Sayyid Qutb: Poet, Reactionary, Islamist (Part 2)
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Welcome back, dear listeners, to another episode of Conflicted. I'm Thomas Small, and Eamon Dean is alongside me once again. Now, Eamon, I'm always throwing out quotes at you at the start of these episodes, but do you have one for me this time about today's subject?

Sayyid Qutb? Indeed, Thomas. It is one of Sayyid Qutb's most famous quotes, always referenced by jihadists, by theologians, and by activists all over the Muslim world. He said, our words are lifeless, unlit candles until we die for them. And once we die for them, these candles will be lit again.

Those are the words of a martyr, aren't they, Amen? Indeed. Of a man drawn to martyrdom. Sayyid Qutb was certainly drawn to martyrdom by the end of his life, as we will find out in the second episode in our two-part series on the life of Sayyid Qutb. So without further ado, today we are completing our long journey looking at the Islamic thinkers who have dominated the thoughts of Salafi jihadists.

We discussed poets, scholars, warriors, invasions from Byzantines, invasions from Mongols, from Ottomans. We've been from Baghdad to Damascus to the Nejd in Saudi Arabia. And now we're ending in Egypt with Sayyid Qutb, the radical romantic turned idealist Islamist firebrand. Let's jump right in. ♪

We didn't talk in the first episode in this series on Sayyid Qutb Ayman about your own real personal interaction with his writing. So how much of Sayyid Qutb's oeuvre have you read? I would say maybe about two-thirds of whatever he written, and that's a lot. Two-thirds, that's a lot, given what he wrote, that's a lot. Indeed. So, I mean, when did you start reading Sayyid Qutb?

I started reading Sayyid Qutb at a vulnerable moment in my life, I would say. My mother just died. I was 12. And I remember I went to see one of my teachers, one of my theology tutors. And I've asked him about what should I read that would correspond with coping with grief in Islam. And I remember him saying,

Really, if you want to read something that would really deeply touch you at this moment, then read Fi Dhilal al-Qur'an, In the Shades of the Qur'an, written by Sayyid Qutb. He said to me that Sayyid Qutb wrote this book over nine years period when he was in and out of prison in the 1950s and early 60s. It is a 4,000 pages.

plus pages commentary on every single verse of the Quran. It's not a theological book. It is a book of literary commentary on the Quran.

to extract lessons, to extract meanings, to understand the Quran's beauty, elegance, eloquence, while at the same time understanding the intended lessons that God wanted to teach us through the trials and through the difficulties and through the sadness that the Prophet had.

himself experienced throughout his life. You know, he himself was orphaned. I'm talking about the Prophet Muhammad was orphaned at a very young age. I remember like, you know, basically when I was reading Fi Dhulal Qur'an, there was one particular passage that broke my heart completely and actually healed me, healed me completely at that moment, because he was talking about a Prophet Muhammad who was fatherless at the age of six.

coming back with his mother from Medina. And when they were with the caravan, his mother got ill. So she decided to stay behind next to a well with her son until she recovers. But hours later, she died. So there he is, a six-year-old boy, alone in the desert, completely alone next to a dead mother.

until another caravan came, helped him to bury his mother, and then took him to Mecca. This six-year-old boy would then change the world and be entrusted with a divine message

A message of love, a message of morality, a message of societal cohesion, and a message of law, order, safety, and mercantile prosperity. Words that were so powerful. And when I saw it, I cried so much. I was 12 at the time, but I cried because I thought that I'm 12 and I felt the grief. Yet it's nothing compared to what the prophet went through. And who actually...

taught me that, Sayyid Qutb, through the beauty of his prose, the language that he used to transform me to that moment, as if I was seeing a young six-year-old boy alone with his dead mother, and I was thinking, I am in a better situation, and that man is my savior. So,

He saved me at that moment. Well, you've done a very good job of describing the softer side of Sayyid Qutb as reflected in his great work of Quranic exegesis, In the Shade of the Quran. But that's not the only side of Sayyid Qutb in that work. There's a

a harder, more defiant, more angry side. What about that side? Didn't that have an impact on the young Ayman Deen as well? Now that Sayyid Qutb has consoled me, when I started to dive deeper and deeper into his interpretations, into his commentary on the Qur'an,

he started to comment on battles, on the everlasting struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between ignorance and enlightenment. Wow, goodness, this is when he ignited these revolutionary fires within me. I felt that, yes,

This is what I wanted to read. I wanted to have purpose in life and this man was giving it to me. Now I understand that he wrote these words while he was under the lash, while he was being tortured, while he was being persecuted for his faith. And I really started to feel when he said,

interpreted and commented on verses about jihad, he felt as if he wanted to be there on the front lines, fighting alongside those who wanted to sacrifice their lives for the faith. When he talked about martyrdom, I felt as if he longed to it, as if he was longing to be with a beautiful woman. I mean, I saw his thirst for an Islamic empire

empire that would protect its subjects, that it would subjugate the rest of the world to worship at the altar of morality and to actually finally achieve a just society for everyone without having to undermine everyone stationed in society. Amen, amen, amen. Where do I sign up for this crusade? Wow, this sounds great. Let's

Do it. You and I aim it against the world. Come on. So, you see, I finished reading all of this when I was 14 and a half, and a year and a half later, I was in Bosnia, joining the jihad there, because Sayyid Qutb showed me the way. I was watching Jurassic Park on repeat at the time. I was a very different kind of 14-year-old, I think.

Okay, well, that's it. Thank you, dear listeners. That's the end of our series on Sayyid Qutb. Eamon's taken us right to the end, to Sayyid Qutb's, let's say, his post-mortem state as the tutelary spirit of all young would-be jihadist martyrs. But we're going to have to roll the timeline back to where we left him at the end of the last episode, just as World War II was breaking out in the world

and the new post-war world was going to emerge, the American-dominated post-war world was going to emerge out of the ashes of the ruin of European empires everywhere.

In Egypt, most Egyptian political activists favored Germany in the war, not because they were Nazis or not necessarily because they were Nazis, but because they wanted Britain out of Egypt. So they supported Britain's enemies. You know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And though in this episode, we will draw some links between Sayyid Qutb's thought

and Nazi thought. At the outset, I want to be fair to him. Seyed Khotob was horrified by German war atrocities. He actually found the concentration camps, he found the blitzkrieg, he found the remorseless, merciless conquest of the Nazi movement to be a symbol of what he hated most about modern, technical, machine-oriented war.

European civilization. So he did not fetishize Nazism wholly at all. And he very much, as a result of what he was seeing playing out on the battlefields of Europe and elsewhere, looked forward to that post-war future where Egypt could remain

unattached from the West entirely and join with fellow Eastern countries dedicated to the spiritual renewal of mankind. So, Ayman, you agree, right? We're not calling Sayyid Qutb a Nazi. No, I don't think he was a Nazi sympathizer in the classical sense.

However, he did dabble with that idea because of Hajj al-Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. And we talked about it before in the Israel-Palestine episode in season three, because there was the feeling that the...

anti-Semitic feelings of the Nazis. And of course, don't forget the concentration camps were not yet known about in the Middle East. So the idea that Hitler's anti-Zionism would be of use to the movements that wanted to stop the Jewish migration to Palestine, which was under British mandate at that time. So there were many in Iraq, in Egypt and in the Levant who were sympathetic

to the Germans at the beginning of the World War II. But that sympathy started, of course, to decrease, you know, slowly as the atrocities started to emerge and people started to know about them. So do we call him a Nazi? No. Do we call him someone who was influenced by Nazis? Ah, yes, definitely. Yeah, and we mentioned in the previous episode that he had read the French right-wing reactionary thinker Alexis Carrel's

And, you know, he also in the 30s read Mein Kampf. He was reading these ideas. And, you know, and I tried to stress in the last episode that Sayyid Qutb was a very modern figure, very recognizable as a member of that reactionary, romantic class of thinkers who valorized nation, blood, culture, spirit over liberal, technocratic, utilitarian, industrial society.

So to that extent, there was a lot of overlap with right-wing reactionary Nazi fascist ideas in the 1930s. There's no question. And he would, as you say, to some extent, take that milieu of ideas, Islamicize those ideas and create –

Islamism. But where we left him off and where we're taking up the story again now, he hadn't yet fully made his Islamist turn. He was on the verge of beginning that turn. And that turn began in the midst of the Second World War. Initially,

through literary criticism of the Quran. Literary criticism, you know, we have to point out. Again, he was not a theologian. He had not received a traditional religious education. And his initial return to Islam came through poetry, through the imagination, through aesthetics, through an appreciation of the Quran's beauty in a book that he published in 1944, Artistic

depiction in the Quran. In this book, he argued that the Quran's real power was aesthetic, was its beauty. He argues that Quranic images, imagery within the words, would impress themselves on your imagination, revealing truths.

He called this way of appreciating the Quran tasweer, as opposed to tafsir. Yes, and also the same time. I remember when I was reading it when I was young, I was thinking that once you read that book, you will never look at the Quran the same way before.

Because suddenly you start to become, you know, more or less interested in what does this verse mean? You really start to transfer yourself and your mind and your imagination, you know, into that event. There is a color, there are faces, there are buildings, you know, it's like as if

A drama is playing in front of you. So actually, once you read that book, you never read the Quran the same way ever again. - I'm feeling that in this regard, unlike the other figures we've been studying in this series, Sayyid Qutb

was not a mere literalist. I don't think it would be fair to call him a literalist in the same way that Ahmed bin Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyyah and bin Abdul Wahab were. Because Sayyid Qutb is like a poet assuming that the literal images, the literal words of the Quran, which create in the imagination these powerful images, are inclining in the direction of something beyond the mere words.

And this is part of that Sufi, and in fact, more traditional, I would argue, way of engaging with the revelation than the Salafis tend to do. So in this way, like in so many other ways, Sayyid Qutb is unlike the other figures who fed into Salafi jihadism. And at the end of this

episode, we'll discuss this in greater detail, I hope. For the time being, let's go back to the story. It's the Second World War, and then the war ends. We're in that period, the 1940s, the mid-40s. Egypt is in political turmoil. There are riots. There are assassinations.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded, as we said in the last episode, in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, is a big player on the scene. It has already established its so-called secret apparatus, you know, the sort of vaguely paramilitary wing of the Brotherhood, which was oriented towards overthrowing the government. Now, we're going to actually do two episodes on the Muslim Brotherhood after this episode. So I don't want to go too much into the Muslim Brotherhood and its workings.

The point that I want to make now is that Qutb throughout this period is turning more and more anti-Western. He's writing that Westerners simply lack conscience. His language is becoming more and more extreme. It's around this time that he's writing that quote that I quoted at the beginning of the last episode about how much he hates Westerners.

And it is at this time that for the first time in his career, he begins openly to call for a comprehensive social and political program that would solve Egypt's problems and create social justice. Now, I want to talk about this because this kind of a call for a comprehensive social program is totally modern.

This call for a comprehensive social program is explicitly totalitarian, alongside all sorts of totalitarianisms that were in the air, including Soviet totalitarianism, including Nazi totalitarianism. He used the word nizam. He called for the establishment of an Islamic nizam, an integrated system, a regime, encompassing every dimension of life, society, and politics.

It's a modern word that Sayyid Qutb is employing to achieve a modern end, a totalitarian solution to the world's problems. It became very clear to Sayyid as we are going into the year 1948.

that he couldn't find the solution to Egypt's ills and problems through poetry, through literature. There was no denying it. At the time, the Egyptian society was torn between extremes.

whether extreme left, you know, with the communists gaining ground, whether with the nationalists who wanted to have purely nationalist Arab Egyptian government, and of course the Islamist represented in the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted a political salvation through Islamic regime. Sayyid, when he started re-engaging with the Quran in the 1940s,

he started to come to that conclusion that only through Islam we could find a solution to Egypt's problems. He articulated this growing conviction in a new journal that he founded at that time called New Thought. But it was in this journal that he first began to invoke Islam as the underpinning, as the foundation of the comprehensive social solution that he was yearning for.

Now, the government noticed his new tone and the journal New Thought was shut down after only 12 issues because it was included amongst a list of banned publications, subversive publications, the government called them.

Which brings us to the pivotal year, which listeners of the last season will know is very pivotal indeed, of 1948. Year 1948. It is the year of the partition between the Jews and the Arabs in what was known there as the Mandate of Palestine, which was, of course, controlled by the British. The United Nations announced the independence of Israel in 1948, and immediately seven Arab armies invaded Palestine.

Against the odds, the Israelis fought back and there was a massive humiliation against all the seven Arab armies, including the Egyptian army. The Egyptian army in particular suffered significant casualties and a significant defeat. And that humiliation was tremendous.

felt throughout all of Egypt, including by Sayyid Qutb, which of course propelled him to write that book later, Ma'arakatuna Ma'al Yehuda, or Battle with the Jews. And that formed some of his ideas that are yet to come. Just to remind the listener, the Muslim Brotherhood participated in the Arab-Israeli war alongside Egyptian troops.

in the war. And this gained the initial respect of young army officers in the Egyptian army, including a very key figure in the rest of this story and a key figure in last season of Conflicted, soon to be President Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Let's just bracket that for now, because in fact, Sayyid, weirdly, Sayyid Qutb is going to leave Egypt precisely at this time, at the end of the summer of 1948.

He takes up the opportunity that the Egyptian government gave him to travel to, of all places, the United States, where he goes on to spend 21 months traveling around the country, learning and studying the United States' education system.

Well, two things I want to say about this, Eamon. First of all, a lot of people think that Sayyid Qutb became an Islamist because when he went to the United States, he saw American culture and hated it and so turned to Islamism. This is not true. This is a myth.

He had already made his Islamist turn, as we've just said, before he left. So it's simply not true. Absolutely. This is a problem with simplistic, easy takes on Sayyid's life, for sure. And just before he left, and this is proof, again, that he had already made his Islamist turn, he completed the manuscript for the first of his three great and most influential works,

called social justice in Islam. So you see, he was already an Islamist. Social justice in Islam is calling for an Islamist solution to the world's problems. - There's an anecdote here where he was traveling to the US, of course, like an ocean liner, and across the Atlantic.

And one night, one lady who wasn't dressing modestly and clearly drunk, knocked on his door and, you know, in the middle of the night, and she, you know, really threw herself at him and just wanted to be in his company.

And the shock, how he was shocked, he just threw her out of the room. He threw her out across the galley and, you know, just go away. And of course, this would have been a traumatic experience for him. And he just started to realize that.

hey, I'm far away from the genteel gentleman saloons of Cairo, where even among the effendi classes, the segregation between genders were still being practiced. Yeah, it's good that you bring up that anecdote of this poor drunk woman trying to get into his bed. But it also raises the question of sayid kutub and sex.

We didn't talk about sex in the first episode, but I want to talk about sex and Sayyid Qutb. That's like sex in the city, but sex and Sayyid Qutb. Maybe we could make a new TV show. No, no, no. We should call it Sexless in the City. Sexless in the City. That's right. Sayyid Qutb, like Ibn Taymiyyah, in fact, never married.

And most scholars of his life think that it's extremely likely that he never had sex, that he died a virgin. He is only on record of having fallen in love one time. He actually wrote a novel, a schwach it's called, about this experience, about him falling passionately in love with a woman and yet having to break off the love affair because she wasn't pure enough for him.

There's something very telling in this fact about him. A squeamishness about female sexuality, a squeamishness about male sexual desire, and an antipathy that

to that side of life, to sex. Being afraid of sex does overlap quite nicely, as we discussed before, with the fundamentalist or the radical or the, you know, literalist frame of mind. And Sayyid Qutb had it in spades. In fact, you know, there is an anecdote from his life where, you know, when he was at the University of North Colorado, of all places, I mean, North Colorado, for God's sake.

I recall you are a Coloradan yourself, you know, Thomas. I did spend five years of my childhood in Colorado. You know, it is the middle of nowhere. It is true. Yeah. More like the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, so when he was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, he attended, you know, a church dance. And he was commenting that I saw the men dancing.

You know, hugging the women so tight, you know, putting their hands at the bottom of their backs. So he found that to be scandalous.

And oh my God, I'm just reading this and I'm thinking, oh, poor Syed, poor, poor, poor Syed. If he was alive today, he would have a heart attack. That story of the church dance in Greeley, Colorado, includes the detail of the song that he found particularly offensive. It's the classic Christmas song,

Baby, It's Cold Outside. This has gone down in history. Sayyid Kutub hates that song. You know, he found it to be utterly provocative. We've sort of got off track here. So he lands in New York. He's walking down Broadway. Kiss Me, Kate is in the theaters. This is the kind of world we're in. This is America in its glorious post-war apotheosis. This is the America that Americans today, in a nostalgic way,

wave, you know, praise to the skies. And Sayyid Qutb's walking in this America, hating everything he sees, thinking that it's all just the pits. He was writing letters and essays detailing his trip back home, constantly seeing everything through an anti-Western lens that he had already largely been, you know, sort of built up in his mind over the previous 15 years.

After New York, he went to Washington, D.C., where he was hospitalized for an illness that he never made clear about what it was. And while he was in hospital, a very momentous event happened back home in Egypt.

And that's that on the 12th of February of that year, 1949, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was assassinated. And Sayyid Qutb found out about this while recuperating in hospital in Washington, D.C. How is the death of Hassan al-Banna likely to have impacted him, Ayman? I mean, he wasn't a member of the Muslim Brotherhood yet.

But he must have respected greatly already by this time al-Banna's anti-colonialist, pro-Muslim stance. Given what he wrote about Hassan al-Banna later, you could tell that he admired the man considerably. And there was no question that he felt that the death of Hassan al-Banna was a great loss to Egypt and to the cause of Islamist nationalism. Yeah.

He was aware at the time that members of the American foreign policy establishment whom he was socializing with in Washington, D.C. as a representative of the Egyptian government were very aware of Hassan al-Banna's significance.

And he was disturbed by the glee that he felt he sensed in their descriptions of Hassan al-Banna's assassination. And it planted the seeds of something that would definitely continue to grow, of a kind of paranoid conspiratorial way of thinking about America and British foreign policy.

policy and foreign agents and intelligence. He always saw the American-British kind of alliance as secretly working to undermine Islam. And in that, again, he shared that with so many Muslim activists at the time. So after his period in Washington, D.C., he crossed the country and landed up in Greeley, Colorado, as we said. Greeley, Colorado. You can imagine this is

Classic Americana, classic mid-20th century Americana. You know, again, a world that Americans, especially conservative Americans, fetishize today. But for Sayyid Qutb, it was like he was in hell.

Because for him, it lacked the spirituality of what he was feeling back home. And for him, it felt as if it was detached from God in the moral sense, the desegregation of the genders.

And also at the same time, what he saw as the real sin of racism because he experienced it himself. He did. Yes. He went with an Egyptian friend while he was in Colorado. He went to the cinema and initially they were denied entry because the cinema manager misidentified them as black. Now, when he was black,

told that, in fact, no, they're Egyptians. The manager was very apologetic, but Sayed could have refused his apology and stormed off. So he was very offended by being at the receiving end of America's racism. And yet there's something slightly subtle in his offense, because I think what really offended him was that he

had been lumped in with black people. One of the things that he wrote about obsessively during his time in America was how disgusting he found jazz music

because he believed that jazz music expressed the, quote, primitive inclinations of black people. So he's not really offended at America's racism as much as he was offended at America's considering him to be black. Indeed. From Colorado, he then traveled to California, my native stomping ground. He lived in San Francisco and San Diego.

And that's where he drew his 21 months in the U.S. to a close.

Now, Sayyid Qutb's experience of America was not unlike that of many intellectuals at the time, especially European intellectuals of a radical or reactionary persuasion. So from left or right, they found America to be crass, materialistic, consumeristic, etc. All of the things that, in fact, right-thinking intellectuals today still think of America. And he left America

absolutely convinced that Western society was decadent and corrupt and that the solution for the Muslim world lay in Islam.

We're going to take a break now. When we come back, he returns to Egypt and he launches on his full-throated career as an Islamist ideologue, which will quickly land him in very hot water indeed with the new growing power at the center of Egyptian politics, Nasser. We'll be back. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot...

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Hello, dear listeners. Thomas Small here to tell you a little bit about our fantastic sponsor for this season of Conflicted, The Jordan Harbinger Show. If you haven't listened to Jordan's incredible show yet, and really, dear listeners, if not, why not? Then you can expect episodes every few days in which Jordan speaks to exceptional people about the most fascinating and pressing subjects in the world today.

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We're back. We're rushing to the end of the great Sayyid Qutb's life. When we left him, he was just returning to Egypt from his 21 months in America. Upon returning home to Egypt, he immediately went on Hajj. While he was away in America, his book, Social Justice in Islam, had been published and was warmly embraced across the Muslim world.

So on Hajj, he met up with other Muslim thinkers who were praising him for this work. During the trip, in conversation with an Indian pilgrim, he was first introduced to Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi's idea. So this is another key, key modern Islamist thinker, al-Mawdudi. He was introduced to his idea that the Muslim world had fallen back into jahiliyyah.

This was absolutely formative for Sayyid Qutb. It kind of was like the capstone to all of his thinking. And he realized that, yes, and in this, he was a bit like Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab, yes,

That is what's happening here. The Muslim world is no longer properly Muslim. It has fallen back into jahiliyyah. This is it. This is when he becomes the Islamist that we know him as. Is that right, Ayman? Indeed, because now, more than ever, you have this formative thinking in his mind that the Muslim world has abandoned Islam as the basis of governance.

And that Muslim societies are no longer Muslim societies. They are now experiencing what he calls Jahiliyyah. And Jahiliyyah means the pre-Islamic era, you know, when people lived in ignorance. The age of ignorance, yeah. Yes, absolutely. And you see, from his point of view, you know, how could a mosque be sandwiched in Egypt between a bank and a

a nightclub. He opposed that, and he said, either we live fully as Muslims or the society as a whole has abandoned Islam. For him, it's all or nothing. So now, convinced of this, he returns to Egypt. He writes a book, The Battle of Islam and Capitalism. He also writes a book, Our Struggle with the Jews. You've mentioned that book already, Ayman. His writing becomes increasingly paranoid. He

He sees conspiracies everywhere. He starts writing against what he calls American Islam, a watered-down form of Islam. This is now Sayyid Qutb, the revolutionary radical firebrand, and he is warmly embraced by a growing revolutionary ferment that is overwhelming Egypt at the time. This is the ferment that would result in

in July, 1952 with the overthrow of Fat Farouk and the coming to power in time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, initially not as president, eventually as president.

Sayyid Qutb was intimately and directly involved in that July Revolution. Four days before the revolution, Nasser and the other officers who would overthrow the king met in Sayyid Qutb's house in Cairo. Sayyid Qutb knew some of the other officers. He was there, Sayyid Qutb was there, with some members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Sayyid Qutb was now much more directly linked, although not yet a member.

The officers told them all of the coup plan. The Muslim Brotherhood was asked to take control of the streets when the coup would be launched four days later. And Sayyid Qutb was tasked with coordinating between the brothers and the officers. And after the revolution, Nasser, still not president, the president was a man called Muhammad Naguib.

would consult with Sayyid Qutb on the progress of the revolution regularly. Sayyid Qutb would claim that sometimes he and Nasser would meet for 12 hours a day. This relationship, Eamon, between Nasser and Sayyid Qutb is one of the great

dramatic relationships of the 20th century, honestly. It's worthy of an Egyptian-Roman-Greek drama, I would say. The fact that Nasser was an ardent student of Sayyid Qutb and his writings. He was influenced by these writings even before they met, when Nasser was on the front lines of the 1948 war against the fledgling state of Israel.

There is no question that Nasser admired Saad Qutb's writings and in particular his anti-colonialist writings. Nonetheless, Nasser in the end is a military man, a pragmatic man, and someone who already had a slight leaning towards socialism, more likely communism, Soviet style.

And more importantly, I think, from Sayyid Qutb's point of view, Nasser's ideology would become fully-fledged pan-Arabism. Nasser wished to see himself at the head of a pan-Arab state organized in a collectivist, pseudo-socialist way, whereas Sayyid Qutb was more and more advocating for a pan-Islamist policy overseen really by the Muslim Brotherhood.

this would inevitably lead to a clash between them. Despite the fact that for the first months after the revolution, Nasser was begging Qutb to come on board the regime in some official capacity. But it never happened. Qutb quickly realized that Nasser was only using the Muslim Brotherhood to take advantage of the Muslim Brotherhood's political organization.

And when he realized this, that Nasser had no intention whatsoever of adopting an Islamist policy for Egypt, Qutb refused to meet with him anymore. And even after Nasser offered him his pick of political position, basically Nasser said, you can't be president, you can't be vice president, but you can be anything else in this new regime. And yet,

He refused. And it is in this context, in February 1953, and it was partly out of his disappointment with the new Nasser-dominated revolutionary regime that Sayyid Qutb momentously joined the Muslim Brotherhood.

Only now, in 1953, aged 47, did Sayyid Qutb join the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood thought that no one could ever replace Hassan al-Banna after his assassination in 1949. However, 1953, Christmas came early for them. Sayyid Qutb joined them. And when he joined them, he gave them that much-needed boost.

They straight away, you know, appointed him at the very top of the leadership. He was added as a member of the guidance council and he was given the task of being the chief propagandist of the movement. So in a way, the Muslim Brotherhood got that momentum that they never had before. And this scared them.

the Nasirites in the new government. It sure did, especially since Sayyid Qutb was traveling on Muslim Brotherhood business from this time forward, traveling to places like Syria and elsewhere, meeting other Islamists, coordinating the Muslim Brotherhood's relations with other Islamist, pan-Islamist groups. All of this was very provocative.

and through a series of very complicated political moves, which we covered to some extent in last season of Conflicted, moves which brought Nasser to power in Egypt as the president, following an attempted Muslim Brotherhood coordinated assassination of him, a thousand Muslim Brotherhood members were arrested, including Sayyid Qutb. This is in October 1954. The following January, Sayyid Qutb appeared before a show trial

I mean, that he was going to be found guilty had already been decided, I'm sure. And yet the court sentenced him to 15 years hard labor.

So this is really where Sayyid Qutb will spend, weirdly enough, the most important years of his life in prison. And I say weirdly enough because it is due to the books he wrote in prison, books we've already mentioned, in the shade of the Quran and milestones, that Sayyid Qutb would leave his most lasting mark on the world. It is important for the dear listener to know that

that Nasser's presence in the 1950s and 60s were no picnic at all.

In fact, he was aided by East German Stasi agents to help him invent new ways of persuading prisoners to talk. Let's call them torture, torture methods. So you can imagine here that one of the methods which Sayyid Qutb himself mentioned is that they would douse him with animal fat.

And then they would let German shepherds on him. Oh, unbelievable. Hungry German shepherds. So you can imagine what would that do to him. Also, at the same time, they would sometimes take him into a room along with another one or two fellow prisoners. And they will find in the room, there will be three, four, five snakes, poisonous. And now it's either them who kill the snakes or the snakes will kill them. And of course,

This kind of extreme physical and psychological torture would take its toll on the most sane of people. And so what do you expect the outcome of...

You know, his mind would be, when he is commenting on the Qur'an, under severe stress from all of the torture, both physical and mental. After an initial period of extreme deprivation and indeed torture, the authorities did allow him the freedom to write. And it was during this period, as I said, that he wrote In the Shade of the Qur'an.

And this very important book, Milestones, which you've mentioned, Eamon, and which I'd like to talk about here now in some greater detail. Because Milestones, you've described it to me, Eamon, as basically the kind of constitution of the Salafi jihadist movement. It's the book that all Salafi jihadists read.

read, they don't memorize it, but they cherish it. It is the blueprint for the Salafi jihadist movement and for all of their aims and ambitions. - Not only the Salafists, but many other groups and all of those armed groups, insurgents, Taliban, Hamas,

Daesh, Al-Qaeda, you know, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, not to mention even the Islamic revolution in Iran. I mean, even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei translated and his brother Mohammed translated, you know, milestones into Farsi because it is a ready-made constitution for any Islamist movement that want to take over a society and turn it into an Islamic state.

I'm sure many of our dear listeners would be wondering, what is the nature of Milestones, the book that led to the execution of Sayyid Qutb, his grand manifesto, which then became the ultimate constitution for many jihadist and radical organizations around the world. Well, it's easy to summarize it.

The first chapter of Milestones talks about, well, milestones. He is talking about the milestones on the journey towards the ultimate aim, an Islamic state, an Islamic society, the kingdom of God on earth as he envisioned it.

The second chapter there talks about a unique Qur'anic generation. So he of course declaring his Salafism. The third chapter explains the nature of the Qur'anic struggle and where we are heading as a society if we want to embrace Qur'an as the constitution for everyday life.

That is why in the fourth chapter, he goes on to talk about the foundation of the Islamic society and its special character. Then he goes on to say,

say, "How do we establish this Islamic society? Is it just by preaching?" In fact, in this chapter, he talks about the fact that you cannot preach your way into power, where he is talking about jihad as an important instrument to remove the obstacles to the establishment of an Islamic society, the kingdom of God on earth.

Then the following chapter talks about the statement of faith, "La ilaha illallah" there is no God but God as a way of life. Because once you establish the state through jihad, then "La ilaha illallah" will reign supreme.

And that is through what? In the next chapter he talks about universal Sharia. He is talking about Sharia not being only applicable to Islamic societies, but to all societies. And that is why in the following chapter after that talks about the fact that Islam itself is a civilization.

And then he talks about culture within Islam. Then he talks about the fact that the nationality of a Muslim is his faith. That's it. All other identities should be abolished based on the modern nation state. And that's why he called it in the next chapter a giant leap. And that is why in his book,

Second to last chapter, he called it the mastery of faith, echoing what Hassan al-Banna said about the mastery of the world as the final outcome of the Muslim Brotherhood creed, aim, and goal.

And the final chapter in Milestones, something that our dear listeners who are fans of Star Wars and the Mandalorian series would love it, it's called This is the Way. Well, you can see why Milestones is called the jihadist constitution. You can see why it has inspired Islamists of every stripe since its release in the 1960s.

It is a comprehensive plan, a comprehensive ideological plan on how to frame thinking about returning society to its Quranic roots and establishing a modern Islamist society, which he calls, interestingly, the kingdom of God on earth.

Very interesting. That is not a traditionally Muslim formulation. That is a Christian formulation. The kingdom of God on earth. Very interesting. Why do you think he chose that term, the kingdom of God on earth, as the goal to which Islamists should be aspiring?

because he wanted to convince the masses, down with all this Republican nonsense, down with all this, you know, the republics of this and the Soviet this and the socialist this and democratic that, you know, there is nothing than a godly kingdom to establish God's rule on earth. Sovereignty is to the king and the king is God. Well, if...

his great work Milestones ends with a call to martyrdom, Sayyid Qutb would get it. Just after he finished writing the book, he had a heart attack in prison. When word of this got out, various figures, including the president of Iraq,

who by this time, along with many other millions of people, had learned to very much revere Sayyid Qutb because of his writings. The president of Iraq personally requested from Nasser that he release him from prison.

Nasser did. Sayyid Qutb immediately returned to the Brotherhood, began helping the Brotherhood reorganize its secret organization to set up paramilitary groups to strategize for the coming revolution, which Sayyid Qutb and other Brotherhood members were determined to bring about. Milestones was published, was read by the government. The government said, hey, this is a comprehensive program for overthrowing us.

And so not long after being released from prison, in August 1965, Sayyid Qutb was arrested again. This was the biggest and most brutal crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood that Nasser would launch during his time as president of Egypt. Sayyid Qutb was sent to a military prison. He was put in solitary confinement.

At another show trial, he was accused of subversion, of attempting to assassinate Nasser and overthrow the government. Despite that, many people counseled Nasser to show mercy, including, interestingly enough, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, asking him to show clemency to this great thinker, Sayyid Qutb. But Nasser refused. In a final letter facing his execution, Sayyid Qutb wrote,

I have been able to discover God in a wonderful new way. I understand His path and way more clearly and perfectly than before. My confidence in His protection and promise to the believers is stronger than ever before. Moreover, I maintain my resolution to raise my head and not to bend it to anyone except God.

There are echoes there, Ayman, of Ibn Taymiyyah, who died in prison. Indeed. There are echoes there of Ahmed bin Hanbal, who spent time in prison. Fewer echoes there of bin Abdul Wahab. But in that note of determination, of total conviction, of political idealism based in Islam, Ibn Abdul Wahab is present.

On the 29th of August, 1966, Sayyid Qutb was hanged. He died a martyr.

according to many, many, many millions of people. So this leaves us, Eamon, discussing not only Sayyid Qutb's legacy, which is really unparalleled in modern Salafi jihadism and modern Islamism in general, but the legacy of all the figures that we've explored now, those three Hanbalis and the one

modern Hanafi, Sufi, Nazi, poet, romantic, reactionary dreamer, Sayyid Qutb. So imagine if Wahhabism and Salafism was an egg, then Sayyid was a sperm that came in, fertilized it with a political framework, with an ideological bent in order to propel it forward as a movement, to create that embryonic stage

towards a proper militant Islamic revolutionary movement. - I love that metaphor because it helps to explain the relationship between the three Hanbalis that we discussed in this series and Sayyid Qutb in the generation of modern radical Islamism. Sayyid Qutb took already existing Salafism

and breathed ideological fire into it, forming it into a political framework, giving it a political goal, the kingdom of God on earth that inspired not only Al-Qaeda, not only the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, not only al-Shabaab, but also

the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution. But also, take your pick, they've all been influenced by Sayyid Qutb. He gave Salafism, he gave that psychological, spiritual temperament that we've been exploring, the temperament towards literalism, the temperament towards purity, the temperament towards nostalgia, the temperament towards withdrawing from the world, which is perceived as corrupt and corrupting.

infused that temperament with an ideological superstructure, the combination of which gave birth to something very powerful indeed, that thing which we have been exploring in different ways for five years now, Eamon, and which we call Islamism. That brings to an end

It makes me depressed, actually, because I just think of all the things we could have talked about, including what you told me, Eamon, you pointed out his little Hitler mustache. Do you remember? Indeed. You had this whole thing. Sayyid Qutb wasn't entirely not a Nazi. You said, look at his little Hitler mustache. Indeed. Also, all the modern day resonances with Sayyid Qutb's mind, even outside of Islam, because this is very important, the reactionary mentality. Yes.

does not exist only inside Islam. Far from it. My God, people like Alexander Dugin, the current Russian ideologue who sort of hangs over the war in Ukraine. Figures like Andrew Tate, a recent convert to Islam, it must be said. Like incels all around the world who also are very resentful at their inability to have sex with women.

All sorts of reactionary movements resonate with Sayyid Qutb's mentality. Anyway, Eamon, as I say, there's so much that I wanted to discuss. Luckily, Conflicted will go on and on and on, and no doubt we'll have many opportunities to talk about all of these things. As it stands, our series on these four seminal thinkers that gave birth to Islamism has come to an end.

But that doesn't mean Conflicted comes to an end. And when we come back next week, we're really going to continue this line of exploration when we devote two episodes to that organization which Sayyid Qutb provided the much-needed ideological structure, the Muslim Brotherhood. Stay tuned. ♪

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and just generally geeking out over Conflicted-related topics. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.