Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean
Thomas: Welcome back, dear listeners, to another episode of Conflicted. I'm Thomas Small and Aimen Dean is alongside me once again.
Now, Aimen, I'm always throwing out quotes at you at the start of these episodes, but do you have one for me, this time about today's subject, Sayyid Qutb?
Aimen: Indeed, Thomas. It is one of Sayyid Qutb's most famous quotes, always referenced by jihadists, by theologians, and by activists all over the Muslim world. He said, “Our words are lifeless, unlit candles until we die for them. And once we die for them, these candles will be lit and will live forever.”
Thomas: Those are the words of a martyr, aren't they, Aimen?
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: Of a man drawn to martyrdom. Sayyid Qutb was certainly drawn to martyrdom by the end of his life, as we will find out in the second episode in our two-part series on the life of Sayyid Qutb.
So, without further ado, today, we are completing our long journey, looking at the Islamic thinkers who have dominated the thoughts of Salafi jihadists. We discussed poets, scholars, warriors, invasions from Byzantines, invasions from Mongols, from Ottomans.
We've been from Baghdad to Damascus to the Najd in Saudi Arabia, and now we're ending in Egypt with Sayyid Qutb, the radical romantic turned idealist, Islamist firebrand. Let's jump right in.
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We didn't talk in the first episode in this series on Sayyid Qutb about your own real personal interaction with his writing. So, how much of Sayyid Qutb’s oeuvre have you read?
Aimen: I would say maybe about two thirds of whatever he written. And that's a lot.
Thomas: Two thirds. That's a lot. Given what he wrote. That's a lot. So, I mean, when did you start reading Sayyid Qutb?
Aimen: I started reading Sayyid Qutb at a vulnerable moment in my life, I would say. My mother just died. I was 12. And I remember I went to see one of my teachers, one of my theology tutors, and I've asked him about what should I read that would correspond with coping with grief in Islam.
And I remember him saying, “Really, if you want to read something that would really deeply touch you at this moment, then read Fi Dhilal Al Qur'an.” In the Shade of the Qur'an written by Sayyid Qutb. He said to me that Sayyid Qutb wrote this book over nine years period when he was in and out of prison in the 1950s and early 60s.
It is a 4,000 plus pages commentary on every single verse of the Qur’an. It's not a theological book, it is a book of literary commentary on the Qur’an to extract lessons, to extract meanings, to understand the Qur’an's beauty, elegance, eloquence, while at the same time understanding the intended lessons that God wanted to teach us through the trials and through the difficulties and through the sadness that the prophet himself experienced throughout his life.
He himself was orphaned. I'm talking about the Prophet Muhammad, was orphaned at a very young age. I remember, basically when I was reading Fi Dhilal Al Qur'an, there was one particular passage that broke my heart completely and actually healed me, healed me completely at that moment.
Because he was talking about Prophet Muhammad who was fatherless at the age of six, coming back with his mother from Medina. And when they were with the caravan, his mother got ill. So, she decided to stay behind next to a well with her son until she recovers. But hours later she died.
So, there he is, a six-year-old boy alone in the desert, completely alone next to a dead mother, until another caravan came, helped him to bury his mother, and then took him to Mecca.
This six-year-old boy would then change the world and be entrusted with a divine message, a message of love, a message of morality, a message of societal cohesion, and a message of law, order safety and mercantile prosperity, words that were so powerful.
And when I saw it, I cried so much. I was 12 at the time, but I cried because I thought that I'm 12 and I felt the grief. Yet it's nothing compared to what the prophet went through.
And who actually taught me that? Sayyid Qutb, through the beauty of his prose, the language that he used to transform me to that moment, as if I was seeing a young six-year-old boy alone with his dead mother.
And I was thinking, I am in a better situation and that man is my saviour. So, he saved me at that moment.
Thomas: Well, you've done a very good job of describing the softer side of Sayyid Qutb as reflected in his great work of Qur’anic exegesis in the shade of the Qur’an.
But that's not the only side of Sayyid Qutb in that work. There's a harder, more defiant, more angry side. What about that side? Didn't that have an impact on the young Aimen Dean as well?
Aimen: Now that Sayyid Qutb has consoled me. When I started to dive deeper and deeper into his interpretations, into his commentary on the Qur’an, he start to comment on battles, on the everlasting struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between ignorance and enlightenment.
Wow, goodness. This is when he ignited these revolutionary fires within me. I felt that, yes, this is what I wanted to read. I wanted to have purpose in life, and this man was giving it to me.
Now, I understand that he wrote these words while he was under the lash, while he was being tortured, while he was being persecuted for his faith. And I really started to feel when he interpreted and commented on verses about jihad, he felt as if he wanted to be there on the front lines, fighting alongside those who wanted to sacrifice their lives for the faith.
When he talked about martyrdom, I felt as if he longed to it, as if he was longing to be with a beautiful woman. I mean, I saw his thirst for a Islamic empire, empire that would protect a subject, that it would subjugate the rest of the world to worship at the altar of morality and to actually finally achieve a just society for everyone without having to undermine everyone stationed in society.
Thomas: Aimen. Aimen. Aimen. Where do I sign up for this crusade? Wow, this sounds great. Let's do it. You and I, Aimen, against the world. Come on.
Aimen: So, you see, I finished reading all of this when I was 14 and a half, and a year and a half later I was in Bosnia joining the jihad there because Sayyid Qutb showed me the way.
Thomas: I was watching Jurassic Park on repeat at the time. This was very different kind of 14-year-old, I think.
Okay, well, that's it. Thank you, dear listeners. That's the end of our series on Sayyid Qutb. Aimen's taken us right to the end and to Sayyid Qutb’s, let's say his post-mortem state as the tutelary spirit of all young would be jihadist martyrs.
But we're going to have to roll the timeline back to where we left him at the end of the last episode. Just as World War II was breaking out in the world and the new post-war world was going to emerge. And the American dominated post-war world was going to emerge out of the ashes of the ruin of European empires everywhere.
In Egypt, most Egyptian political activists favoured Germany in the war, not because they were Nazis, or not necessarily because they were Nazis, but because they wanted Britain out of Egypt. So, they supported Britain's enemies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And though in this episode, we will draw some links between Sayyid Qutb’s thought and Nazi thought at the outset. I want to be fair to him.
Sayyid Qutb was horrified by German war atrocities. He actually found the concentration camps. He found the blitzkrieg; he found the remorseless, merciless conquest of the Nazi movement to be a symbol of what he hated most about modern technical machine oriented European civilization.
So, he did not fetishize Nazism wholly at all. And he very much as a result of what he was seeing, playing out on the battlefields of Europe and elsewhere, looked forward to that post-war future where Egypt could remain unattached from the West entirely and join with fellow eastern countries dedicated to the spiritual renewal of mankind.
So, Aimen. Just you agree, right? We're not calling Sayyid Qutb a Nazi.
Aimen: No, I don't think he was a Nazi sympathiser in the classical sense. However, he did dabble with that idea because of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. And we talked about it before in the Israel-Palestine episode in season three, because there was the feeling that the anti-Semitic feelings of the Nazis, and of course don't forget the concentration camps were not yet known about in the Middle East.
So, the idea that Hitler's anti-Zionism would be of use to the movements that wanted to stop the Jewish migration to Palestine, which was under British mandate at that time.
So, there were many in Iraq and Egypt and in the Levant who were sympathetic to the Germans at the beginning of the World War II. But that sympathy started, of course, to decrease slowly as the atrocities started to emerge and people started to know about them.
So, do we call him a Nazi? No. Do we call him someone who was influenced by Nazis? Yes, definitely.
Thomas: Yeah. And we mentioned in the previous episode that he had read the French right wing reactionary thinker, Alexis Carrel. And he also in the 30s read Mein Kampf. He was reading these ideas.
And I tried to stress in the last episode that Sayyid Qutb was a very modern figure, very recognizable as a member of that reactionary romantic class of thinkers who valorised nation, blood, culture, spirit over liberal technocratic, utilitarian, industrial society.
So, to that extent there was a lot of overlap with right wing reactionary Nazi fascist ideas in the 1930s. There's no question. And he would, as you say, to some extent, take that milieu of ideas, Islamisize those ideas, and create Islamism.
But where we left him off and where we're taking up the story again, now, he hadn't yet fully made his Islamist turn. He was on the verge of beginning that turn.
And that turn began in the midst of the Second World War, initially through literary criticism of the Qur’an, literary criticism we have to point out. Again, he was not a theologian. He had not received a traditional religious education.
And his initial return to Islam, came through poetry, through the imagination, through aesthetics, through an appreciation of the Qur’an's beauty in a book that he published in 1944, Artistic Depiction in the Qur’an.
In this book, he argued that the Qur’an's real power was aesthetic, was its beauty. He argues that Qur’anic images, imagery within the words, would impress themselves on your imagination, revealing truths. He called this way of appreciating the Qur’an as opposed to Taswir, as opposed to Tafsir.
Aimen: Yes. And also at the same time, I remember when I was reading it when I was young, I was thinking that once you read that book, you will never look at the Qur’an the same way before, because suddenly you start to become more or less interested in what does this verse mean?
You really start to transfer yourself and your mind and your imagination into that event. There is a colour, there are faces, there are buildings. It's as if a drama is playing in front of you. So actually, once you read that book, you never read the Qur’an the same way ever again.
Thomas: I am feeling that in this regard, unlike the other figures we've been studying in this series, Sayyid Qutb was not a mere literalist. I don't think it would be fair to call him a literalist in the same way that Ahmad bin Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyyah and ibn Abd al-Wahhab were.
Because Sayyid Qutb is like a poet, assuming that the literal images, the literal words of the Qur’an, which create in the imagination, these powerful images are inclining in the direction of something beyond the mere words.
But for the time being, let's go back to the story. It's the Second World War and then the war ends. We're in that period, the 1940s, the mid-40s. Egypt is in political turmoil. There are riots, there are assassinations.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded as we said in the last episode in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna is a big player on the scene. It has already established its so-called secret apparatus, the sort of vaguely paramilitary wing of the brotherhood, which was oriented towards overthrowing the government.
Now, we're going to actually do two episodes on the Muslim Brotherhood after this episode. So, I don't want to go too much into the Muslim Brotherhood and its workings.
The point that I want to make now is that Qutb, throughout this period is turning more and more anti-western. He's writing that Westerners simply lack conscience. His language is becoming more and more extreme.
It's around this time that he's writing that quote that I quoted at the beginning of the last episode about how much he hates Westerners. And it is at this time that for the first time in his career, he begins openly to call for a comprehensive social and political program that would solve Egypt's problems and create social justice.
Now, I want to talk about this because this kind of a call for a comprehensive social program is totally modern. This call for a comprehensive social program is explicitly totalitarian alongside all sorts of totalitarianisms that were in the air, including Soviet totalitarianism, including Nazi totalitarianism.
He used the word Nidham. He called for the establishment of an Islamic Nidham, an integrated system, a regime encompassing every dimension of life, society, and politics.
It's a modern word that Sayyid Qutb is employing to achieve a modern end, a totalitarian solution to the world's problems.
Aimen: It became very clear to Sayyid as we are going into the year 1948, that he couldn't find the solution to Egypt’s ills and problems through poetry, through literature. There was no denying it.
At the time, the Egyptian society was torn between extremes, whether extreme left, with the communists gaining ground, whether with the nationalists who wanted to have purely nationalist Arab, Egyptian government.
And of course, the Islamist represented in the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted a political salvation through Islamic regime.
Sayyid, when he started reengaging with the Qur’an in the 1940s, he started to come to that conclusion that only through Islam we could find a solution to Egypt's problems.
Thomas: He articulated this growing conviction in a new journal that he founded at that time called New Thought. But it was in this journal that he first began to invoke Islam as the underpinning, as the foundation of the comprehensive social solution that he was yearning for.
Now, the government noticed his new tone and the journal New Thought was shut down after only 12 issues, because it was included amongst a list of banned publications, subversive publications, the government called them. Which brings us to the pivotal year, which listeners of the last season we'll know, is very pivotal indeed of 1948.
Aimen: Year 1948. It is the year of the partition between the Jews and the Arabs, and what was known there as the mandate of Palestine which was of course controlled by the British.
The United Nations announced the independence of Israel in 1948, and immediately seven Arab armies invaded. Against the odds the Israelis fought back, and there was a massive humiliation against all the seven Arab armies, including the Egyptian army.
The Egyptian army in particular suffered significant casualties and a significant defeat. And that humiliation was felt throughout all of Egypt, including by Sayyid Qutb, which of course propelled him to write that book Ma'rakatuna ma 'a al-Yahud, our battle with the Jews. And that formed some of his ideas that are yet to come.
Thomas: Just to remind the listener, the Muslim Brotherhood participated in the Arab-Israeli War alongside Egyptian troops in the war. And this gained the initial respect of young army officers in the Egyptian army, including a very key figure in the rest of this story. And a key figure in last season of Conflicted, President Nasser, or soon to be President Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Let's just bracket that for now. Because in fact, Sayyid, weirdly Sayyid Qutb is going to leave Egypt precisely at this time. At the end of the summer of 1948. He takes up the opportunity that the Egyptian government gave him to travel to of all places, the United States, where he goes on to spend 21 months travelling around the country, learning, and studying the United States' education system.
Well, two things I want to say about this, Aimen. First of all, a lot of people think that Sayyid Qutb became an Islamist because when he went to the United States, he saw American culture and hated it. And so, turned to Islamism.
This is not true. This is a myth. He had already made his Islamist turn as we've just said, before he left. So, it's simply not true.
Aimen: Absolutely. And this is a problem with simplistic easy takes on Sayyid’s life for sure.
Thomas: And just before he left, and this is proof again, that he had already made his Islamist turn, he completed the manuscript for the first of his three great and most influential works called Social Justice in Islam.
So, you see, he was already an Islamist. Social Justice in Islam is calling for an Islamist solution to the world's problems.
Aimen: There’s an anecdote here where he was travelling to the U.S. of course, an ocean liner and across the Atlantic. And one night, one lady who wasn't dressing modestly and clearly drunk, knocked on his door in the middle of the night. And she really threw herself at him and just wanted to be in his company.
And the shock, how he was shocked. He just threw her out of the room. He threw her out across the galley and just go away. And of course, this would have been a traumatic experience for him, and he just doesn't realise, hey, I'm far away from the Gentil gentleman saloons of Cairo, where even among the Effendi classes, the segregation between genders were still being practised.
Thomas: Yeah, it's good that you bring up that anecdote of this poor drunk woman trying to get into his bed. But it also raises the question of Sayyid Qutb and sex. We didn't talk about sex in the first episode, but I want to talk about sex and Sayyid Qutb. That's like Sex and the City, but sex and Sayyid Qutb, maybe we could make a new TV show.
Aimen: No, no, no. We should call it sexless in the city.
Thomas: Sexless in the city. That's right. Sayyid Qutb like ibn Taymiyyah in fact, never married. And most scholars of his life think that it's extremely likely that he never had sex, that he died a virgin.
He is only on record of having fallen in love one time. He actually wrote a novel, a schwak, it's called about this experience, about him falling passionately in love with a woman and yet having to break off the love affair because she wasn't pure enough for him.
There's something very telling in this fact about him, a squeamishness about female sexuality, a squeamishness about male sexual desire and an antipathy to that side of life, to sex.
Being afraid of sex does overlap quite nicely, as we discussed before with the fundamentalist or the radical or the literalist frame of mind and Sayyid Qutb had it in spades.
Aimen: In fact, there is an anecdote from his life where when he was at the University of North Colorado, of all places, I mean North Colorado, for God's sake. I recall you are a Coloradon yourself, Thomas.
Thomas: I did spend five years of my childhood in Colorado. It is the middle of nowhere. It is true. Yep.
Aimen: More like the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, so when he was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, he attended a church dance.
And he was commenting that I saw the men hugging the women so tight, putting their hands at the bottom of their backs. So, he found that to be scandalous, and oh my God, I'm just reading this and I'm thinking, oh, poor Sayyid, poor, poor, poor Sayyid, if he was alive today, he will have a heart attack.
Thomas: That story of the church dance in Greeley, Colorado includes the detail of the song that he found particularly offensive. It's the classic Christmas song, Baby it's Cold Outside. This has gone down in history. Sayyid Qutb hates that song. He found it to be utterly provocative. We've sort of got off track here.
So, he lands in New York, he's walking down Broadway, Kiss Me Kate is in the theatres. This is the kind of world we're in. This is America in its glorious post-war apotheosis. This is the America that Americans today in a nostalgic wave praise to the skies.
And Sayyid Qutb is walking in this America hating everything he sees thinking that it's all just the pits. He was writing letters and essays detailing his trip back home, constantly seeing everything through an anti-western lens that he had already largely sort of built up in his mind over the previous 15 years.
After New York, he went to Washington DC where he was hospitalised for an illness that he never made clear about what it was. And while he was in hospital, a very momentous event happened back home in Egypt.
And that's that on the 12th of February of that year, 1949, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna was assassinated. And Sayyid Qutb found out about this while recuperating in hospital in Washington DC.
How is the death of Hassan Al-Banna likely to have impacted him, Aimen? He wasn't a member of the Muslim Brotherhood yet, but he must have respected greatly already by this time, Al-Banna's anti colonialist pro-Muslim stance.
Aimen: Given what he wrote about Hassan Al-Banna later, you could tell that he admired the man considerably. And there was no question that he felt that the death of Hassan Al-Banna was a great loss to Egypt and to the cause of Islamist nationalism.
Thomas: Yeah, he was aware at the time that members of the American foreign policy establishment whom he was socialising with in Washington DC as a representative of the Egyptian government, were very aware of Hassan Al-Banna's significance.
And he was disturbed by the glee that he felt he sensed in their descriptions of Hassan Al-Banna's assassination. And it planted the seeds of something that would definitely continue to grow of a kind of paranoid, conspiratorial way of thinking about America and British foreign policy and foreign agents and intelligence.
He always saw the American British kind of alliance as secretly working to undermine Islam. And in that, again, he shared that with so many Muslim activists at the time.
So, after his period in Washington DC he crossed the country and landed up in Greeley, Colorado, as we said, Greeley, Colorado, you can imagine this is classic Americana, classic mid-20th century Americana.
Again, a world that Americans, especially conservative Americans fetishized today. But for Sayyid Qutb it was like he was in hell.
Aimen: Because for him, it lacked the spirituality of what he was feeling back home. And for him, it felt as if it was detached from God in the moral sense, the desegregation of the genders. And also, at the same time what he saw as the real sin of racism. Because he experienced it himself.
Thomas: He did, yes, he went with an Egyptian friend while he was in Colorado, he went to the cinema. And initially they were denied entry because the cinema manager misidentified them as black.
Now, when he was told that, in fact, no, they’re Egyptians, the manager was very apologetic, but Sayyid Qutb refused his apology and stormed off. So, he was very offended by being at the receiving end of America's racism.
And yet there's something slightly subtle in his offence, because I think what really offended him was that he had been lumped in with black people.
One of the things that he wrote about obsessively during his time in America was how disgusting he found jazz music because he believed that jazz music expressed the “primitive” inclinations of black people.
So, he's not really offended at America's racism, as much as he was offended at America's considering him to be black.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: From Colorado, he then travelled to California, my native stomping ground. He lived in San Francisco and San Diego, and that's where he drew his 21 months in the U.S. to a close.
Now, Sayyid Qutb's experience of America was not unlike that of many intellectuals at the time, especially European intellectuals of a radical or reactionary persuasion. So, from left or right.
They found America to be crass, materialistic, consumeristic, et cetera. All of the things that in fact, right thinking intellectuals today still think of America. And he left America absolutely convinced that western society was decadent and corrupt, and that the solution for the Muslim world lay in Islam.
We're going to take a break now. When we come back, he returns to Egypt and he launches on his full-throated career as an Islamist ideologue, which will quickly land him in very hot water indeed, with the new growing power at the centre of Egyptian politics, Nasser. We'll be back.
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We are back. We are rushing to the end of the great Sayyid Qutb's life. When we left him, he was just returning to Egypt from his 21 months in America. Upon returning home to Egypt, he immediately went on Hajj.
While he was away in America, his book, Social Justice in Islam, had been published and was warmly embraced across the Muslim world.
So, on Hajj, he met up with other Muslim thinkers who were praising him for this work. During the trip in conversation with an Indian pilgrim, he was first introduced to Abul A'la al-Maududi's idea, key idea.
So, this is another key, key modern Islamist thinker, al-Maududi. He was introduced to his idea that the Muslim world had fallen back into Jāhiliyyah. This was absolutely formative for Sayyid Qutb.
It kind of was like the capstone to all of his thinking, and he realised that yes, and in this he was a bit like Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Yes, that is what's happening here. The Muslim world is no longer properly Muslim. It has fallen back into Jāhiliyyah. This is it. This is when he becomes the Islamist that we know him as. Is that right, Aimen?
Aimen: Indeed. Because now more than ever, you have this formative thinking in his mind that the Muslim world has abandoned Islam as the basis of governance, and that Muslim societies are no longer Muslim societies. They are now experiencing what he calls Jāhiliyyah. And Jāhiliyyah means the pre-Islamic era when people lived in ignorance.
Thomas: The age of ignorance. Yeah.
Aimen: Yes, absolutely. And you see from his point of view, how could a mosque be sandwiched in Egypt between a bank and a nightclub? He opposed that. And he said, either we live fully as Muslims, or the society as a whole has abandoned Islam. For him, it's all or nothing.
Thomas: So, now convinced of this, he returns to Egypt. He writes a book, The Battle of Islam and Capitalism. He also writes a book, Our Struggle with the Jews. You've mentioned that book already, Aimen.
His writing becomes increasingly paranoid. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He starts writing against what he calls American Islam, a watered-down form of Islam. This is now Sayyid Qutb, the revolutionary radical firebrand. And he is warmly embraced by a growing revolutionary ferment that is overwhelming Egypt at the time.
This is the ferment that would result in July 1952 with the overthrow of Fat Farouk and the coming to power in time of Gamal Abdel Nasser initially not as president, eventually as President.
Sayyid Qutb was intimately and directly involved in that July revolution. Four days before the revolution, Nasser and the other officers who would overthrow the king met in Sayyid Qutb’s house in Cairo.
Sayyid Qutb knew some of the other officers. He was there. Sayyid Qutb was there with some members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Sayyid Qutb was now much more directly linked, although not yet a member.
The officers told them all of the coup plan. The Muslim Brotherhood was asked to take control of the streets when the coup would be launched four days later. And Sayyid Qutb was tasked with coordinating between the brothers and the officers.
And after the revolution, Nasser, still not president. The president was a man called Mohamed Naguib, would consult with Sayyid Qutb on the progress of the revolution regularly. Sayyid Qutb would claim that sometimes he and Nasser would meet for 12 hours a day.
This relationship, Aimen, between Nasser and Sayyid Qutb is one of the great dramatic relationships of the 20th century, honestly.
Aimen: It's worthy of an Egyptian, Roman Greek drama. I would say that. The fact that Nasser was ardent student of Sayyid Qutb and his writings, he was influenced by these writings even before they met when Nasser was on the front lines of the 1948 war against the fledgling state of Israel.
There is no question that Nasser admired Sayyid Qutb's writings, and in particular his anti-colonialist writings. Nonetheless, Nasser in the end is a military man, a pragmatic man, and someone who already had a slight leaning towards socialism, more likely communism Soviet style.
Thomas: And more importantly, I think from Sayyid Qutb's point of view, Nasser's ideology would become fully fledged Pan-Arabism. Nasser wished to see himself at the head of a Pan-Arab state organised in a collectivist pseudo socialist way.
Whereas Sayyid Qutb was more and more advocating for a Pan Islamist policy overseen really by the Muslim Brotherhood. This would inevitably lead to a clash between them, despite the fact that for the first months after the revolution, Nasser was begging Qutb to come on board the regime in some official capacity.
But it never happened. Qutb quickly realised that Nasser was only using the Muslim Brotherhood to take advantage of the Muslim brotherhood's political organisation. And when he realized this, that Nasser had no intention whatsoever of adopting an Islamist policy for Egypt, Qutb refused to meet with him anymore.
And even after Nasser offered him his pick of political position, basically Nasser said, you can't be president, you can't be vice president, but you can be anything else in this new regime. And yet he refused.
And it is in this context in February 1953, and it was partly out of his disappointment with the new Nasser dominated revolutionary regime that Sayyid Qutb momentously joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Only now in 1953, aged 47, did Sayyid Qutb join the Muslim Brotherhood.
Aimen: The Muslim Brotherhood thought that no one could ever replace Hassan al-Banna after his assassination in 1949. However, 1953 Christmas came early for them. Sayyid Qutb joined them.
And when he joined them, he gave them that much needed boost. They straight away appointed them at the very top of the leadership. He was added as a member of the guidance council, and he was given the task of being the chief propagandist of the movement.
So, in a way, the Muslim Brotherhood got that momentum that they never had before. And this scared the Nasserites in the new government.
Thomas: It sure did, especially since Sayyid Qutb was travelling on Muslim Brotherhood business from this time forward, travelling to places like Syria and elsewhere, meeting other Islamists, coordinating the Muslim brotherhood's relations with other Islamist, Pan-Islamist groups. All of this was very provocative.
And through a series of very complicated political moves, which we covered to some extent in last season of Conflicted, moves which brought Nasser to power in Egypt as the president following an attempted Muslim Brotherhood coordinated assassination of him, a thousand Muslim Brotherhood members were arrested, including Sayyid Qutb.
Now, this is in October 1954. The following January, Sayyid Qutb appeared before a show trial. I mean, that he was going to be found guilty had already been decided, I'm sure. And yet the court sentenced him to 15 years hard labour.
So, this is really where Sayyid Qutb will spend, weirdly enough, the most important years of his life in prison. And I say weirdly enough because it is due to the books he wrote in prison, books we've already mentioned: In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones, that Sayyid Qutb would leave his most lasting mark on the world.
Aimen: It is important for the dear listener to know that Nasser's prisons in the 1950s and 60s were no picnic at all. In fact, he was aided by East German Stasi agents to help him invent new ways of persuading prisoners to talk, let's call them torture, torture methods.
So, you can imagine here that one of the methods at which Sayyid Qutb himself mentioned is that they would douse him with animal fat and then they would let German Shepherds on him.
Thomas: Unbelievable.
Aimen: Hungry German Shepherds. So, you can imagine, what would that do to him. Also, at the same time, they would sometime take him into a room along with another one or two fellow prisoners, and they will find in the room there will be 3, 4, 5 snakes poisonous. And now it's either them who kill the snakes or the snakes will kill them.
And of course, this kind of extreme physical and psychological torture would take its toll on the most sane of people. And so, what do you expect the outcome of his mind would be when he is commenting on the Qur’an under severe stress from all of the torture, both physical and mental.
Thomas: After an initial period of extreme deprivation and indeed torture, the authorities did allow him the freedom to write. And it was during this period as I said that he wrote In the Shade of the Qur’an and this very important book Milestones, which you've mentioned, Aimen.
And which I'd like to talk about here now in some greater detail, because Milestones, you've described it to me, Aimen, as basically the kind of constitution of the Salafi jihadist movement. It's the book that all Salafi jihadists read. They don't memorise it, but they cherish it. It is the blueprint for the Salafi jihadist movement and for all of their aims and ambitions.
Aimen: Not only the Salafits, but many other groups and all of those armed groups Taliban, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Not to mention even the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I mean even Ayatollah Khomeini translated and his brother Mohammed translated Milestones into Farsi because it is a ready-made constitution for any Islamist movement that want to take over a society and turn it into an Islamic state.
I'm sure many of our dear listeners would be wondering, what is the nature of Milestones, the book that led to the execution of Sayyid Qutb, his grand manifesto, which then became the ultimate constitution for many jihadist and radical organisations around the world.
Well, it's easy to summarise it. The first chapter of Milestones talk about, well milestones. He is talking about the milestones on the journey towards the ultimate aim, an Islamic state, an Islamic society, the kingdom of God on earth as he envisioned it.
The second chapter there talks about a unique Qur’anic generation. So, we of course, declaring his Salafism.
The third chapter explains the nature of the Qur’anic struggle and where we are heading as a society if we want to embrace Qur’an as the constitution for everyday life.
That is why in the fourth chapter, he goes on to talk about the foundation of the Islamic society and its special character. Then he goes on to say, how do we establish this Islamic society? Is it just by preaching?
In fact, in this chapter, he talks about the fact that you cannot preach your way into power, where he is talking about jihad as an important instrument to remove the obstacles to the establishment of a Islamic society, the kingdom of God on earth.
Then the following chapter talks about the statement of faith, la 'iilah 'iilaa allah there is no God, but God as a way of life. Because once you establish the state through jihad, then la 'iilah 'iilaa allah will reign supreme.
And that is through what? In the next chapter, he talks about universal sharia. He is talking about sharia not being only applicable to Islamic societies, but to all societies.
And that is why in the following chapter, after that, talks about the fact that Islam itself is a civilization. And then he talks about culture within Islam. Then he talks about the fact that the nationality of a Muslim is his faith. That's it.
All other identities should be abolished based on the modern nation state. And that's why he called it in the next chapter a giant leap. And that is why in his second to last chapter, he called it the Mastery of Faith.
Echoing what Hasan Al-Banna said about the mastery of the world as the final outcome of the Muslim Brotherhood creed, aim, and goal.
And the final chapter in Milestones, something that our dear listeners who are fans of Star Wars and the Mandalorian series would love it. It's called, This is the Way.
Thomas: Well, you can see why Milestones is called the Jihadist constitution. You can see why it has inspired Islamists of every stripe since its release in the 1960s.
It is a comprehensive plan, a comprehensive ideological plan on how to frame thinking about returning society to its Quranic roots and establishing a modern Islamist society, which he calls interestingly, the kingdom of God on earth. Very interesting. That is not a traditionally Muslim formulation. That is a Christian formulation, the kingdom of God on earth. Very interesting.
Why do you think he chose that term, the kingdom of God on earth as the goal to which Islamists should be aspiring?
Aimen: Because he wanted to convince the masses, down with all this Republican nonsense Down with the republics of this and the Soviet this and the socialist this and democratic that. There is nothing than a godly kingdom to establish God's rule on earth. Sovereignty is to the king and the king is God.
Thomas: Well, if his great work Milestones ends with a call to martyrdom, Sayyid Qutb would get it. Just after he finished writing the book, he had a heart attack in prison. When word of this got out, various figures, including the president of Iraq, who by this time along with many other millions of people, had learned to very much revere Sayyid Qutb because of his writings, the president of Iraq personally requested from Nasser that he released him from prison.
Nasser did. Sayyid Qutb immediately returned to the brotherhood, began helping the brotherhood reorganise its secret organisation to set up paramilitary groups to strategize for the coming revolution, which Sayyid Qutb and other brotherhood members were determined to bring about.
Milestones was published, was read by the government. The government said, “Hey, this is a comprehensive program for overthrowing us.”
And so, not long after being released from prison in August 1965, Sayyid Qutb was arrested again. This was the biggest and most brutal crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood that Nasser would launch during his time as president of Egypt.
Sayyid Qutb was sent to a military prison. He was put in solitary confinement. At another show trial, he was accused of subversion of attempting to assassinate Nasser and overthrow the government.
Despite that many people counselled Nasser to show mercy, including, interestingly enough, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia asking him to show clemency to this great thinker, Sayyid Qutb but Nasser refused.
In a final letter facing his execution Sayyid Qutb wrote, “I have been able to discover God in a wonderful new way. I understand his path and way more clearly and perfectly than before. My confidence in his protection and promise to the believers is stronger than ever before. Moreover, I maintain my resolution to raise my head and not to bend it to anyone except God.”
There are echoes there, Aimen, of Ibn Taymiyyah who died in prison. There are echoes there of Ahmad bin Hanbal who spent time in prison, fewer echoes there of ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
But in that note of determination of total conviction of political idealism based in Islam, ibn Abd al-Wahhab is present.
On the 29th of August 1966 Sayyid Qutb was hanged. He died a martyr according to many, many, many millions of people. So, this leaves us, Aimen, discussing not only Sayyid Qutb's legacy, which is really unparalleled in modern Salafi jihadism and modern Islamism in general.
But the legacy of all the figures that we've explored now, those three Hanbalis and the one modern Hanafi, Sufi, Nazi poet, romantic, reactionary, dreamer Sayyid Qutb.
Aimen: So, imagine if Wahhabism and Salafism was an egg, then Sayyid was a sperm that came in, fertilised it with a political framework, with an ideological bent in order to propel it forward as a movement, to create that embryonic stage towards a proper militant Islamic revolutionary movement.
Thomas: I loved that metaphor because it helps to explain the relationship between the three Hanbalis that we discussed in this series and Sayyid Qutb in the generation of modern radical Islamism.
Sayyid Qutb took already existing Salafism and breathed ideological fire into it, forming it into a political framework giving it a political goal. The kingdom of God on earth that inspired not only Al-Qaeda, not only the Egyptian Islamic jihad, not only al-Shabaab, but also the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution.
But also take your pick, they’ve all been influenced by Sayyid Qutb. He gave Salafism, he gave that psychological spiritual temperament that we've been exploring. The temperament towards literalism, the temperament towards purity, the temperament towards nostalgia, the temperament towards withdrawing from the world, which is perceived as corrupt and corrupting.
Infuse that temperament with an ideological superstructure. The combination of which gave birth to something very powerful indeed. That thing which we have been exploring in different ways for five years now, Aimen. And which we call Islamism, that brings to an end.
Oh, it makes me depressed actually because I just think of all the things we could have talked about, including what you told me, Aimen, you pointed out his little Hitler moustache. Do you remember?
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: You had this whole thing of Sayyid Qutb was entirely not a Nazi. You said, look at his little Hitler moustache.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: Also, all the modern day of resonances with Sayyid Qutb's mind, even outside of Islam, because this is very important that the reactionary mentality does not exist only inside Islam. Far, far from it.
My God. People like Aleksandr Dugin, the current Russian ideologue who sort of hangs over the war in Ukraine. Figures like Andrew Tate, a recent convert to Islamic, must be said. Incels all around the world who also are very resentful at their inability to have sex with women. All sorts of reactionary movements resonate with Sayyid Qutb’s mentality.
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Anyway, Aimen, as I say, there's so much that I wanted to discuss. Luckily Conflicted will go on yes, and on and on, and no doubt we'll have many opportunities to talk about all of these things.
As it stands, our series on these four seminal thinkers that gave birth to Islamism has come to an end, but that doesn't mean Conflicted comes to an end. And when we come back next week, we are really going to continue this line of exploration when we devote two episodes to that organisation which Sayyid Qutb provided the much-needed ideological structure, the Muslim Brotherhood. Stay tuned.
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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.