Conflicted S4 E9: Sayyid Qutb: Poet, Reactionary, Islamist (Part 1)

Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean

Thomas: Welcome back to Conflicted with me, Thomas Small and my illustrious co-host, Aimen Dean. Aimen, I've got a pretty hefty quote from today's subject to start things off for you. Hopefully this will set the tone for these next two episodes.

Here's the quote, “All Western nations take their bearings from one source, and that is the materialistic civilization that has no heart and no moral conscience. It is a civilization that does not hear anything except the sound of machines and does not speak of anything but commerce. How I hate and disdain those westerners, all of them, without exception.”

What do you reckon, Aimen? Coming in a bit strong, don't you think?

Aimen: That sounds very familiar to things that you would have believed a while ago, Thomas.

Thomas: As I was reading it, I thought, hmm, did I think maybe in the last season of Conflicted, I said things like that.

But in fact, that quote was from the 20th century Egyptian scholar, educator, and martyr, who many view as the real inspiration behind Salafi jihadism, Sayyid Qutb.

He was a poet, a writer, an aesthete, but also dogmatic, sexually repressed, and obsessed with the purity of his religion.

Aimen: For me, he is the Voltaire that the Muslim world craved in during the time of colonisation.

[Music Playing]

Thomas: He's the final stop in this journey we've been taking through the Islamic thinkers who have shaped Salafi jihadism today, a truly modern, truly radical romantic. Let's get into it.

So, Aimen, how is Sayyid Qutb different from those Hanbali figures that we've been exploring in this series? He was not a Hanbali, I think we need to make that clear from the start. Ahmad bin Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab are firmly in the Hanbali tradition.

But Sayyid Qutb is not, and yet he's equally, if not more important to the phenomenon of Salafi Jihadism and in general Islamist radicalism today. So, how is Qutb different from that tradition, Aimen?

Aimen: Oh, he is different. So different from all the other three figures that we have discussed earlier, Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

And why? Because he differs from them in several areas. When he is not a theologian, he is a writer, a poet, a thinker, a philosopher, and most importantly, an ideologue who put together a political and an ideological and a philosophical framework for radical Islam in the 20th and 21st century.

Thomas: He was a political visionary, really, a political visionary in a way that maybe bin Abd al-Wahhab was obviously in Abd al-Wahhab's relationship with Muhammad bin Saud in the creation of a state to further the Da’wa Wahhabiya, the Wahhabi mission. But Sayyid Qutb was a modern political ideal ideologue.

Aimen: Indeed. He was the product of his time, but also, we have to state that he comes from a Sufi family. He was never a Hanbali or a Salafi. Nonetheless, this man, the most unlikely of people, would have the greatest impact on Salafism and Hanbali Salafism to be more precise in the 20th and the 21st century.

Thomas: So, as I've said, unlike the others in this series, Sayyid Qutb was a modern man. Unlike the others in this series, he received no traditional religious education apart from memorising the Qur’an as a child.

This is typical of many modern Islamist ideologues. They do not come out of the traditional Madrasas of Islam. They do not receive the classical Muslim formation. They receive a modern education and based on that education bring modern categories of thinking to Islam, to erect a new form of Islam, which is often called Islamism.

Sayyid Qutb was a voluminous writer. That's something he has in common with many of our figures, especially Ibn Taymiyyah. His main books, Social Justice in Islam, Milestones, and In the Shade of the Qur’an we’ll come to as we unfold his life story.

But these books have had an enormous impact on Salafi jihadism, especially I imagine, Aimen, that when you were a young jihadist yourself in the Salafi jihadist movement inside Al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb was in the air, to put it lightly.

Aimen: Sayyid Qutb was in my life before even I joined the jihadist movement in 1994 when I went to Bosnia.

Thomas: He probably influenced your decision to join that movement.

Aimen: Absolutely. I mean, the man was there in our house on the bookshelf because his books were an essential reading for many young men and women growing up in the Gulf and in Egypt and in Iraq and in many other Muslim nations across the world.

Thomas: So, what about inside the Jihadist movement once you were there? What was Sayyid Qutb's ghostly presence in the movement?

Aimen: His book Milestones, which is an Arabic called Ma'alim fi al-Tariq, was considered the constitution of the modern jihadist movement.

Thomas: We'll get to Milestones in our second episode on Sayyid Qutb. But you're saying that literally there were copies of the book around, people would quote from the book. I mean, what about Osama bin Laden people like that? Were they clearly influenced by Sayyid Qutb?

Aimen: It was impossible not to see the fingerprints of Sayyid Qutb's writings and ideology influencing their sermons, influencing their strategy, influencing their tactics and recruitment and literature. He was there. I mean, he is the ever-present ideologue as if he was the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz.

I remember that one of our theology instructors from Al-Qaeda in one of the camps, he used to say that, you see, we have thousands of scholars that we could quote on matters of theology and jurisprudence, but there is only one true philosopher and an ideologue that we could rely on for the political and strategic framework of our movement. And that would be Sayyid Qutb.

Thomas: Sayyid Qutb. Well, let's get right into his life. My reading in preparation for this episode focused on John Calvert's classic book, now, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism as well as Sayyid Qutb's own writings, which as I said, are voluminous.

So, it would've been impossible for me to read it all, but I certainly had a good dive into it. My goodness, what a great writer he was as we'll see.

So, as you mentioned, Aimen, he was born in 1906 in a small village, the village of Musha in Upper Egypt. So, that means Southern Egypt. It lay on the West Bank of the Nile, along that narrow strip of cultivated land that makes Egypt so distinctive when viewed from above.

Aimen: Indeed, yeah.

Thomas: A world of farmers, a relatively prosperous, relatively egalitarian village. I like the little detail that there was a Coptic monastery nearby. There was also the domed tomb of a Sufi saint, Shaykh Abdul Fattah, his name was.

So, Sayyid Qutb's childhood was really immersed in something like age old, traditional Egyptian pastoral peasant Islam.

Aimen: Indeed. The other thing is that Sayyid Qutb's birthplace is called also in Arabic a Sa`id, which also means a plateau, a higher land. And the Egyptian listeners would feel some affinity when I tell them that it is the tradition in Egypt to make jokes about the people of Sa`id.

Sa`id and Sa`idis as they are called, are the butt of the jokes in Egypt because they're always described as those tough yet dim people, conservative and simple. But Sayyid Qutb was anything but dim.

Thomas: No, he was certainly not dim. He was maybe a diamond in the rough in that sense if his fellow Sa`idis were physically tough, but dim-witted people.

His father was a farmer. By that I mean a landowner, a small holding landowner. The family had once been rich, but its fortunes had declined in the previous generations. Again, like many revolutionaries, like many radical thinkers, Sayyid Qutb grew up with a family memory of past prosperity.

I think this kind of sense of resentment coming from a poorer background, it may have sowed the seeds for what would definitely be a common refrain in his adult life of contempt for the bourgeoisie contempt for rich people.

Aimen: Sayyid Qutb did indeed hate the massive inequality that was happening in Egypt. The stratification of the society in Egypt was so vast that the top was so far from the bottom, and the bottom was resembling really Egypt's pyramids.

I mean, really, just like the pyramids in Egypt, the society was so stratified, and the inequality was so outrageous. So, he hated the bourgeoisies of Egypt. He hated that wealth concentration at the top, but that did not make him a communist. He was never a communist, unlike what some academics in later years would have described him as.

Thomas: That's right, Qutbism, if you could call it that and Salafi jihadism in general is often conflated with revolutionary communism, with like the Bolshevik Revolution. There's these sorts of ideas, and of course there's some overlap because it's all radicalism in the end of the day.

But you are right. Sayyid Qutb was not a communist. He would have agreed with communists about some of the problems facing society, but his solutions to those problems were not communistic, as we will see down the line.

One important thing I think about his childhood and about the environment in which he grew up that left a lifelong sort of stamp on him, was the superstition, if you like, that saturated his village.

Now, you mentioned that he came from a Sufi family. There's no indication that he himself was ever initiated into a Sufi order, but Sufism, by which I really mean that traditional pre-Salafi, pre reformed Islam of the classical Islamic world was powerfully present in his childhood.

Demons, ghosts revelatory dreams were everywhere. There were dishevelled dervishes around playing the fool whom the peasants considered holy men. And Sayyid Qutb believed intensely in this universe, in this enchanted religious universe as a child.

Aimen: Well, the society around him was superstitious. There is no question about it. In fact, he himself when he was young, practised exorcism. Of course, please dear listener, don't think it is the same as you see in some horror movies about what exorcism in Catholic sense feels like. It is a bit different.

But nonetheless, he did practise exorcism as a young man to cast away demons who possess humans.

Thomas: Sayyid Qutb would eventually, as we'll see, shortly have a modern education. And as he emerged into adulthood, he would begin to dismiss the superstitions of his childhood as ignorant.

But he would always romanticise this peasant way of seeing the world. Like many reactionaries today, and I think this is really key, who talk about the “disenchantment” of the world.

Sayyid Qutb mourned that disenchantment in the modern world around him, and then eventually he would see that peasant superstitious faith, let's say, driven imaginative way of seeing the world as Qur’anically grounded. He would go full circle and return to affirming, quite powerfully that way of seeing the world, the enchanted way.

But we'll get to that in the next episode. For now, as a child, Qutb craved education, he really wanted to learn. Two of his uncles had studied at Al-Azhar, the great centre of Muslim learning in Cairo. And Al-Azhar scholars visited the village of Musha when he was a child, and he would attend lectures by them on Tafsir, on Quranic interpretation. He loved education.

Aimen: At age six, just like many children in Egypt at that time, he enrolled into a state-run primary school that was generally secular, but with some Qur’anic instructions there and Arabic as well.

However, two years into his education in that state school there were rumours that the state is going to stop altogether Qur’anic instructions in the schools that they run.

So, of course, his father, who was deeply religious, thought, “Ah, no, no, no, no, no.” So, he withdraw him from that school and enrolled him into a proper Qur’anic school.

Thomas: It's an early hint of that kind of paranoia that would haunt Sayyid Qutb all his life, that modern westernised or westernizing institutions were always on the verge of attacking Islam.

His father must have felt that, the people of Musha definitely felt that. And so, yes, he was pulled out of the state school, enrolled in a traditional Qur’an school, which Sayyid Qutb absolutely hated.

Aimen: Well, he did enrol into the Qur’anic School, but unlike the state-run school, the Qur’anic School wasn't properly funded, wasn't properly run, it was dirty, it was makeshift, and he just wasn't happy there. He wanted to go back to the rigorous, well-run, well-funded school, and his father in the end agreed with him.

Thomas: And again, there you see, there's hints of that puritanistic kind of OCD tendency when he liked the ordered, clean, hygienic world of modernity, while at the same time hating that world for spoiling or polluting the ideological and idealistic purity of his mind.

It's a very confused, kind of dualistic way of approaching things, very common to lots and lots of radicals. So, yes, he begged his father to send him back to the state school, his father capitulated.

And yet, Sayyid Qutb didn't want to neglect Qur’anic studies. And in fact, in the state school, he organised pupils to memorise the Qur’an by themselves. And by the time he was 10-years-old, he had memorised the Qur’an.

Later on, he would claim that this Qur’anic memorization was what planted the seeds of what was going to soon emerge as an intensely creative side to his character.

Aimen: To be honest, I've seen a lot of my friends and that actually include myself, those young boys who embarked on memorising the Qur’an from a young age. I started when I was nine, and I finished when I was 12.

I can relate to his experience, because really the memorization of the Qur’an opened the mind so much to many other possibilities. So actually, my love for poetry, when I was young, my love for reading, all sparked because of the memorization of the Qur’an. His experience was ours. Exactly. So, I can relate.

Thomas: He definitely loved reading. He would eagerly collect books going to travelling booksellers and buying whatever they had to sell. According to Calvert, he collected 25 books over his childhood, books that straddled the divide between traditional subjects and modern subjects.

So, he loved Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, which I love. That's hilarious. But he also read books on astrology and magic, as you said. He began performing exorcisms.

And then as a teenager, he began to become politically aware. I think we need to kind of remind the listener, especially the listener who followed last season of Conflicted when we talked about Egypt in great detail, that he grew up in a world that was living in the shadow of Muhammad Ali's reforms to Egypt's political economy.

You're going to have to go back listener to episode six of the last season, to learn all about Muhammad Ali, who beginning in the early 19th century radically transformed Egypt.

So, a strong centralised state had emerged. It had abolished tax farming, and instead introduced a modern tax gathering bureaucracy. This had forced the peasants to grow cash crops for export in order to generate cash, to pay the state. This is all very modern sort of thing.

This had led to what is like the equivalent of the British enclosures. So, the land had become a commodity, and the central government had been dispensing parcels of land to members of the aristocracy, creating this wealthy new overclass.

So, in a way, the process that sort of England had undergone in the 16th and 17th centuries, Egypt had undergone in the 19th century, law had been somewhat secularised. The Sharia had been limited to domestic affairs only.

So, though we said before that Qutb grew up in a world that was traditional in terms of its worldview, in fact, that world was modern, and it was a village world that was in profound flux. He was living in a world that had been radically transformed, and perhaps, unsurprisingly, it led to political agitation on the ground.

Aimen: Egypt was going through turmoil when he was born. The year he was born, 1906, there was an incident in Egypt. It's called the Denshawai incident. Denshawai actually was a massacre, which happened when a clash happened between villages, farmers in the village of Denshawai in the West Nile Delta when they clashed with British soldiers.

So, the British opened fire. Many people were killed, including women, and that, of course led to administrations across Egypt. And the calls for the British to leave, of course, that never happened.

But nonetheless, this is the same year that Sayyid Qutb was born. And then of course, Egypt remained under direct British mandate all the way until 1922. So, by that time, Sayyid was a 16-year-old, the teenager, he was, of course aware of all the agitation, the riots, the demonstrations, the clashes with the British authorities.

To the point where the king of Egypt at that time, who was known as a sultan, decided that you know what? The British need to grant some independence, at least, even if it is superficial, just to please the masses. And this is exactly what happened.

So, this is the society, the agitated Egypt that Sayyid Qutb was living in at that time.

Thomas: And not to mention, of course during his childhood, the First World War broke out, and the two of the parties in that war were the British against the Ottomans. And Egypt was sort of technically still part of the Ottoman Empire, even if the British, in fact, dominated it entirely.

And families like Sayyid Qutb’s tended to support the Ottomans against the British in that war. And Sayyid Qutb’s father was no different. His father became a political activist at that time, and Sayyid Qutb would join in his father's meetings and would be asked to read out nationalistic articles to the largely illiterate activists.

So, that's an important point to stress. Nationalism was in the air. Now, some nationalists in Egypt wanted Egyptian nationalism to be modelled on European norms.

Others were already inclining toward a more Islamic conception of Egyptian national identity, as Sayyid Qutb would have been caught in the middle of this sort of swirling nationalist discourse.

But at that time, he became animated in his fervour against the British. And this was given even greater impetus in 1919 during the nationwide uprising against the British that occurred following the First World War. When Egypt was refused an independent place at the Paris Peace Conference, the British wanted to negotiate on their behalf.

Again, 13-year-old Sayyid gave nationalist speeches in mosques, and already in these nationalistic speeches, he was praising the caliphate. He was praising Islam. So, the seeds of his later ideology were already being sewn.

Aimen: Again, Thomas, I feel like his childhood mirrors a lot of my childhood, feeling the sense of endangerment to identity, to faith, to the Pan Islamic bond that bonded many of the world's Muslims together.

Now, Sayyid in his speeches, because don't forget, many of them are not his, but he was reading the articles, he was borrowing from all of these writers. But at the same time, he is not forgetting his Islamic education, that the caliphate is still there, even though it is as Western as it could be.

I mean, the caliphs were living a western lifestyle. I mean, they were wearing Western uniforms. They were drinking Western wines and whiskeys. They were absolutely as detached from proper Islamic way as it could be.

And yet he felt it. He felt that impact because of Pan Islamism, which shows that even in the late 1910s, the feeling of Pan Islamic solidarity was still strong, even in the remote parts of the former Ottoman Empire.

So, the caliphate sadly for Sayyid Qutb would be abolished just few years later by Kemal Atatürk. And of course, we talked about it in the Turkey episode of season, season three. Please, dear listener, go and listen to it.

Thomas: By that time, Sayyid was already in Cairo. In fact, he moved aged 15 in 1921 to Cairo to finish his education there. So, that must have been a huge shock to him. Cairo was a divided city. It had a very modern European half and a very mediaeval Islamic half.

In a way, it still has that to this day. The population of Cairo had only recently reached 1 million, which these days doesn't sound like a lot to us, but in the early 20th century was a lot indeed.

Compared to his village upbringing, the young Sayyid Qutb’s experience of Cairo must have been incredibly shocking, especially this division that it manifested between the modern west and the mediaeval Islamic world. He finished his education in Cairo at a state secondary school.

And then a few years later, age 23, he was admitted to the Dar al-Ulum, which was a sort of teacher training institution. And would, after graduating from there, begin his career inside Egypt's Ministry of Public Instruction, and then he would move later to the Ministry of Education.

And that's where we'll leave him while we take this break. We'll leave him freshly minted young educationalist working inside the Ministry of Education inside Cairo. And when we get back, we'll see that he's just on the verge of a new chapter in his life as he joins the glittering, a high society world of Cairo's burgeoning literary elite. We'll be right back.

[Music Playing]

We are back, dear listener, Sayyid Qutb is our subject. He is now, what is he, 27-years-old. The year is 1933. He's living in Cairo. He is working inside the Ministry of Education. And his father dies.

Now Aimen, I don't know, you can perhaps speak to this from a Middle Eastern point of view. I think it would've been expected at that time for him to then go home to take up the sort of family business of farming. But he didn't.

Aimen: Well, of course he didn't, because how could you expect someone who experienced modern life and modern education to go back and take up farming? I mean, it would be way beneath him.

It is the literary circles of Cairo, those beautiful cafes where intellectuals would meet and debate and talk about the latest issues of politics. War is brewing in Europe, and it is the 1930s, in fact, 1933, the year in which one of Qutb's possible influencers, I would say would take power in Germany, Hitler.

Europe is going through political turmoil again. And therefore, why would Sayyid Qutb leave Cairo where he is in touch with the rest of the world and go back to the backwater village where he come from? No, no, no, no. That's not Sayyid Qutb’s destiny.

Thomas: For seven years, he'd been a primary school teacher in various places across Egypt. But yes, Cairo was always sort of beckoning him back. He eventually settled in the well to do and modern suburb of Helwan. He bought a house and invited his mother and his siblings to join him there.

So, he's going to become the anti-western, anti-modern ideologue, but he quite likes the comforts of modern life as well. This is not unusual.

Aimen: Isn’t that all radicals, Thomas? I mean, have you noticed many hate preachers and many of these Islamist jihadists living in London and Paris and Berlin and Munich, and preaching from there, sending people to die, but they and their kids stay in the comforts of these places. I mean, come on, he’s as old as the beginning of this century.

Thomas: Calm down, calm down. We have to do Sayyid Qutb justice. He was not yet an Islamist firebrand. In fact, he was a poet, a novelist, a literary critic. He was part of a very vibrant, a very dynamic literary scene in Cairo.

In fact, it was his literary criticism, which he was publishing in journals up and down the country that brought Naguib Mahfouz to the public's attention. For example, I mean, Sayyid Qutb can be attributed with sort of discovering that man who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature and is inarguably the greatest writer of modern Egypt.

Aimen: Incredible.

Thomas: Sayyid Qutb adopted a modernist literary style. Now, again, a bit of an irony. He loved modernist writing. Its clarity, its straightforward means of expression.

He didn't like the classical Arabic style at all. He thought that it was too complicated. He thought that it was too elite, it was too formal. He liked the rigorous, but sort of direct expressiveness of modernism.

And at this point in his career, he was laying the foundations for a literary style that I think Aimen, you would agree, became extremely powerful.

Aimen: In fact, it became the standard. I mean, Sayyid Qutb can be partially accredited with modernising the modern Arabic writing that is easily accessible to the new generations of Arabs in the 20th century.

Before that, most Arabic writing was theological and formal, and to some extent really inaccessible to the vast majority of people. So, the way he made modern writing seem so eloquent, elegant, with deep, beautiful prose that would enchant those who read them.

You see, this is his magic, not the demon's magic, not the exorcism magic, but the magic of the pen. And he will wield this magic so powerfully in the next decades.

Thomas: I mean, not only prose, as I say, he was a poet. And Sayyid Qutb’s poetry is very similar to the romantic existentialist poetry of Europe of that time.

But more than just the poetry itself, it was like the philosophy, the literary philosophy of the time he found very appealing. He believed that poetry appealed to the emotions, not the intellect. And he began to develop a theory of the imagination as the primary means, whereby the mind knows things.

So, there was a bit of an anti-rationalist bent to his understanding of the human mind. He was much more of an aesthete; he was much more of an artist than a true philosopher in that sense.

And in this way, he found himself a fellow traveller amongst a whole generation of reactionary right-leaning literary figures in Europe, people who valued the imagination.

Someone like D.H. Lawrence in England, someone who believed in things like the blood, things like the instinctive engagement with the world, things like how natural forms, trees, dirt, ocean, sky impinged themselves on the imagination and revealed truths that transcended the reason.

This kind of world is the one that Sayyid Qutb was swimming in. And I think it would influence his Islamist ideology down the line, profoundly.

Aimen: Indeed. But remember, Thomas, that Sayyid Qutb, in fact, was the quintessential Egyptian bureaucrat. He is precisely similar to the people who would wear a bowler hat in England and be the typical quintessentially English civil servant.

Thomas: It's true that he had a dual character. He had this inner self of imaginative fire, but an external self of a kind of technocratic bureaucrat, as you say, they were known as effendis.

Aimen: Yeah. You see, Egypt was a very class-oriented society. In fact, that class divided society in Egypt of the first half of the 20th century is still influencing Egypt to this day. Can you believe it? So, he was an effendi, and they are given that respect. So, he was a respected upper middle-class gentleman, civil servant.

Thomas: And in his work as a bureaucrat within the Ministry of Education, he, for example, opposed religious conformism and called for the teaching of secular subjects alongside religious subjects.

Again, you might be surprised by this dear listener because he is the great anti-western, anti-modern ideologue of Salafi jihadism. But he actually hated and was rather embarrassed by the traditional superstitious Islam of the peasant world.

And he wanted the state to transform Egyptians into modern, let's say, efficient people, people who could stand shoulder to shoulder with modern Westerners.

Aimen: Indeed, because don't forget, he is not a traditional theologian. He wasn't a theologian. He was, at the end of the day, the product of a modern education in Egypt. And he wanted Egyptians to master engineering, medicine, architecture, and the ability to start industry.

He really envisioned the industrial Egypt at some point in the future. And therefore, how can you have an industrial Egypt without industrious minds that are graduated from industrious schools? You can't do that from Al-Azhar. You have to have a proper education that is based on modern science.

Thomas: Romantic poet, utilitarian technocrat, that Sayyid Qutb at this time in his career, kind of seems to us a contradiction. But at the time, it was not a contradiction. There were a lot of such people around, as the new modern world was being forged out of the Great Depression and all the swirling political, geopolitical, economic and cultural chaos of the 1930s, which did not leave Egypt untouched.

And it is in that swirling Great Depression, inflicted chaos. That friend of the show, Fat Farouk arrived on the scene. Dear listeners, you remember Operation Fat Fucker from series three when Fat Farouk was ousted by the colonels, including Nasser, who would overthrow the monarchy in Egypt. That's down the line.

In 1936, aged only 16, a Fat Farouk became the king of Egypt. And at the time, nationalists, including people like Sayyid Qutb, I think at this time, he would still have considered himself a nationalist, had big hopes for Fat Farouk.

They thought that his father, King Fuad had capitulated too much to the British during his reign. And so, they hoped that King Farouk, who actually was not yet that fat, would tilt the balance back in favour of Egyptian sovereignty.

That very year, 1936, he did sign the Anglo Egyptian Treaty, which was seen as a step forward by Egyptian nationalists as it relegated British troops to the Suez Canal zone only.

But their high hopes for good old Fat Farouk didn't last long. They were particularly upset, especially I think the more conservative among them like Sayyid Qutb. They were particularly upset by King Farouk's notorious moral turpitude, if you could put it that way.

Aimen: Well Thomas, whatever fat hope that those nationalists had in Fat Farouk, unfortunately, that fat hope didn't materialise. You see, Farouk was a gluttonous, lecherous individual with a incredible appetite for oysters and women.

But nonetheless, of course, if you are going to do that in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s, remember that Egypt was at the time extremely stratified. I likened it to a pyramid, the Egypt of the 1930s and 40s, that many Egyptians right now romanticise as the age of the Cadillacs cars and the Mercedes-Benz, and the parties and all of this opulence.

This was only experienced by less than 2, 3% of the society. The rest of society was nothing but peasants. And this is why the anger towards Farouk's reinforcement of this stereotype of the detached elite, and the fact that he has immersed himself so indulgent in all of these vices has more or less disappointed his subjects who are growing weary with the fact that the world around them is changing.

There is a war, a world war about to happen. Just three years into his reign, King Farouk would see Egypt even being more controlled by the British to prevent the Suez Canal from falling into the Italians and the Germans. And with the world falling around them, the Egyptians didn't have that much confidence in their king. And his ability to rule.

Thomas: Qutb was certainly among those Egyptians. His thinking, which was appearing more and more often as essays in journals, he was becoming more well known as a writer, as a thinker. And in addition to his work as a poet and a novelist.

His thinking focused more and more on Turath, on heritage. And in his thinking about Egypt's Turath, its heritage, he characterised Egypt as having something uniquely spiritual and ethical about it.

And again, in this vein of thinking, he was not unlike a lot of continental European, especially thinkers at the time, thinkers who talked about how the spirit of a nation is a kind of metaphysical substance. And each nation has its own spirit that the nation must live truly by.

And especially in places like Germany, this kind of thinking was widespread. And in the same way that some thinkers at the time were talking about the German nation, Qutb was talking about the Egyptian nation.

Now, the difference, of course, is that Sayyid Qutb was a Muslim, and Islam can easily cut against European style ethnic nationalism because of the concept of the Ummah.

So, there's a tension at this time in Sayyid Qutb's thought. He's always talking about Egypt, Egypt's particularity, it's especially spiritual nature. He's also talking about the Islamic Ummah, the loss of the caliph and how Islam in general has this unique spirit against which the West is corruptive and corrosive.

So, there's a tension there that is going to be tipping more and more in the more Islamic direction as his life unfolds, especially thanks to a new movement that just at this time was gaining speed in Egypt. What movement, Aimen, am I talking about?

Aimen: Well, of course, since 1928, Egypt was going through a steady and well-organised spiritual transformation, especially among the middle classes and the upper middle classes, led by a man called Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thomas: Hassan al-Banna. Again, dear listener, you'll recall that in the last series of Conflicted, we talked about Hassan al-Banna at some length. For now, I think Aimen, you'll agree, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb have a lot in common.

Like Qutb, for example, al-Banna was also a village boy who left the village to become a school teacher. He also attended the Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, the teacher training college.

He was also somewhat mystically inclined, but the differences are as vast as the similarities, because unlike Sayyid Qutb, Banna was always intensely pious. He didn't go through a similar phase of being a kind of literary figure, an aesthete hobnobbing with the new intellectual elite within Cairo.

He was always an intensely pious Muslim. And instead of becoming a man of letters, Banna became a preacher activist from a young age.

Aimen: Indeed. And this is why, while the two never met, you know that?

Thomas: Well, wait, I think we need to point out Aimen, Sayyid Qutb didn't join the Muslim Brotherhood until 1953. Much down the line. So, we're at least saying that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the air.

Aimen: So, while Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb never met yet, when Sayyid Qutb would write about Hassan al-Banna in the future, he would write about him with reverence. And as if the two had met in real life.

Thomas: When Banna moved the Muslim Brotherhood Organization to Cairo in 1932, he adopted the full range of modern political means of spreading his movement.

Now, like Qutb, he had an almost populist admiration for the Egyptian people. Hassan al-Banna would talk a lot about the Egyptian people and their unique character as well.

And so, the means, the propaganda means, if you want to call them that, that he adopted did dovetail quite neatly with Nazi strategy to some extent.

And I think Aimen, there's even some indications that Hassan al-Banna would've been influenced by the example of the growing National Socialist Movement in Germany.

So, for example, Hassan al-Banna established the Rover Scout units instilling in young male recruits a sense of chivalry, Futuwwah, but very much along a kind of modern disciplined lines.

Aimen: It was there because you see, remember that it was the 1920s and 1930s, the political movements in Egypt and in Turkey and many other places when they see the success of Mussolini's fascists, and then later with Hitler's Nazis. To benefit from the experience of other movement, doesn't necessarily mean that you emulate them entirely. You just emulate the tactics.

I mean, just like Al-Qaeda used to teach us about the successful takeover of Cuba by Castro and Guevara, it doesn't mean basically that they lack these communists, of course, far from it. I mean, they would've killed them on the spot if they meet them. But it's just how to emulate in a successful strategy when you see it.

Thomas: And don't forget, Hassan al-Banna was not an ideologue. He really wasn't. He was a moral campaigner. He was a good political organiser. But his ideas, his religious ideas were more or less traditionally, fundamentalist Salafi ideas with some Sufi inflections, but he wasn't a brilliant ideologue.

And in fact, the Muslim Brotherhood at first didn't really possess an ideological program. This is something that people often don't quite get. The Muslim Brotherhood lacked an ideological superstructure until a bit later in its development when a certain Sayyid Qutb joined it.

Now, as I said, that's not going to happen until 1953. And at the time in the 1930s, we're still in the 30s. The Second World War is on the horizon. Sayyid Qutb was not attracted to the Muslim Brotherhood. He was still an aesthete. He was a literature.

He thought that writers and thinkers like himself would be able through their work, to organically influence the Egyptian nation, to embrace their ideas. He was not writing about politics per se, he was writing about cultural identity.

Aimen: His writings were more in defence of the Egyptian Muslim culture against what he sees as the European and Western decadence, and lack of morality, and the fact that such influences are corrupting the Egyptian society.

Remember, it was all written, not from a political point of view. It was all written from the perspective of culture, not from the perspective of politics.

And of course, was all written during the time when King Farouk, of course, was known for his extravagant, over the top, partying and drinking and famous gluttonous indulgence.

And I think it was more of an attack on the Western influences on the local culture, not necessarily, because basically he wanted to declare jihad against the West or anything like that.

Thomas: No, not at all. I mean, he was a cultural figure still, but within this sort of thinking about culture, spiritual things were creeping more and more into his writing. In fact, in the early 40s, he came under the influence of a French reactionary thinker called Alexis Carrell, who was actually a eugenicist. He had views that we would now consider to be really beyond the pale.

But at the time, he was a respected thinker, and he influenced Qutb, who began to argue that Western modernity was like the worship of the machine. He became obsessed with this idea that the western world worshipped machines and elevated machines over the spirit. Unlike Egypt, unlike Islam, unlike the East in general.

Aimen: Considering the technology that was existing in the 1930s and 40s. And he said that the West is worshipping machines. What would he say right now with AI? I mean, what would he say?

Thomas: But see, the thing, Aimen, is that this kind of talk about modernity is the worship of the machine against the human spirit is still very much with us. As we bring this episode towards its conclusion, I think that's where we should kind of be leaving it.

That Sayyid Qutb’s thinking, especially at this point in his career (before his Islamist turn), is still so powerfully persuasive to people. I mean, even to like people like me when I read what he has to say, criticising modernity, criticizing the Western modern civilization, it just resonates.

As you said at the beginning of this episode, the quote that I quoted could've been me at the end of last season, and it's true. You look around and you do think that the modern world does worship the machine. It is highly utilitarian. It is highly materialistic, and it does tend to gobble up, absorb, destroy, and neutralise all other cultures.

I mean, that just is true. Qutb isn't wrong. The question is he an asshole?

Aimen: Well, unfortunately it falls to me Thomas to defend the world and the modern world against fundamentalists like you, yeah.

Thomas: How do you defend it? I'm not saying I want to burn the world down. Not at all. I believe in God's providence. I believe that ultimately all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

But it's still kind of dispiriting living in this modern world, isn't it? I mean, it's a bit of a disappointment.

Aimen: Not necessarily seeing how many people lifted out of poverty, how many diseases has been cured, how many people no longer having to succumb to natural disasters because of a modern world. I mean, I would say the modern world is a blessing.

Thomas: Well, Aimen, honestly, you and I, we're never going to completely agree on this. How is it that I am being schooled in embracing the modern world by a former member of Al-Qaeda. The modern world will never, ever cease to amaze me.

Well, let's bring this episode to a close, Aimen. This first half of the life of Sayyid Qutb, this is the story of Sayyid Qutb before his Islamist turn. We're leaving him on the brink of the Second World War.

We're leaving him a fully paid-up member of Egypt's effendi class of bureaucrats. And its growing and powerful literary elite, its poets, its novelists, its literary critics, its thinkers.

He's firmly opposed to Western culture now because it seems to him to be undermining Egyptian culture. And he's about to link that complex of ideas to the complex of ideas that is emerging, and which is called Islamism, and which he will do more than anyone else to firmly and fully define.

[Music Playing]

So, that's where we'll leave him, a very much a 20th century figure. Very much a 1930s style reactionary figure. And when we come back to the next episode, we'll take up the story from the Second World War onwards as Sayyid Qutb will find himself propelled really into global and certainly Muslim superstardom as the chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood. We'll see you next week. Stay tuned.

A reminder that you can follow the show over on Facebook and Twitter at MH Conflicted, and for a deeper dive into all the subjects we talk about here on Conflicted, head over to Facebook and search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group.

There you will find other fans of the show engaging in heated debates, enlightening conversations, and just generally geeking out over Conflicted related topics.

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.