Sayyid Qutb Publishes Milestones — The Manifesto of Jihadist Islamism
Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) was an Egyptian literary critic and government education official who became radicalised in stages. A visit to the United States from 1948 to 1950 — he had gone to study education — produced a book, The America I Have Seen, that was viscerally hostile to American materialism, racial inequality, and sexual permissiveness. Joining the Muslim Brotherhood on his return, he became its most prolific intellectual, writing a multi-volume Quran commentary (In the Shade of the Quran) while imprisoned by Nasser after the 1954 crackdown. Milestones, written in prison and published in 1964, was Qutb's most compact and explosive text. Its central argument was a radical extension of Maududi's concept of hakimiyya (divine sovereignty): not only was a secular state un-Islamic, but any society that did not implement God's sovereignty in all domains was in a state of jahiliyya — the pre-Islamic 'ignorance' that Muhammad had come to abolish. This categorisation was Qutb's most dangerous move: jahiliyya had historically referred to pagan Arabia before Islam, but Qutb applied it to twentieth-century Muslim societies, including Egypt. Muslims living under such conditions were required to separate themselves from the surrounding society (the stage of hijra — withdrawal, paralleling Muhammad's emigration from Mecca) and then, when ready, to engage in physical struggle (jihad) to destroy the jahiliyya state. The implications were revolutionary. Classical Islamic jurisprudence had carefully limited the grounds for declaring jihad, and had generally forbidden rebellion against Muslim rulers however impious. Qutb dissolved these restrictions: a ruler who did not implement Sharia was not a Muslim ruler at all, and killing him was not rebellion but the righteous overthrow of unbelief. This reasoning — later elaborated by the Egyptian jihadist Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj as the 'neglected duty' of jihad — was used to justify the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, the bombings of the 1990s, and ultimately the September 11 attacks. Qutb did not live to see any of this. He was arrested in 1965, tried for plotting to overthrow the government, and hanged on 29 August 1966. His execution transformed him into a martyr whose ideas spread with new urgency across the Islamic world. Ayman al-Zawahiri, later Osama bin Laden's ideological partner and eventual successor as al-Qaeda leader, was a teenager in Cairo when Qutb was hanged; he described Qutb as the primary intellectual influence on his radicalization.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Ideological
