Sayyid Qutb (9 October 1906 in Musha – executed on 29 August 1966) was an important theoretician of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
He first received a religious and then a modernist education before starting his career in the Ministry of Public Instruction. He spent from 1948 to 1951 in United States on a scholarship to study the educational system, receiving a master's degree from the Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado).
What he saw in the USA, its morals, and especially the free conduct of its women, is believed by some to have been the basis for his commentary of the Qur'an Fi zilal al-Qur'an, which he wrote while imprisoned in Egypt. Resigning from the civil service he became perhaps the most persuasive publicist of the Muslim Brotherhood. The school of thought he inspired has become known as Qutbism.
His commentary on the Quran has been extremely influential; some see him as the central theorist of twentieth-century Islamism. There is anecdotal evidence that Sayyid Qutb and Shaykh Taqi-ud-deen an-Nabhani founder of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, influenced each other. According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon , "In a century in which some of the most important writing came out of prisons, Qutb, for better or for worse, is the Islamic world's answer to Solzhenitsyn, Sartre, and Havel, and he easily ranks with all of them in influence. It was Sayyid Qutb who fused together the core elements of modern Islamism.... Qutb concluded that the unity of God and His sovereignty meant that human rule – government legislates its own behavior – is illegitimate. Muslims must answer to God alone." [Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America (New York: Random House, 2002) p. 62] ISBN 0812969847. This point is central to most modern Islamists, in thier assertion that all forms of governance over the muslims is illegitimate except the Islamic state Khilafah.
Of many aspects of Islam to which Qutb gave renewed emphasis, perhaps the most significant was the concept of Jahiliyyah, the state of ignorance a society dwells in, in the absence of Islamic rule. Qutb wrote movingly of what he perceived as a contagion of Jahiliyyah flowing from corrupt Western liberal societies.
Before his death, many Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq, offered refuge to Qutb and other Muslim Brothers. Qutb beleived that all the current muslim regimes were in a state of "Jahilliyyah" or ignorance of Islam, so refused to come under thier wings. Qutb refused to leave his native land, and was later executed. His brother, Muhammad Qutb , detracted in many points from Sayyid Qutb's ideas, by adopting Wahhabism, after fleeing to Saudi Arabia where he became a Professor of Islamic Studies. One of Muhammad Qutb's students was Osama bin Laden.
Works:
- Mahammat ash-Sha'ir fi-l-hayat wa-shi'r al-jil al-hadir, 1933
- ash-Shati al-majhul, 1935
- al-Taswir al-Fanni fi-l-Qu'ran, 1944/45
- Tifl min al-qarya (autobiographical work), 1946
- Al-Adala al-Ijtima'iyya fi-l-Islam (Social Justice in Islam), 1949
- Fi zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an), 1954, commentary of the Qur'an in 30 volumes
- Ma'alim fi'l Tariq, 1965, Qutb's best known work
See also
External links
- Sayyid Qutb, Milestones http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/milestones/index_2.asp .
- Paul Berman, The Philosopher of Islamic Terror http://members.cox.net/slsturgi3/PhilosopherOfIslamicTerror.htm New York Times Magazine (March 23, 2003).
- Robert Irwin, Is this the man who inspired Bin Laden? http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,584478,00.html The Guardian (November 1, 2001).
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Sayyid Qutb's America http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1253796 from NPR's All Things Considered (May 6, 2003).
