Islam • 169But the real founder of Islamic fundamentalism in the
Sunni world was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), who was greatly in-
fluenced by Mawdudi. Yet he had not originally been an ex-
tremist but had been filled with enthusiasm for Western
culture and secular politics. Even after he joined the Muslim
Brotherhood in 1953 he had been a reformer, hoping to give
Western democracy an Islamic dimension that would avoid
the excesses of a wholly secularist ideology. However, in
1956 he was imprisoned by al-Nasser for membership of the
Brotherhood, and in the concentration camp he became con-
vinced that religious people and secularists could not live in
peace in the same society. As he witnessed the torture and ex-
ecution of the Brothers, and reflected upon al-Nasser's
avowed determination to cast religion into a marginal role in
Egypt, he could see all the characteristics of jahiliyyah, which
he defined as the barbarism that was for ever and for all time
the enemy of faith, and which Muslims, following the exam-
ple of the Prophet Muhammad, were bound to fight to the
death. Qutb went further than Mawdudi, who had seen only
non-Muslim societies as jahili. Qutb applied the term
jahiliyyah, which in conventional Muslim historiography had
been used simply to describe the pre-Islamic period in Ara-
bia, to contemporary Muslim society. Even though a ruler
such as al-Nasser outwardly professed Islam, his words and
actions proved him to be an apostate and Muslims were duty-
bound to overthrow such a government, just as Muhammad
had forced the pagan establishment of Mecca (the jahiliyyah
of his day) into submission.
The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to es-
pouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the
Quran and the Prophet's life. Qutb told Muslims to model
themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from
mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrab from
Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But