than a disciple, the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden seems like a projection of Qutb. The child of a well-connected Saudi entrepreneur and billionaire, the young bin Laden was also well educated, learned English, and initially became a cosmopolitan. Photographs show him in Western clothes, enjoying himself in Oxford and Geneva and in the U.S., and in the company of girls too. His change of heart is not yet documented, but the sense of helplessness and frustrated power that Qutb had seems to motivate bin Laden as well to wage all-out war against Western types of modernity.

Just as Qutb was willing to use terror to stop Nasser, so bin Laden is prepared to overthrow the monarchy in his native Saudi Arabia. The country resists the presence of foreigners within its borders, and forbids them completely from entering the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (imagine, by the way, the uproar if the Vatican allowed in only Catholics). Permitting American bases on the holy soil-indeed sheltering behind those bases against other Muslims such as Saddam Hussein-King Fahd and the royal family are selling out, nothing less than traitors to Islam. This is Qutb's pagan barbarity, and cause for Islamic war. Instead of arresting him for sedition and hanging him as Nasser hanged Qutb, the Saudi royal family knew that bin Laden had influential friends at court and they merely outlawed him. Weak and unpopular as they are, the Saudi rulers prefer this kind of double- dealing to any forthright decision, and so they end up in tangles of self-inflicted confusion. In the same hope of having things both ways, they subsidized the Taliban who are providing bin Laden with a safe haven in Afghanistan from which to operate against their own interests. Had they been more resolute, they would not now be relying on the United States to eliminate on their behalf so mortal an enemy.

In the cases of Qutb and bin Laden, militant Islam legitimizes the objective of taking power. But in their outlook and language resonates a terrible sense of inferiority. They have to get even. Hate and terror here are the counterparts of the tormenting admiration these men have for the supremacy of the West, and even for the Jews, everlastingly conspiring. It's schizophrenic, and that's the trouble.