Qutb, Sayyid (1906–1966) leading ideologue of
the Muslim Brotherhood
Sayyid Qutb is widely considered today to be
one of the founders and intellectual forebears of
modern Islamist movements. Qutb was born and
raised in the Egyptian village of Musha, where
he was educated from a young age in the qUran,
having memorized it by age 10. His early career
ranged from being a teacher for the Ministry of
Public Instruction to an author, literary critic,
and journalist. He was at first actively involved in
nationalist politics, and for a time was a firm sup-
porter of the Wafd Party. In 1948 he went to the
United states to study the American edUcation
system, receiving a master’s degree from Colorado
State College of Education (now University of
Northern Colorado) in 1950.
While in the United States Qutb witnessed
what he considered to be the immorality, sexual
promiscuity, and materialism of the United States
and the West, and this partially impelled him into
his career as an Islamist. Upon returning to egypt
in 1951, Qutb joined the mUslim brotherhood,
where he was an outspoken critic of Egyptian
president Jamal abd al-nasir (r. 1953–70) and
his regime, becoming the organization’s key ideo-
logue and filling the vacuum left by the death of
the hasan al-banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s
founder, in 1949. Under Qutb, the Muslim Broth-
erhood became more radical than it had been
under his predecessor. After the attempted assas-
sination of Nasir in 1954, Qutb, along with
other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, was
imprisoned, and he himself was tortured. While in
prison Qutb wrote his two most important works:
In the Shade of the Quran, a commentary on the
Quran, and Signposts on the Road (often shortened
to Signposts or Milestones; Arabic: Maalim fi al-
tariq).
In Signposts, Qutb vigorously attacked the
Nasir regime, its secUlarism, and the social
inequalities that he believed were perpetuated
by it. Although Signposts is clearly a scathing
polemic aimed largely at the Egyptian govern-
ment, it has been widely translated and remains
an enormously influential text well past his life-
time and well beyond Egypt’s national borders.
Qutb set forth many of the ideas and themes that
would recur in the ideologies of a wide variety of
subsequent Islamist thinkers, from the assassins
of Egypt’s president anWar al-sadat (r. 1970–81)
all the way to Usama bin ladin (b. 1957). Part of
the appeal of Signposts stems from its novel evo-
cation of traditional and familiar Islamic symbols
and application of them to the modern world,
including, for example, a reinterpretation of the
term jahiliyya. Qutb redefined the meaning of the
term, which originally meant the “age of igno-
rance” before Islam, and he applied it to the mod-
ern period, when he accused secular and Muslim
rulers of governing in blatant opposition to God’s
will and making a mockery of the traditional,
“pure” Islam. Qutb also rejected Nasir’s secular
Egyptian and Arab nationalism based on national
borders and language, and indeed rejected all
modern political systems, including commUnism,
socialism, and democracy. Instead, Qutb called
for a Jihad to be led by a unique Islamic vanguard
to establish a single Islamic polity, based on his
interpretation of the early Islamic community
of Muhammad that encompassed all Muslims,
regardless of nationality or language. Signposts
offered a blueprint for how to bring this revolu-
tion about.
Qutb was released from prison in 1964, but
he was rearrested in 1965, tried, and executed by
hanging in 1966. Although many today regard
Qutb as an Islamic “fundamentalist” intent on
bringing back “original” Islam, Qutb’s ideas and
islamism itself are in reality a distinctly modern
phenomenon—they are a response to the rapid
urbanization, population growth, Westernization,
and widespread poverty that characterize the
modern world in many countries. Further, there
is little about Qutb’s ideas that Muslims even
20 years before him would have recognized; his
application of jahiliyya to modern life, his ideas
about political revolution, and many other aspectsK 576 Qutb, Sayyid