"Interestingly, it was Islamism

that inaugurated an autonomous tradition of immanent critique within the Middle East. The influential Egyptian writer, Sayyid Qutb, a contemporary of the Frankfurt School theorists, critically attacked Islamic regimes as a return of the condition of ignorance - the "Jahiliyyah" of pre-Islamic times. Hence present-day Islamic society (Egypt) was un-Islamic. The strategy precisely paralleled the argument of Adorno and Horkeimer in Dialect of Enlightenment, that Western reason, which emerged from myth, had itself returned back into myth. The difference, of course, was Qutb's move to positivity, his affirmation of a return to Islam as stated, literally, in the Qur'an. This affirmation of the true Islam can be seen to mark a definitive break from Western-defined "modernity," allowing for an Islamic model to replace it. But what is interesting about Qutb's understanding of the "self-evidence" of Qur'anic thought, is that it, too, was dependent on the West, in the dialectical sense of critical negation. Islam - the true Islam - appears in Qutb's work as the inverted other of Western modernity: spiritual where the West is materialist; communal where the West is egoistically individual, socially just where the West is greedy and competitive, morally disciplined where the West is negligently libertine. This was, of course, the antithesis of the apologists' strategy of redeeming Islam within the value categories of the West. Redeeming Islam because it was "other" opened the way for endorsing an alternative road to modernity, different from both the capitalist West and the Soviet Union [6] - at the enormous price, however, of affirming neo-patriarchal social forms and opening the door for dogmatic, fundamentalist belief. [7]

-Susan Buck-Morss, "Can There Be a Global Left?," in Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, p. 98