Bizarre error while ./configure-ing PIL

[Matt Gushee]

Hello, folks--

This may be the weirdest thing I've yet seen happen on a Linux
box. I'm running RedHat Linux 5.2 and trying to compile PIL 1.0b1. I
have a feeling this isn't really a PIL- or Python-specific problem,
but just in case anyone's run into this:

[matt at crawdad Imaging-1.0b1]$ ls -dl libImaging
drwxr-xr-x   2 matt     matt         2048 Jun  1 03:26 libImaging
[matt at crawdad Imaging-1.0b1]$ cd libImaging/
[matt at crawdad libImaging]$ ls -l configure
-rwxr-xr-x   1 matt     matt        65845 Jan 10 04:29 configure
[matt at crawdad libImaging]$ ./configure
bash: ./configure: Permission denied
[matt at crawdad libImaging]$ su
Password: 
[root at crawdad libImaging]# ./configure
bash: ./configure: Permission denied

What the --- ?

Extremely puzzledly yours,
Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA