A leading theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) founded by Hassan Al-Banna (see Al-Banna, Hassan), Sayyid Qutb was born in a village in Upper Egypt and like Al-Banna became a teacher before joining the ministry of education which sent him to the United States for further study from 1948-50. While in America he was stunned by what he saw as the high level of support for the newly established State of Israel which had recently been victorious in the first of a series of Arab-Israeli wars. Qutb interpreted this support as a Jewish engineered attack on Islam in which Christianity was complicit. He was also greatly disturbed by what he described as the degeneracy of the American way of life and in particular its materialism and lust.
From Qutb’s perspective there were two interrelated threats to the Muslim world, the external enemy—the corrupting and corrosive influence of the United States and western culture generally—and the internal enemy to which the external enemy had given birth, and which he termed the new jahiliyya or age of ignorance, characterized by the debauchery and indifference to the Islamic way of life that had gripped Islamic society and its new Pharaohs or rulers.
On returning to Egypt from the United States in 1952 Qutb left the ministry of education and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Al-Banna and the Indian/ Pakistani reformer Sayyid Abul Al’a Mawdudi (1903-79), founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami (Society of Islam) his many articles as editor of the Brotherhood’s journal insisted that Islam was and must become once again for Egyptian and other Muslims a complete way of life.
The Muslim Brotherhood saw an opportunity to make this something of a reality in Egypt with the military coup carried out in 1952 in which King Farouk was overthrown by the so-called Free Officers prominent among whom was Gamel Abel Nasser (191870), the future president and inspiration for nationalist movements in the Arab world and elsewhere. First as prime minister and later from 1954 as President of Egypt Nasser sought to govern according to what he termed the principles of Islamic socialism which to many Islamists including Qutb was largely secular, western socialism. It is not surprising, therefore, that Nasser failed to convince the Brotherhood that he seriously intended to establish an Islamic state and an attempt was made to assassinate him in 1954. Nasser reacted by banning the movement and executing many of its leaders and imprisoning others. Qutb spent the next ten years, until 1964, in prison—a venue for the education of hundreds of potentially radical thinkers and future activists—where he composed his major treatise Ma’alim fial-tariq (Milestones) (1965). Among other things, this treatise condemned Nasser’s government as unIslamic and laid out the broad principles of an Islamic state and the strategy for achieving this.
Qutb who was previously open to the possibility of some kind of relationship between Islam and the West had hardened his position by 1965 and while he did not call explicitly for the continuous use of violence he did imply that this could in certain situations be justified. He argued, for example, that Islam could not coexist with jahiliyya (unbelief) and that the latter must, therefore, be eliminated by jihad if necessary.
Suspicious that it was conspiring to overthrow the government Nasser had hundreds of Brotherhood members arrested in 1965 and a number of the leaders including Qutb executed.
