Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an influential Muslim Brotherhood ideologue whose later publications inspired radical Islamists worldwide, particularly those seeking confrontational means to address what they perceived as governing leaders’ immorality and corruption.
Like Hassan al-Banna and other Muslim reformists, Qutb was disturbed by the social ills he witnessed in Egypt, and attributed them to an erosion of public piety among Egyptians. However, his early writings reflect greater ease with Western culture and thought. During a two year period of study in the United States, he changed his views on Western culture and reported being shocked by racism and especially sexual permissiveness. Upon his return to Cairo, he became intensely critical of the Nasser government.
Influenced by Islamist writers such as Abu A'la Maududi in and Abu Hasan al-Nadwi in India and Ibn Taymiyyah, Qutb became convinced that Egypt was in a state of jahiliyya—pre-Islamic ignorance, harkening back to a concept used to describe the days prior to the coming of Islam—and would only recover with the institution of a fully Islamic government. In 1964, following Qutb’s arrest and torture, he published Milestones, which advocated for the violent overthrow of government in order to establish an Islamic state. Perhaps most significantly, Qutb supported the idea that Muslims could accuse their leaders of not being Muslim and then use violent means to remove them, a doctrine referred to takifirism.
Sayyid Qutb was executed in 1966, making him a martyr in the eyes of his admirers and further confirming the immorality of the state. His advocacy of violence represents an important shift in the Brotherhood’s relationship with radicalism, but also served as an inspiration for generations of radical Islamists to come. While the Muslim Brotherhood itself disavowed violence in 1970 and came to be part of the political mainstream in the 1980s, breakaway movements pursued Qutb’s thought, leading to a rise in violence in Egypt during the two decades after his death.
Sources:
James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).