I’ve recently become familiar with a book called The America I Have Seen by Sayyid Qutb. It is a very anti-American polemic and it includes the following claims:
Shortly before the American Revolution, English colonists violently pushed all the Spanish out of North America and to the south.
The Indian Wars were still going on in 1949, with the US army heavily involved even at that point.
American women of 1949 were universally harlots who intentionally displayed their breasts and buttocks.
He also spoke of jazz as a “primitive” music that was invented by “bushmen”.
So how popular is this horribly ignorant man and his opinions among Arabs and Muslims?
I can’t speak to how widespread or popular that particular polemic is, but Sayyid Qutb in general is perhaps the single most influential theorist of modern Islamism ( he was hanged in 1966 for his membership in the Society of Muslim Brothers and agitations in Egypt ). His more important works were In the Shadow of the Quran and Signposts on the Road, both written in the 60’s and both international bestsellers. He died before modern Islamism began to make really major strides in the 70’s and his influence was most important posthumously. It also was a bit confused as he died before clarifying his thoughts on a number of theological issues.
In general, I’d say he is not a mainstream figure, but among the Islamist ( Sunni strain ) cognocenti he is of central importance. More impoortant, I’d argue, than the influence of Wahhabism. As to how widely disseminated and received his work is among the non-fundamentalists, I’ll defer to Collounsbury who’d know better than me.
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*Originally posted by Tamerlane *
**I can’t speak to how widespread or popular that particular polemic is, but Sayyid Qutb in general is perhaps the single most influential theorist of modern Islamism ( he was hanged in 1966 for his membership in the Society of Muslim Brothers and agitations in Egypt ). His more important works were In the Shadow of the Quran and Signposts on the Road, both written in the 60’s and both international bestsellers. He died before modern Islamism began to make really major strides in the 70’s and his influence was most important posthumously. It also was a bit confused as he died before clarifying his thoughts on a number of theological issues.
In general, I’d say he is not a mainstream figure, but among the Islamist ( Sunni strain ) cognocenti he is of central importance. More impoortant, I’d argue, than the influence of Wahhabism. As to how widely disseminated and received his work is among the non-fundamentalists, I’ll defer to Collounsbury who’d know better than me.
Hard to say, certainly among intellectuals he will be known. Even non-Islamist thinkers certainly are aware of his existance.
He apparently wrote a thirty volume commentary of the Qu’ran, along with more than a dozen other separate books on Islam, and some novels. He died with a smile on his face. He believed that man’s brief life should be spent in an effort to purify the world, spiritually and morally. He appeared to loathe desire and lust. He believed the description of the Gardens of Bliss to be symbolic, and not literal, as was/is popularly believed.
Qutb advocated a clean break with the established order, a strategy that attracted a cross-section of Muslim youth from both educated and deprived backgrounds but alienated most clerics and the middle class. Mawdudi, by contrast, viewed the establishment of an Islamic republic as a task to be undertaken slowly, step by step. While his more moderate approach found favor with the Pakistani middle class, it did not achieve support among the masses…
from pgs. 25-26
*It was at this juncture that Qutb and Mawdudi entered the fray. Their writings rejected the values of the nationalists and reactivated Islam as the sole cultural, social, and poliutical standard for behavior among Muslims. The first battle they chose to wage was over interpretations of the past. Having established independent states, the nationalists wished to propound a version of history that would feature them as agents of a radical and decisive break of everything that had gone before…
But for Qutb and his followers, the post-independence history of Muslim states had no inherent value. Qutb stigmatized it with an Arab word from the Koran, jahiliyya, which describes the state of ignorance or barbarism in which Arabs were supposed to have lived before the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammed, at the beginning of the 7th century AD. The Muslims of the nationalist period were ignorant of Islam, according to Qutb; just like the pagan Arabs of the original jahiliyya who worshipped stone idols, Qutb’s contemporaries worshipped symbolic idols such as the nation, the party, socialism, and the rest. By denying the nationalists’ pretension to have founded history and by consigning them metaphorically to the pre-Revolution abyss, Qutb staked out a radical position that sparked a cultural revolution…he called for a “new Koranic generation” to build on the ruins of nationalism a contemporary Islamic civilization…
By placing his hope for the future in a singler generation, Qutb set his ideas in a clear historical time frame. He spoke to the young, born after independence, who had come too late to benefit from the vast redistribution of spoils that followed the departure of the colonial occupiers. To win the allegiance of this young cohort, he had to address them in the language in which they had been educated, but he also had to subvert it. Thus, Qutb devised a new way of writing about Islam that was simple and straightforward, very different from the complex rhetoruic of the ulemas, which was laden with traditional references and pedantic commentary. Qutb spoke directly to the readers, using the modern idiom to get simple points across.
In order to belittle nationalism as an ideal, he resorted to two concepts that Mawdudi in Pakistan had invented: sovereignty ( hakimiyya ) and adoration ( ouboudiyya )…Within Islam, Allah alone has sovereignty, being uniquely worthy of adoration…The only just ruler is one who governs according to the revelation of Allah. When sovereignty becomes invested in an “idol”, whether nation, party, army, or people, and when this idol becomes an object of mass adoration… then evil, iniquity, and falsehood reign. The result is anti-Islam, jahiliyya.
The force of Qutb’s rhetoric and his extraordinary attraction for younger people during the 1970’s derived from his radical and imaginative break with the present…
The weakness in Qutb’s theory lay in the latitude he allowed for the interpretation of exactly what the Prophet’s experience had been and how it should be reproduced in the context of the twentieth century. Qutb died before he could clarify his views on this important point, and those who claimed his mantle - ranging from sectarian cranks who wrote off the whole of society as “impious” to militants who reserved this adjective exclusively for regimes in power - found themselves in a state of ideological confusion that in the long term did great damage to the Islamist movement.*
from pgs. 31-32
*…The Islamist movement that rose from the ashes of the Brothers found itself not only persecuted by a state to which it was implacably opposed but also alienated from the general population. This alienation was both physical ( since the Islamist leaders were either in exile of in prison ) and spiritual, for despite Nasser’s propaganda and coercive methods, the Egyptian people were firmly behind him. He was the nemesis of the Brothers: and it was during Nasser’s repression that Qutb defined the times as jahiliyya…
This path diverged radically from the original way of the Brothers. It meant that members of society as a whole were no longer viewed as Muslims. In Islamic doctrine this is a very serious accusation called takfir. The term derives from kufr ( impiety ) and it means that one who is, or claims to be, a Muslim is declared impure: by takfir he is excommunicated in the eyes of the Community of the Faithful. For those who interpret Islamic law literally and rigourously, one who is impious to this extent can no longer benefit from the protection of law. According to the consecrated expression, “his blood is forfeit” and he is condemned to death.
Takfir is a sentence of last resort. The ulemas, who are in principle the only people authorized to pronounce takfir after taking all the prescribed legal precautions, have always been very reluctant to use it. Used wrongly and unrestrainedly, this sanction would quickly lead to discord and sedition in the ranks of the faithful. Muslims might resort to mutually excommunicating one another and thus propel the Umma to complete disaster. Qutb, who died before he could fully explain his theories, left unclear his use of the term jahiliyya and its dire consequence, takfir.
Three different readings were offered by those who took Qutb as their reference and debated his ideas in prison camps and elsewhere. The most extreme considered that impiety was endemic all over the world, except of course in their own corps of atuthentic believers. They pronounced a general takfir on everyone else, even their fellow prisoners. The second reading confined the excommunication to the rulers of the state, whom they condemned as impious…All other believers they spared. The third reading suggested an allegorical interpretation of the most controversial passages in Qutb’s work: rupture with society ( jahiliyya ) should be understood in a spiritual sense, not a material sense…they saw themselves as preachers, not judges. Thus, to show society how to make istself more Islamic, they needed to preach, not condemn.*
All the above quotes from Jihad:The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, translated by Anthony F. Roberts ( English edition 2002, Harvard University Press. 454 pgs ).