Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadhili Qutb (9 October 1906 – 29 August 1966) was an Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary who was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

As the author of 24 published books, with around 30 unpublished for different reasons (mainly destruction by the state), and at least 581 articles, including novels, literary arts critique and works on education, Qutb is best known in the Muslim world for his work on what he believed to be the social and political role of Islam, particularly in his books Social Justice and Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones). His magnum opus, Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an), is a 30-volume commentary on the Quran. Even though most of his observations and criticism were leveled at the Muslim world, Qutb also intensely disapproved of the society and culture of the United States, which he saw as materialistic, and obsessed with violence and sexual pleasures. He advocated violent, offensive jihad.

During most of his life, Qutb's inner circle mainly consisted of influential politicians, intellectuals, poets and literary figures, both of his age and of the preceding generation. By the mid-1940s, many of his writings were included in the curricula of schools, colleges and universities. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed by hanging.

Qutb has been described by followers as a great thinker and martyr for Islam, while many Western observers (and some Muslims) see him as a key originator of Islamist ideology, and an inspiration for violent Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda. Qutb is widely regarded as one of the most leading Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century. Strengthened by his status as a martyr, Qutb's ideas on Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic Arabia) and his close linking of implementation of sharia (Islamic Law) with Tawhid (Islamic monotheism) has highly influenced contemporary Islamist and Jihadist movements. Today, his supporters are identified by their opponents as "Qutbists" or "Qutbi".

Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadhili Qutb was born on 9 October 1906. He was raised in the Egyptian village of Musha, located in Upper Egypt's Asyut Province. His father, whose sixth great-grandfather was an Indian Muslim, was an Upper Egyptian landowner and the administrator of the family estate, but he was also well known for his political activism, holding weekly meetings to discuss the political events and Qur'anic recitation. At this young age, Sayyid Qutb first learned about melodic recitations of the Qur'an, which would fuel the artistic side of his personality. He eventually memorized the whole Qur'an at 10.

A precocious child, during these years, he began collecting different types of books, including Sherlock Holmes stories, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts on astrology and magic that he would use to help local people with exorcisms (ruqya.) In his teens, Qutb was critical of the religious institutions with which he came into contact, holding in contempt the way in which those institutions were used to form public opinion and thoughts. He had a special disdain, however, for schools that specialized in religious studies only, and sought to demonstrate that local schools that held regular academic classes as well as classes in religion were more beneficial to their pupils than religious schools with lopsided curricula. At this time, Qutb developed his bent against the imams and their traditional approach to education. This confrontation would persist throughout his life.

Qutb moved to Cairo, where between 1929 and 1933 he received an education based on the British style of schooling before starting his career as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During his early career, Qutb devoted himself to literature as an author and critic, writing such novels as Ashwak (Thorns) and even helped to elevate Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz from obscurity. He wrote his very first article in the literary magazine al-Balagh in 1922, while still a teenager, and his first book, Muhimmat al-Sha’ir fi al-Haya wa Shi’r al-Jil al-Hadir (The Mission of the Poet in Life and the Poetry of the Present Generation), in 1932, when he was 25, in his last year at Dar al-Ulum. As a literary critic, he was particularly influenced by ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), "in his view one of the few mediaeval philologists to have concentrated on meaning and aesthetic value at the expense of form and rhetoric." In 1939, he became a functionary in Egypt's Ministry of Education (wizarat al-ma'arif).

In the early 1940s, he encountered the work of Nobel Prize-winner French eugenicist Alexis Carrel, who would have a seminal and lasting influence on his criticism of Western civilization, as "instead of liberating man, as the post-Enlightenment narrative claimed, he believed that Western modernity enmeshed people in spiritually numbing networks of control and discipline, and that rather than building caring communities, it cultivated attitudes of selfish individualism. Qutb regarded Carrel as a rare sort of Western thinker, one who understood that his civilization "depreciated humanity" by honouring the "machine" over the "spirit and soul" (al-nafs wa al-ruh). He saw Carrel's critique, coming as it did from within the enemy camp, as providing his discourse with an added measure of legitimacy."