Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism

"This book represents the best kind of scholarship. Calvert doesn’t just focus on the details of Qutb’s life, but is able to place him in the much broader context of the intellectual world he grew up in. The reason I chose this in conjunction with Gudrun Kraemer’s book is that the contrast between Qutb and Al-Banna is a very important one. Hasan al-Banna wasn’t in any real sense an intellectual – in fact Gudrun Kraemer describes him as “anti-intellectual” – whereas Qutb was a really significant literary figure, a novelist and essayist who was initially inspired by a lot of Western literature. He then had this Damascene conversion to Islam, an experience which has been replicated by young, Western-educated intellectuals who have come after him. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In that flip-over into religion, a lot of material tends to appear that isn’t authentically Islamic and doesn’t come from the Islamic tradition. In Qutb’s case, what we see is his reading of Western sources becoming fused with Islamic sources, although he of course claimed that his discourse was wholly, authentically Islamic. What I like about Calvert’s book is the way that he captures that very cleverly and in a very readable format. I particularly like the way he contrasts the actual Qutb with the character of Qutb that appears in one of [the novelist] Naguib Mahfouz’s books. What comes across – although Calvert is quite cautious about drawing this conclusion – is that actually as an individual, the great martyr he became is intellectually inauthentic as compared to someone like Mahfouz and the liberal generation of writers to which Qutb initially belonged, who pursued truth in a much more total way. In Qutb you have an example of the corruption of thought by religion. In that sense he’s rather a Tolstoyan figure. When Tolstoy got religion, the quality of his writing declined and that’s very much what appears to happen with Qutb. So Qutb is in some ways a much more substantial man than Hasan al-Banna. He’s not an organisation man, but he sets himself up as an icon. He becomes the great martyr when he’s executed by Nasser in 1966, and hence the inspiration for generations of young men who suffer from what might be described as cultural schizophrenia in terms of personal identity and intellectual outlook. I think that’s part of it. But in his memoir, Qutb describes an encounter he had while he was in Colorado in the US, where he was sent by the Egyptian government on an educational mission for two years in 1948. He’s invited to a church event where the pastor turns down the lights and they play the big band tune “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and you have all these young people smooching. He disapproved of this. Calvert is a bit sceptical about Qutb’s account about this being a transformative moment and points out that he had previously written disapprovingly about what was going on in Cairo nightclubs. So to some extent he was transposing his Hasan al-Banna-like rejection of sexual mixing in Egypt to the United States. There are other things that are very unattractive about Sayyid Qutb. He makes extremely rude remarks about jazz, which he claimed only pointed to the primitive backwardness of African Americans. His racist attitudes make him in some ways a very unattractive iconic figure."