In the 1950s, a young Egyptian man of letters would separate himself from the milieu of progressive revolutionary intellectuals to go on his own way, dreaming of a different vanguard bringing a different version of the Revolution. This act of individuation led to an inevitable clash with the state, which would lead to unforeseen consequences influenced by the imagination of the man, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb’s works, considered to be the foundational jihadist texts, are often, both in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, studied in a larger context of political thought in Islam. This, in effect, forces his ideas to be seen as a manifestation or a continuation of the massive edifice that is the heritage of political thought of historical Muslim societies across the centuries, in all languages, and in all different historical political contexts. This treatment often succeeds in giving the false impression that his works are Islamic in the sense that Islamic means a silo of a self-contained and self-generating political tradition that generates out of itself, in a manner of a Hegelian idea, an Islamic political reality. This has been a disaster and either confirmed the jihadist line of thought itself, that it is indeed a continuity of the Muslim tradition, or affirms the idea that Islam is irredeemably totalitarian and nihilistic, an idea that is equally destructive and becoming common among secular Muslim youth.
Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) came from a rural area in upper Egypt. Like the Nasser generation, he was also upwardly mobile thanks to the favorable conditions of pre-revolutionary Egypt. Since his childhood, Qutb has had strong romantic inclinations, not just reading the Quran but also Arabian Nights and English literature, and having a deep interest in the occult, the world of ghosts, Spiritualism, and exorcisms. Spiritualism was a rich occult movement that started in upstate New York in the mid-19th century and got globalized relatively quickly. Already in 1919, Tantawi Jawhari, an Egyptian traditional al-Azhar scholar, published an influential book titled The Book of Spirits, in which he popularized Spiritualism and the idea of connecting with the occult through mediums and which influenced many Egyptian youths. Qutb writings also indicate a significant influence of European vitalism, although its sources are unclear. (Notably, Henri Bergson’s vitalism significantly affected Qutb’s younger peer, Naguib Mahfouz.)
After Qutb had moved to Cairo as a young man, he received a European-styled education, after which he started a career as an educator himself. He was a man with a keen romantic literary sensibility, making him a known name in literary criticism. Qutb introduced Egyptian lovers of books to the works of a young man named Naguib Mahfouz, who later became the Nobel laureate icon of modern Arabic literature. His romantic inclinations matured into a force of a melancholic, romantic, intellectual sensibility. His writings from his youth until the mid-1940s were entirely dedicated to literary matters and seldom dealt with politics.
The first piece of work Qutb ever published was a 1932 short poem titled Confused, which he published in the Egyptian literary magazine Apollo. It said,
The night found calm from all
but from a heart fluttering like a dying bird.
Leading a fugitive life,
seeking a safe shelter…
I do not weep over a bygone past,
nor do I weep over a wasted future.
But in myself, there is a lost meaning,
To which I find no symbol but weeping.
The motif and theme of self-alienation are likely the only continuous thread in Qutb's entire life. In the following year, he published another poem titled The Lost Self, again centered around the theme of the alienated individual. Interestingly, even during the Second War and as Egypt was roiled over the possibility that the marching Nazis would remove the British from Egypt, and as the chatter in the coffeeshops discussed the daily propaganda and political upheaval, Qutb had no interest in politics. All his writings during the war remained consistently literary and concerned with poetry and Western music. In 1941, during the peak time for Nazi conquests, he published his poem At Crossroads, which continued the romanticist themes of alienation and expressed more explicitly the torment of the divided self, introduced as a dialogue “between two souls of the many selves living fragmented in his breast,” an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust two souls monologue. In February 1942, as German forces entered Egypt and Radio Berlin prepared Egypt for a total revolution, Qutb published another poem titled Between Two Epochs. Despite its suggestive title, the poem is entirely romantic, speaking of the prodigal spirit that abandoned its home and, with it, leaves warmth and light to cold and darkness. Its second half welcomes the spirit’s return to its original unity.
After this initial experimentation with poetry, Qutb moved to literary theory, aesthetics, and literary criticism. To that point, all of his work was entirely secular, and his understanding of faith lay between deism and romantic atheism. Starting in 1944, Qutb started publishing essays discussing his own theory of aesthetics of images and shades, and he started applying it to scripture from the Quran. According to Qutb, “Expressions which communicate meaning in abstract, speculative terms address only reason. However, expressions that express an image and a shade address intuition and sentiment and mold the psyche as a figure made by the imagination. The first method is that of science; the second is that of art.” Qutb then proceeds to analyze the Quran’s figurative method, an analysis in which he insists on not being religious but aesthetical. Qutb’s central idea is that the Quran should be understood figuratively as an aesthetic construction of a psychological reality through molding the intuitive experience with powerful imagery and conditioning it through shades of meaning. “The shades around it [the image] expand the psychological space, or so to speak.” This is a romanticist, nontraditional, and unscriptural reading of the Quran that belongs more to the world of Goethe and Schiller than traditional Islamic knowledge. Qutb’s methods likely originated from his consumption of Western literature and literary criticism. Indeed, the origin of his image and shade lays in Biblical typology, and his image and shade were a translation of the Christian patristic hermeneutical concepts of type and shadow. The original patristic idea, ultiamtely based in the innovative Pauline hermenutical device introduced in Romans, was that in God’s word, divine illumination falls unto the figures and types of the Bible, and in doing so, it creates a space of shadow around them that foreshadows more illumination, usually of the coming person of Christ. The European Christian origin of such concepts is clear in his use of passages from the Bible as clarifying examples to his Arabic readers. But Qutb, despite using Biblical examples, has a secularized version of such a method in mind. He ultimately advocated that Arab men of letters use such a method not just in reading texts but, most importantly, in producing them. In all likelihood, Qutb’s inspiration wasn’t directly from patristic or evangelical literature of figurative Biblical exegesis but already filtered through a secularized Western form that is meant for application in literary criticism, likely by way of neo-Romantic European authors. This is evident from the difference between the Christian patristic original concept of the shadow, which usually indicated a Christological prefiguration of future events, and Qutb’s literary shade, which points to a deeper psychological experience.
Qutb alluded that he didn’t believe he was suggesting a new method but that he discovered the method that already existed in the Quran. His ideas of meanings and shades will continue with him throughout his life, and he will keep calling “to apply the method of the Quran in imaging and foreshadowing.” In July 1945, he published Existential Logic and Faith, in which he debated with another Egyptian intellectual over whether the Quran is a text to be grasped by intuition, which Qutb celebrated, or by reason. At the end of the article, Qutb pointed out that the reason for the disagreement was the difference in understanding the nature of intuition. Qutb held intuition to be “the intuitive vision into eternal axiomatic truth which connects mind and intuition,” while the other intellectual understood it as the excitable sentiments that are impressed by the arts and not rational and reasonable facts.
In November 1945, Qutb, for the first time, started publishing the first overtly political writings, starting with an article titled Oh, Arabs, Awaken and Be Alarmed which dealt with the Zionist threats to Palestine. In January 1946, he published a review of Ali Ahmed Bakathir’s new antisemitic play, The New Shylock, in which he praised Bakathir and spoke of the continuity of Jewish evil in Palestine. In the following years, the political writings of Qutb only expanded, and gradually, his writings in aesthetics disappeared or, rather, shifted into the aestheticization of politics. He unceasingly attacked capitalism, the white man, Judaism, imperialism, and the West. His ideas of the decline of the West show clear influences of the works of Oswald Spengler and other anti-modernist Western authors. Islam started to feature in his writings, not as a religion or a tradition of Quranic exegesis, but as a synthesis between the Hegelian idea and the image that is able to unify both the divided psyche of the individual and the fragmentation of the world.
The most widely read biography for Qutb in Arabic is titled, A Life of Pivots, due to the fact that he seemed to have changed directions multiple times in his thought. Those pivots are much more explicable than many think. Qutb lived through WWII like all young people of his age, he lived the ideological fervor, the pool of primordial ideas of socialism, nationalism, and radicalism, the intense hopes of German victory that would liberate Egypt, and the bombardment of Nazi antisemitic propaganda from both German Arabic radio and Luftwaffe dropped literature. The emergence of a new Qutb after WWII, authoring books of ideological syncretism of literary criticism, antisemitism, social justice, and the alleged bankruptcy of Western civilization was the result combined with his own alienated and romantic tendency. More than most people, he was constantly exposed to the flow of romantic Western literature characterized by feelings of impending doom.
The unitary absolutist totalitarian conceptions Qutb had of history, humanity, and Islam were idealist and romantic in a way that neatly fits in the larger context of European culture. His writing of a radical total and undifferentiated universal “equality of mankind… Islam… the eternal system for the world through the future of the human race” is built on an idealist philosophical view which included a conception of progress and the future nonexistent in Arabic before the 19th century. For Qutb, Islam was not the Islam of the tradition but the Islam of a romantic total and abstract idea, a mystical or metaphysical spirit immanent inside history and a romantic force that could shape the totality of being through its images and shades. By the time Qutb’s writings became potent to young radicals in the late 1960s, the entire substructure of thought was already shaped by this modern substructure, German in origin, through the cultural hegemony of German ideologies. Qutb’s writings had an audience that was largely already psychologically conditioned this way. His articulations of this same idea in traditional Islamic symbols meant it was all vitality but no morality.
In 1952, Qutb’s writings had another turn from apocalyptic political literature obsessed with the looming end of the West into visions for the future of the world. His vision was that of a “third way,” different from communism and capitalism, which will constitute a unifying “one path” for all Muslims. These articles belong to a genre we may call the perennial third-way fantasy, which has been common, indeed originated, in Europe, especially in Germany, since the late 1800s when German intellectuals dreamt of “Germany’s third way” to modernity different than that of Britain and France. These writings made Qutb popular among young Egyptian radicals, including Nasser personally, whose ideas were an amalgam of radical ideas and symbols of socialism, romanticism, revolution, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, antisemitism, and attraction to the ideal total Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood. Following the 1952 revolution, the Free Officers picked Qutb as the official idealogue of the Revolution.
Qutb eventually had a major fallout with Nasser, was imprisoned, and eventually executed. But for some time, he was a member of the revolutionary milieu, which included everyone: the Marxists, the Nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rebels without a cause. Nasser was almost his friend and wanted Qutb to be his propagandist. Qutb was self-associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but he did not come from among their ranks partly due to the practical organizational nature of the group, which was of an inherently fascist kind, and his life as a man of letters never engaged in practical things.
Qutb’s writings, which are associated with the foundation of militant Islam and jihadism, were written after his clash of visions with Nasser. The non-traditional and non-orthodox nature of Qutb’s conception of Islam must not be ignored. His writings show no sign that for him, Islam was the traditional religion literally built on a message from the person of God to Muhammad meant to open a relationship with humanity and the deity. Islam was more like an aesthetic sensibility that was able to shape man to merge with the vital force of the cosmos. In the last letter from Qutb to his sister shortly before his execution by the state, one could discern in Qutb’s letter a total romanticist view of death and a vitalist view of the deity as a force. Qutb’s exegesis of the Quran, In the Shades of the Quran, is a rich work of the modern radical imagination of a romanticist literary critic in which Qutb attempted to extract the romantic aesthetic sensibility of the divine subjectivity expressed in the psyche-shaping images and shades and turn it into an existentialist world-shaping sensibility. This is the key to understanding his most famous work, Milestones, which is considered by many to be the founding document of jihadist Islamism.
To understand Milestones, one needs first to reiterate Qutb’s own aesthetic method of images and shades, his understanding of the Quran, and his romantic existential angst. In his various essays on images of shades, Qutb insisted on the unquestioned superiority of figurative and metaphoric expression to any abstract rational discourse. He demonstrated this understanding by comparing the effects of the Quran’s images of hell and torment versus if the Quran was to discuss abstract conditions of existential terror. The former method is so powerful that it does not merely communicate meaning, but it successfully conditions the human psyche into a state of meaning that has no need for the inferior intellect. This makes the figurative expression a world-making force that abstract discourse and speculative intellectual discussions could never become. For Qutb, the Quran basically relied on these psychologically powerful images, organized in a structure of meaning that shapes the human psychological experience and organizes the personality structure. Around each image, like planted trees, the light of experience throws shades, which are the hermeneutic fields in which the individual’s imagination could engage with the image to deepen their psychological experience. This is the reason Qutb called his Quranic exegesis In the Shades of the Quran.
Lastly, one needs to consider Qutb’s own understanding of the world as a place on the brink of an apocalypse in need of an immediate “third way” to lead humanity, all in the abstract, forward. This understanding wasn’t about economics or political organization but an experience of angst and despair of a torn individual who seeks unity of the self and freedom. Combining these together, we can basically assert the following: Qutb’s infamous political tract Milestones was an attempt to use his own aesthetic theory by using powerful psyche-conditioning Quranic images to erect a structure of a political ideology able to lead man to salvation and create, using the Quranic images and shade method, a revolutionary personality structure. The images are from the Quran, and the structure is from the stock of common salvific political revolutionary philosophies of vanguardism. Qutb articulated a Leninist ideology using Islamic symbols, consciously relying on his own understanding of the psychological effects of such symbols. Qutb’s life, after all, was not of pivots but was remarkably consistent, more than most realize. His genius was to bring his aesthetical method into political activism. In short, Qutb reverse-engineered a hermeneutical literary method that originated as a tool to read text and used it as a tool to produce text, which is what he had advocated in his original essays about the method.
Milestones opened with the ominous line, “Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head, this being just a symptom of the real disease, but because humanity is devoid of the vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.” Those starting lines portray the literature of “nightmare” in the tradition of Spengler and Heidegger. It is also identitical to the catastrophic openings that are the hallmark of the writings of Constantine Zureiq, Qutb’s contemporary and the chief ideologue of Arab Nationalism. The image is that of impending doom, and the air is of some sort of ambiguous and unidentified danger, causing existential angst. The identification of an image of “vital values” with development and progress creates an idealist view of history. Moreover, one needs to ask how generations of scholars and radical Islam experts who examined this text failed to observe the fact that Qutb meant Milestones as a blueprint to progress.
The opening with a crisis is nearly identical to the formulaic openings of the works of Constantin Zureiq, an established international literary genre of political salvation by way of catastrophe, and a comparison would show nearly an identical structure between Qutb’s Milestones and Zureiq’s Meaning of the Nakba. Qutb identified his time as Jahiliyya, the first Quranic image which he employed. Jahiliyya is a Quranic term that describes pre-Islamic times. Its Arabic root is related to ignorance, and the Islamic tradition had developed the concept to mean something analogous to barbarism. Thus, the image and the shade of the word are that of a doomed reality of absolute darkness, absolute ignorance, and absolute injustice that all result from the absence of the deity, and that is how Muslims have understood the word for centuries. Qutb uses the term and its psyche-shaping figurative power to describe his own doomed day in which all contradictions are reaching their final climax. Here, Qutb identifies his time in the same way Marxists identified theirs as “late capitalism” or the way Trotsky identified his as the agony cry of capitalism, albeit significantly more romantically. It is the way all revolutionaries position themselves in their historical dramas. It was the final hour before the major climactic event, ending this agony and resolving the contradictions. This climactic event is a final liberation from the dark Jahilyya. For Qutb, the opposite of Jahilyya is total social justice, which is God's immanence and historical presence. As for that final event of the hour, “the society is purified from the totality of social injustice and an “Islamic system” is erected, working with the justice of God, weighing by God’s measures, and raises the banner of social justice in the name of God alone, and calls it the banner of “Islam.” This is not just a Hegelian revolutionary variant but the collapse of the entire symbolic weight of Islam into a conception of total and final undifferentiated social justice that is identical to the immanence of the divine inside history and to the communist idea at the end of history.