Free Republic

How an Egyptian student came to study 1950s America and left determined to wage holy war ___ Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness...

In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah "Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are...

Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars, requires knowing one’s enemy. This simple truth, first stated by Sun Tsu more than two millennia ago, is no less important in the war on terrorism today. It has become almost common wisdom, however, that America today faces an enemy of a new kind, using unprecedented techniques and pursuing incomprehensible goals. But this enemy is not novel. Once the peculiar rhetoric is stripped away, the enemy America faces is a familiar one indeed. The revolutionary vision that undergirds al Qaeda’s ideology, the strategy it is pursuing, and the strategic debates occurring within...

Four years after President Bush launched a war to oust Osama bin Laden from his hideout in Afghanistan, many are mystified how a polite son of a millionaire construction magnate in Saudi Arabia could turn into the world’s most wanted terrorist. According to many experts, a clue may lie in the life and works of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic ideologue who was radicalized after an overwhelmingly negative experience in the United States and later imprisoned and executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt in 1966...Qutb’s journey to radicalism started in 1948 when the Egyptian government sent the young school...

From Chapter 2: The Foundation of the New Terrorism Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood11 executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought. Sent by the Egyptian government to study in the United States in the late 1940s, Qutb returned with an enormous loathing of Western society and history. He dismissed Western achievements as entirely material, arguing that Western society possesses “nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.”12...

Dear Concerned Citizen, What stands out about the Islamic militant’s critique of America is its refreshing clarity. Painful though it is to admit, they aren’t entirely wrong. They charge that America is a society obsessed with material gain, and who will deny this? They condemn the West as an atheistic civilization, and while they may be wrong about the extent of religious belief and practice, they are right that in the West religion has little sway over the public arena, and the West seems to have generated more unbelief than any other civilization in world history. They are disgusted by...

“Islamic Revivalist” Sayyid Qutb and His Influence on Modern Islamic Fundamentalism Introduction In the mid-20th century, Islamic fundamentalism emerged as a major movement in the Middle East. It had its ideological roots in the works of nineteenth century Islamic modernist thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammed Abduh, and Rashid Rida, who laid the philosophical framework for modern Islamic fundamentalist movements. These thinkers agreed that Islam was in decline, and called for change to reinvigorate their religion, and cope with the influence of the European powers that had begun to colonize traditionally Muslim lands during the first half of the...

Sayyid Qutb and the resurrgence of Islamic antiquity by Greg Swann This is from a huge and very detail-packed article in the New York Times Magazine about Sayyid Qutb, the Koranic philosopher who, more than anyone else, is the founder of Islamic fundamentalism. The most radical of the Pan-Arabists openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had...

Al Qaeda has broader [philosophical] roots [than we imagine]. The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions -- And at the heart of [radical Islam’s] single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide. Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called ''Milestones,'' and that book was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged....

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant police forces of the entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark maneuvers. Al Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring. Just this month, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police agents, as I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin...