A Colorado study trip helped turn an Egyptian literary critic into an Islamist
In the 1940s Sayyid Qutb was a Cairo education official who loved Hollywood films and Victor Hugo and had helped promote Naguib Mahfouz. Two years studying in the United States hardened his rejection of Western life. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, clashed with Nasser, and was executed in 1966.
Qutb was born on 9 October 1906 in Musha, a village in Upper Egypt's Asyut Province, to a landowner who hosted weekly gatherings on politics and Quranic recitation. The boy memorised the entire Quran by ten and by twelve had built a personal library of 25 books, bought on credit from a travelling seller. After studying in Cairo between 1929 and 1933, he taught for the Ministry of Public Instruction, wrote novels such as Ashwak, and worked as a literary critic influenced by the medieval scholar al-Jurjani.
His outlook shifted gradually. In the early 1940s he read Alexis Carrel, a French Nobel laureate and eugenicist whose attack on modern civilisation for valuing machines over the soul gave Qutb a Western voice for his own doubts. From 1948 to 1950 he studied educational administration in Washington, at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, and at Stanford. Social Justice in Islam appeared in 1949 while he was abroad. Back home, his 1951 essay The America that I Have Seen condemned what he saw as American materialism, shallow friendships, mixing of the sexes and enthusiasm for sport.
He left the civil service and joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, editing its weekly and sitting on its guidance council. The Brotherhood welcomed the July 1952 coup by Gamal Abdel Nasser's Free Officers, and Nasser reportedly visited Qutb at home to discuss the revolution. The alliance broke apart once Nasser's secular nationalism proved incompatible with Islamist aims. In 1966 Qutb was convicted of plotting to assassinate Nasser and was hanged.
His output was huge: 24 published books, around 30 more lost or unpublished, and at least 581 articles, including the 30-volume commentary In the Shade of the Qur'an and the tract Milestones. Assessments diverge sharply. Followers regard him as a thinker and martyr, whereas many Western analysts, and some Muslims, regard him as a founder of Islamist ideology whose ideas, including advocacy of offensive jihad, later inspired militant groups such as al-Qaeda.
Source: Sayyid Qutb
