THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY 327Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been as-
sassinated before Nasser's day, but a nervous, brilliant, erratic, anxious intel-
lectual zealot named Sayyid Qutb had taken charge of the Brotherhood in
his place. Qutb's outlook had been shaped by a curious two-year sojourn at
a teacher's college in Greeley, Colorado, where the Egyptian government had
sent him to study U.S. educational methods. The materialism Qutb saw in
America repelled him, the individualism disturbed him, the social freedoms
unnerved him, and the sexual mores shocked him-the sight, for example,
of young men and women square dancing together at a church social!
Qutb came home convinced that the United States was a Satanic force
and had to be destroyed. He began publishing political tracts. He wrote that
Islam offered a complete alternative, not just to other religions such as Chris-
tianity and Buddhism, but also to other political systems, such as commu-
nism and democracy, and he renewed the call for Muslims to rebuild one big
universal Muslim community. And if that sounded like he was saying that
the Muslim Brotherhood should seize power in Egypt, so be it.
Nasser clapped this man in prison: big mistake, it turned out. There in
prison, garbed in the glamour of victimhood, Qutb wrote his most incen-
diary work, a book called Milestones. Here, he proposed a radical reinter-
pretation of Sayyid Jamaluddin's pan-Islamist modernism. He revived the
ancient theoretical schema of a world divided between Dar al-Islam and
Dar al-Harb, the realms of (Muslim) peace and (infidel) violence. Qutb
was no ranter. His prose was cool and measured; he picked his words pre-
cisely. And in this steady, lucid, unblinking language, he called on every
Muslim to embrace and practice jihad, not just against non-Muslims but
against Muslims who faltered in their allegiance to Islam or collaborated
with the enemy.? Under Qutb's leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood basi-
cally declared war against the governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordon,
and Lebanon and against all the secular modernists who supported them.
Egypt had no democratic process with which to co-opt the Brother-
hood's hold on the underclass. Nasser relied instead on police power to
quell demonstrations and on secret police to nip conspiracies in the bud.
Qutb and his brotherhood were all the more irritating to Nasser be-
cause he had plenty of other rivals assailing him, more daunting ones, he
thought. The rulers of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq envied Nasser's popularity,
and they were doing their best to discredit him. Ba'ath activists challenged