Sayyid Qutb
The Egyptian writer executed in 1966 whose prison books gave modern jihadism its central argument: that Muslim rulers themselves are the enemy.
Sayyid Qutb never fired a weapon or commanded anyone. He was a literary critic who became a religious writer, and he was hanged by the Egyptian state in 1966 at the age of fifty-nine. Yet no single thinker did more to shape the violent Islamism of the following half-century, because he supplied the argument that made it possible to declare war on Muslim governments rather than on foreign occupiers.
He was born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, memorized the Quran as a boy, trained as a teacher, and spent his early career in Cairo's literary world writing poetry, novels, and criticism. He was, in his thirties, a fairly conventional Egyptian nationalist intellectual with secular tastes.
Greeley
In 1948 the Ministry of Education sent him to the United States to study its school system. He spent about two years there, including a stretch at a teachers' college in Greeley, Colorado, and returned appalled. His account, written up on his return, describes a society of enormous material power and, as he saw it, spiritual emptiness: obsessed with money and sport, casually racist toward the Black Americans he had watched being treated as inferiors, and sexually unrestrained in ways he found grotesque. Even the church socials horrified him.
The conclusion he drew was not that America was uniquely bad but that Western modernity as a whole was a dead end, and that Egypt's elites were busy importing it. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood soon after.
Prison and Milestones
Qutb initially welcomed the 1952 Free Officers coup, and Gamal Abdel Nasser courted him. The alliance collapsed fast. After a Brotherhood member's attempt on Nasser's life in 1954, the movement was smashed and Qutb was imprisoned, tortured, and left in a prison hospital for most of the next decade. There he wrote the two works that matter: a vast commentary called In the Shade of the Quran, and a short, incendiary book published in 1964 as Maalim fi al-Tariq, Milestones.
Milestones made two moves. The first was to take the classical term jahiliyya, the age of ignorance before Islam, and apply it to the present: not to unbelievers abroad but to nominally Muslim societies whose laws came from parliaments rather than from God. Egypt, in this reading, was not a Muslim country at all. The second was hakimiyya, the doctrine that sovereignty belongs to God alone, which makes any human legislature an act of usurpation.
Put together, they authorize something the tradition had strenuously resisted. If Muslim rulers are actually unbelievers, then fighting them is not rebellion but jihad, and a committed vanguard is entitled to lead that fight without waiting for the community's consent. Qutb was careful and often ambiguous about how far this went. His readers were not.
He was released in 1964, rearrested in 1965, tried for conspiracy, and hanged on August 29, 1966. Nasser had been urged to spare him and refused.
The inheritance
Execution turned an argument into a martyrdom. Mainstream Brotherhood leaders spent years publishing rebuttals insisting that Qutb had not licensed takfir, the excommunication of fellow Muslims, and much of the movement moved toward electoral politics instead. But the militant reading spread, carried in part by his brother Muhammad Qutb, who taught in Saudi Arabia, where a generation of radicals encountered the ideas. Ayman al-Zawahiri, later the ideologist of al-Qaeda, was a teenager in Cairo when Qutb was hanged and described it as the moment that set his course.
The practical consequence shows up in every jihadist campaign since. The groups that emerged from this lineage have killed far more Muslims than Westerners, because the doctrine points first at the government in the nearest capital. Qutb's most influential idea was not that the West is the enemy. It was that the enemy is already at home, holding office, and calling itself Muslim.