a house divided, 1933–73relief for Egypt’s urban poor. Like al-Afghani, the Muslim Brotherhood
attacked European, and particularly British, colonialism and domin ation
of the Near East, calling for the Islamization of society and declared the
Qur’an to be their only Constitution. For the founders of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the state was the church and the church was the state. Many
of the leaders of the Brotherhood were educated in secular institutions and
were intellectuals, writers, poets and journalists, rather than members of
the traditional religious elites. Such individuals and the movements they
founded are usually referred to as Islamists in Western publications.
One of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb
(1906–1966), an employee of Egypt’s Education Department who wrote
novels in his spare time. In 1948 Qutb was awarded a scholarship to study
in the American education system and during his time in Colorado he
wrote his first political treatise in which he attacked American secular-
ism and society, in particular its violence and obsession with sexuality.
His political philosophy was based on the assertion that the shari‘a, as
defined by the Hanafi mazhab, was the only legitimate legal framework
for state and society, since it was God given and represented God’s eternal
and irrevoc able will and decrees. The shari‘a was fundamental therefore
not just to any Muslim society, but to every nation and civilization. Qutb
therefore condemned all alternative forms of state and governance as jahili-
yya – that is, the state of ignorance said to have existed in Arabia prior
to the revelation of the Qur’an. For Muslims to submit to any un-Islamic
form of government was not just unlawful but tantamount to a mortal
sin, for they were the law of Iblis, the Devil. Shari‘aization therefore was
not a matter of choice or preference but of salvific importance. Since
most Muslim nations at the time he wrote were, to one degree or other,
under colonial rule by European, non-Muslim, nations, Qutb called for an
intern al jihad against both European colonialism and Muslims who ruled
in the name of European colonial powers. As a consequence, Qutb shifted
the emphasis of jihad, which traditionally was a war against aggression by
non-Muslim states, and redirected it to an internal political struggle against
governments the Ikhwan al-Muslimin deemed were infidel regimes.
From the early 1960s onwards the Muslim Brotherhood’s radicalism
became increasingly popular with young Muslims, especially university
students. However, its ideology was introduced to Afghanistan not by
secular intellectuals but by a circle of Islamic scholars, most of whom had
studied for higher degrees at Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque-university. Their
leader, Professor Ghulam Muhammad Niyazi, was a Ghilzai naqil from
Pushtun Kot, outside Maimana. In 1957 he returned to Afghanistan after