Nasser Executes Sayyid Qutb — Martyrdom that Globalised Jihadism
By 1965 Nasser had been systematically repressing the Muslim Brotherhood for over a decade — thousands were imprisoned, tortured, and killed in Egypt's political prisons. Qutb himself had been imprisoned since 1954, released briefly in 1964, and re-arrested in 1965 when the government claimed to have uncovered a Brotherhood plot to assassinate leaders and blow up infrastructure. The evidence was contested, the trial widely regarded as staged, but the verdict was never in doubt. Qutb was offered a commutation if he would publicly recant his writings. He refused. 'My words will speak louder after my death than they did during my life,' he reportedly told his brother. On 29 August 1966, he was hanged at dawn along with two Brotherhood colleagues. He was sixty years old. The execution was Nasser's most consequential mistake. A live Qutb was a prisoner whose influence could be managed; a dead Qutb was a martyr whose words could not be silenced. Milestones, already banned, circulated more widely after the execution than before. The generation of young Islamists radicalised by the experience of the 1960s and 1970s — in Egyptian prisons, in the Palestinian refugee camps, in the Saudi universities where exiled Brotherhood members taught — read Qutb's death through the lens he had himself provided: the righteous man destroyed by the jahiliyya state, a new Husayn at a new Karbala. The organisational consequences were immediate and lasting. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fifteen-year-old student in Cairo when Qutb was hanged, later wrote: 'The Egyptian government sowed the seeds of al-Qaeda the day it executed Sayyid Qutb.' The Egyptian Islamic Jihad that Zawahiri would later lead, the broader al-Qaeda network he would build with Osama bin Laden, and the intellectual genealogy of virtually every Sunni jihadist movement since the 1970s traced a direct line back to the prison writings of the man Nasser killed in 1966. The irony of political martyrdom is that repression rarely destroys ideas; it authenticates them. Nasser intended to demonstrate that the Egyptian state was stronger than political Islam. He demonstrated instead that political Islam could survive any repression the state could inflict — and emerge stronger.
- Year: 1966 CE
- Category: Political
