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By Root 980 0

and joyless pigeons in anomic city squares. This exposure to the West—in the form of soporifically suburban Colorado—led Qutb to the view that the modern world had reverted to a state of pagan jahiliyya, against which the true Muslim had to insulate himself through total submission to Allah. Becoming a slave of God liberated the true believer from the slavery of merely human rulers, and such false creeds as the separation of religion and politics, democracy, human rights, liberalism and so on. In local terms, this meant that wherever Arabs thought they were on the side of the future—democracy, nationalism, socialism and so forth—they were merely rendering obeisance to false idols as worthless, despite their greater sophistication, as the old stone gods of ancient Mecca. They were what Qutb dubbed ‘so-called Muslims’ and as such they could be killed along with the infidel kuffar, in what Qutb envisaged as an endless jihad.10

Many have compared Qutb’s book with Lenin’s What is to be Done? Writing with a directness that was unlike the learned disquisitions of the ulema, Qutb managed to slip in the very Western, Marxist-Leninist notion of an elite revolutionary vanguard, albeit camouflaged as the belief that only the imprisoned Brothers were true Muslims, the rest being in various states of thrall to false idols. Regimes not solely based on sharia law should be combated with the sword as well as the book. The worst idolaters were the guards in Qutb’s prison, who in 1957 responded to the prisoners’ refusal to break rocks as part of their sentence of hard labour by entering the cells and killing twenty-one of them. The consumptive Qutb avoided this fate as he was kept in the infirmary.

By the time of his release in May 1964, and by virtue of such writings as Signposts, Qutb had become the leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood as it tentatively sought to regroup. Not every Brother agreed with his violent prescriptions, preferring instead the slow but steady creation of a parallel Muslim society outside the state, a tendency that has periodically enabled Egyptian governments to make peace with the Brotherhood. Qutb was not free for long because in order to boost its credibility vis-a-vis another security agency, the Military Security Services uncovered a wide-ranging conspiracy against Nasser’s regime, of which Qutb was alleged to be a leading light. Brutal raids on shanty towns and villages where the Brotherhood was strong, and routine torture of suspects, provided the evidence the regime needed for the existence of a ramified conspiracy that it hoped would galvanise its own supporters. After trial by a military court, Qutb and two colleagues were hanged on 29 August 1966. The decades of abuse he suffered, culminating in such a death, provided a powerful example of martyrdom for the faith that would reverberate around the Muslim world, not least in the form of a lurid biopic that leaves no torture unexplored. One of the places where Qutb’s doctrines flourished was in Saudi Arabia. Many exiled Egyptian Brothers were given refuge there as their intellectual skills were locally in short supply. One of them was Mohammed Qutb, Sayyid’s brother, who became chief propagator of the martyr’s cult, his future disciples including the young Osama bin Laden.11

For a decade or so after the Suez Crisis, Nasser basked in the adulation of much of the non-aligned world. Then his vision fell apart, beginning with the failure of the United Arab Republic created by amalgamating Egypt and Syria, although the name lingered on until in 1971 Egypt reverted to being the Arab Republic of Egypt. Widespread disillusionment with Arab nationalism, in the wake of the disastrous 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and Jordan’s Black September, gave a brief boost to socialist alternatives, at least among students who looked to the Paris of 1968 as a model. The fact that the Jordanian Muslim Brothers had supported king Hussein’s suppression of the Palestinians inclined many rulers to view Islamism as a useful counterweight. As part of his so-called Corrective