Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadhili Qutb was an Egyptian writer, poet, literary critic and Islamic theorist, born on 9 October 1906 in the village of Musha in Asyut Province, Upper Egypt. He wrote the thirty-volume Qur'an commentary Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an) and Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), the manifesto of his later thought. He was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was hanged in Cairo on 29 August 1966 after being convicted of plotting to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser. ^{1 2}

He remains a divided figure: his followers describe him as a great thinker and a martyr for Islam, while Western observers and some Muslims regard him as a key originator of Islamist ideology and an inspiration for militant groups, including al-Qaeda. This article records those views attributed to those who hold them; the museum issues no verdict of its own. ¹

He grew up in the village of Musha. His father was a landowner and political activist who held weekly meetings to discuss political events and Qur'an recitation. Qutb memorised the whole Qur'an by the age of ten, collected books from childhood, and was already giving informal lessons to the people of his village as a boy. ¹

He moved to Cairo and was educated between 1929 and 1933 at Dar al-Ulum, then worked as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction, becoming a ministry functionary in 1939. ^{1 2}

He began as a man of letters and critic: he published his first article in the magazine al-Balagh in 1922 while still a teenager, issued his first book, The Mission of the Poet in Life and the Poetry of the Present Generation, in 1932, wrote novels including Ashwak (Thorns), and helped bring the novelist Naguib Mahfouz to public attention. As a critic he was deeply influenced by the medieval philologist Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, whom he valued for concentrating on meaning and aesthetic value over form and rhetoric. ¹

Between 1948 and 1950 the ministry sent him to the United States to study its educational system; he studied and worked at institutions in Washington, D.C., at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, and at Stanford. During that stay he published Social Justice in Islam (1949), his first major theoretical work of religious social criticism. ¹

On his return to Egypt in 1951 he published "The America that I Have Seen", criticising what he saw as American materialism and individualism and America's strong support for the new Israeli state, and concluding that major aspects of American life were primitive and shocking to him. The article states that his American experience formed part of the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards organised Islamism. ¹

He resigned from the civil service and joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, becoming editor-in-chief of its weekly Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, then head of its propaganda section, and a member of its guidance council, the organisation's highest body. ^{1 2}

Qutb and the Brotherhood welcomed the Free Officers' coup of July 1952, and cooperation was close at first: Nasser visited Qutb at his home and asked for his ideas about the revolution. The relationship soured as it became clear that Nasser's secular nationalist ideology was incompatible with the Brotherhood's project. The article reports that Qutb refused every government position Nasser offered him, and that in 1954 Qutb and other Brotherhood members were accused of plotting to assassinate Nasser; Qutb was jailed and a crackdown on the Brotherhood followed. ¹

In prison he was tortured in the first years, according to the article; conditions later eased enough for him to write his two most important works, Fi Zilal al-Qur'an and Ma'alim fi al-Tariq. He was released in May 1964 through the intercession of Iraqi president Abdul Salam Arif, and rearrested on 9 August 1965 on charges of plotting to overthrow the state. His trial drew many of its charges directly from Milestones; some observers consider it a show trial. He was sentenced to death with six other Brotherhood members and hanged on 29 August 1966. ¹

His later thought, as the sources present it, turns on central concepts: jahiliyya, the condition of societies not governed by sharia in his view — a condition he held to include existing Muslim societies, since they had given the legislative attribute of God to human beings; hakimiyya, that rule and legislation belong to God alone; and the vanguard, a believing group that would work by preaching and by jihad, in his broad sense of it, to abolish the jahili order and build an Islamic society. He argued that jihad in his framework was not merely defensive. This is a presentation of his ideas as he wrote them and as scholars describe them, not the museum's endorsement of them. ¹

Qutb rejected all Western ideologies, socialism included, and dismissed much of the later Muslim cultural and legal heritage as distant from early Islam — a stance his critics attacked sharply, as the next section records. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of differing positions reported in the sources, not as the museum's judgement on any of them. The English and Arabic articles report these positions; the original statements of critics and defenders have not all yet been reviewed.

His defenders: His followers call him a martyr and a renewer. The mainstream of the Muslim Brotherhood extols him as "the living martyr" (al-shahid al-hayy). The Saudi scholar Hamud ibn Uqla al-Shu'aybi defended him in a treatise, A Word of Truth on Sayyid Qutb, as a renewer killed for the sake of the call to Islam. Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani softened his earlier critique, saying Qutb must be refuted calmly and dispassionately, but that he was a Muslim and an Islamic writer killed for the sake of da'wa — while keeping his objections to some of Qutb's ideas. ¹

His critics: After Milestones appeared, many mainstream Muslims objected to his contention that physical power and jihad had to be used against governments and societies he deemed jahili. The ulama of al-Azhar took the unusual step, after his death, of placing him on their index of heresy and declaring him a "deviant" (munharif). Conservative scholars criticised him on points of creed and method, accusing him of amateur scholarship and of forbidden innovation; Yusuf al-Qaradawi criticised his ideas on jahiliyya as takfiri extremism. Other scholars criticised his wholesale dismissal of non-Muslim culture and of centuries of Muslim learning and culture after the first four caliphs. ¹

His influence on armed groups: The article records that Qutb's influence reached armed groups in Egypt and elsewhere; that his brother Muhammad Qutb published and taught his works in Saudi Arabia, where one of his students was Ayman al-Zawahiri, later al-Qaeda's second leader; and that Osama bin Laden read and was affected by Sayyid Qutb's books. Against this, the historian John Calvert states that "the al-Qaeda threat" has monopolised and distorted the understanding of Qutb's real contribution to contemporary Islamism. The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) cited Qutb as an influence on bin Laden's worldview. The museum presents these statements attributed to their sources and adopts none of them as a judgement. ¹

Qutb left 24 published books, around 30 unpublished, and at least 581 articles, according to the article. His best-known works include:

• Al-Taswir al-Fanni fi'l-Qur'an (Artistic Imagery in the Qur'an, 1945) and Mashahid al-Qiyama fi'l-Qur'an (1946), early literary studies of the Qur'an.
• Tifl min al-Qarya (A Child from the Village, 1946), a memoir of his childhood, and the novel Ashwak (Thorns, 1947).
• Al-Adala al-Ijtima'iyya fi'l-Islam (Social Justice in Islam, 1949).
• Ma'rakat al-Islam wa'l-Ra's Maliyya (The Battle Between Islam and Capitalism, 1951) and Al-Salam al-Alami wa'l-Islam (World Peace and Islam, 1951).
• Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an), a thirty-volume commentary, published in instalments from 1954 and completed in prison.
• Khasais al-Tasawwur al-Islami wa Muqawamatuhu (The Characteristics and Values of Islamic Conduct, 1960).
• Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones, 1964), his last and most famous major work. ¹

Qutb's books remain widely available and translated into many languages. The article records that he influenced Muslim thinkers and activists across schools, among them the Syrian Brotherhood founder Mustafa al-Siba'i and the Indonesian scholar Hamka, and that his influence reached Iran: his works were translated into Persian from the 1950s, the Islamic Republic issued a postage stamp in 1984 showing him behind bars in his honour, and many Iranian clerics later turned against his ideas and condemned them as extremist. The article also records that the majority of Sunni Islamists today view Qutb's proposals as outdated, impractical and prone to extremism. The museum records this legacy as a documented historical fact from the sources, without adopting any assessment of it. ¹

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.