Werzit

Intel - Terrorism
Sayyid Qutb

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• Born 1906 in Egypt in a village in Upper Egypt into a middle class family whose economic situation was gradually declining, and was deeply influenced by the popular Islamic culture there.
• His father was a nationalist and his mother a devout Muslim who insisted that Qutb memorize the Qur'an, which he did at an early age.
• Yet he was sent to attend a secular school (madrasa) rather than a parochial Islamic school (kuttab).

• Although he was something of a teachers' pet and wore relatively nice clothes, from an early age he developed a strong sympathy for the poor.
• He attended Dar al-'Ulum University in Cairo, where he fell under the influence of modernist poetry and literary trends, but was himself a romantic with a spiritual orientation who was saddened by societal problems and familial burdens, "never forsook Islam," and "remained loyal to his Arab Islamic heritage"

• From behind the bars of Nasser's prison, Qutb joined contemporary politics to Ibn Taymiyya's theory of legitimate authority to argue that all supposedly "Muslim" societies in the contemporary world are jahili societies as long as their leaders claim legislative authority for themselves, and construct social life on the basis of "modern science" while paying lip-service to Islamic belief. Islamic society, Qutb insists, is not one in which people follow their own version of Islam. There is no such amalgam called "progressive Islam."
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 60]

• Also influential on Qutb's thought is Indian thinker Abu al-Hasan al-Nadwi, particularly his Islam and the World.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 188]

• The other most prominent Islamic fundamentalist, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, indicts as heretics all humans who believe they can govern themselves by themselves. To him the notion of man's rule is megalomania, for man is created by God and can only be governed by God, within the framework of hakimiyyat Allah.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 28]

• It follows that the anti-Western sentiments are clearly not anti-Christian. Sayyid Qutb once dismissed secular world order as the return to the jahiliyya/pre-Islamic age of heedlessness, as I shall show later.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 43]

• In his view, only Islam is prepared to assume the world leadership that the West is about to relinquish. This idea can be found in his major pamphlets: The Future Belongs to Hdis Religion, and Signposts.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• Qutb blames Muslims themselves for having allowed the West to push Islam into the margins of the international system, where it has little influence in determining the framework of world politics.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 93]

• Qutb also borrowed liberally from the earlier works of the Pakistani jurist Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi in formulating his own political theory. Indeed, Qutb's most powerful organizing concepts are Qur'anic terms that Mawdudi had revived for contemporary use years before.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 55]

• Finally, the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who while in prison became the Brotherhood's ideologist, conceived the universal nature of the Islamic movement, projecting the image of a monolithic nation, a state ruled by an Islamic party. To achieve this final goal, Sayyid justified the use of violence  in any form.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 154]

• These accusations are sufficient to justify the slaying of intellectuals, journalists, artists, lawyers, and other "infidel" Muslims.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 58]

• For this reason he was at pains to replace modernity with an unrestrained theo-centrism that leaves no room for democracy and in the sense of rule of the people by the people. Only Allah, the supreme sovereign, rules. Humans have no sovereignty, and Islamic revelation takes precedence over the reason-centered view of the world.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, pp. 56-57]

• Qutb extended his assault on modernity to Muslims themselves in arguing that they have let themselves be infected by the West and by modernity.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 57]

• Richard Mitchell deems Qutb "the center as well as the main ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood," and Samir Amin argues that Qutb's work "remains unparallelled: the recordings of Ayatollah Khomeini, the long educational talks that the Arab television stations, from Morocco to the Gulf, offer their viewers, the religious education propagated by the militants, the endless range of books and pamphlets shelved in bookshops under the Islamiyat label, have added nothing to the master's thinking."
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 54]

• Qutb's role was that of a successor: to fill this vacuum, forging al-Banna's legacy into a systemic ideology that would outlast the passing of his charismatic leadership.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 55]

• In contemporary fundamentalism we find a new understanding of jihad as an expression of "Islamic world revolution." This concept can be traced back to Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian political preacher who is seen as the intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• In addition, some scholars suggest that Qutb's emphasis on the illegitimacy of non-Islamic law is perhaps more properly understood as the contemporary legacy of a theologian named Ibn Taymiyya, who had introduced this criterion for judging rulers in his theory of a "right to revolt" as early as the fourteenth century.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 55]

• Qutb is even credited with influencing Ali Shari'ati, a writer some scholars have dubbed the "ideologue of the Iranian Revolution."
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 54]

• The leading authority on the ideological source of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, blatantly declares that "the end of Western rule lies ahead" and hastens to add that "only Islam is eligible to assume the leadership of the world. When Islamic fundamentalists address Islam's new role in world politics, this is exactly what they have in mind.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 89]

• In contemporary fundamentalism we find a new understanding of jihad as an expression of "Islamic world revolution." This concept can be traced back to Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian political preacher who is seen as the intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• Qutb stretched this violent understanding of jihad to empower an "Islamic world revolution (see note 42) based on religious legitimacy and the use of force in the form of irregular war.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 58]

• He concludes that Muslims themselves have begun to return to the jahiliyya/pre-Islamic age of heedlessness.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 57]

• in his view, Muslims have forgotten al-taghallub/superiority, the hallmark of Islam, in allowing the West to advance itself at the expense of Islam.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 57]

• Those who are familiar with the pronouncements of Muslim fundamentalists and have read the writings of Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi know that this political movement does not arise simply from a nostalgia for past glory, or to foment a political revolt against Western hegemony.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 15]

• In his numerous writings Qutb argued forcefully that the West is morally bankrupt and about to crumble. In his view, only Islam is prepared to assume the world leadership that the West is about to relinquish. This idea can be found in his major pamphlets: The Future Belongs to This Religion, and Signposts.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• During his New York years Qutb had read the book L'homme cet inconnu, by the Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel , in which this French scholar described, in most pathetic terms, the alienation of man in modern industrial societies.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• With no exaggeration his pamphlets can be compared, in terms of spread and influence, with the Communist Manifesto in the period of the early worker's movements in Europe and later under communism.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• The notion of jahiliyya as grounds for rejecting the postulates and conditions of the modern world was revived by Sayyid Qutb. He saw cultural modernity as a new variety of jahiliyya (jahiliyya jadadah/neo-jahiliyya), and this reference leads us to questions well beyond the Gulf War.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 43]

• Qutb seems to have been the precursor, on the Islamic front, of the Huntington approach of a "clash of civilizations." But unlike Mawdudi he views the conflict on a global scale: "After the decay of democracy, to the extent of bankruptcy, the West has nothing to give to humanity....It is time for Islam to take over and lead.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 187]

• Three basic themes emerge from Qutb's writings.
• First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed).
• Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and jahiliyya.

• Three basic themes emerge from Qutb's writings.
• Second, he warned that more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jahiliyya and its material comforts than to his view of Islam; jahiliyya could therefore triumph over Islam.

• Three basic themes emerge from Qutb's writings.
• Third, no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan.
• All Muslims-as he defined them-therefore must take up arms in this fight.
• Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction.

• The exposure of the World of Islam to modernity and to its rational worldview is, since Qutb, the point of departure in the political and social thought of Islamic fundamentalism.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 57]

• Qutb viewed Western civilization with contempt as an expression of jahiliyya/neo-jahiliyya, that is, the heedlessness of pre- Islamic times manifested in a new "crusader design."
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• For Qutb, man-centered cultural modernity is the cause of the deadly disease that has befallen the West and is now turning to infect Islam.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 56]

• Segregation and racist laws deeply disturbed him
• Called America a "spiritual wasteland"
• Resented the secular nature of USA
• Feared the women and men interact in society
• Resented materialism in America

• Mentor was Dr. William R. Ross, President of Colorado State College of Education in 1949

• His official recruitment into the Muslim Brotherhood in early 1953 by its new General Guide, Hasan Hudaybi

• Interpreted the Qur'an from the standpoint of "Islam under siege" for actions in a war of belief versus unbelief, in a multi-volume work, called "In the Shade of the Qur'an"

• Advocated violent jihad, even against Muslim nations