Sayyid Qutb: Poet, Reactionary, Islamist (Part 1)

Welcome back to Conflicted with me, Thomas Small, and my illustrious co-host, Eamon Dean. Eamon, I've got a pretty hefty quote from today's subject to start things off for you. Hopefully this will set the tone for these next two episodes. Here's the quote. All Western nations take their bearings from one source, and that is the materialistic civilization that has no heart and no moral conscience.

It is a civilization that does not hear anything except the sound of machines, and does not speak of anything but commerce. how I hate and disdain those Westerners, all of them. without exception. What do you reckon, Eamon? Coming in a bit strong, don't you think?

That sounds very familiar to things it that you would have believed a while ago, Thomas. Yes, I actually as I was reading it I thought, hmm, d I think maybe in the last season of Conflicted I said things like that. But in fact That quote was from the twentieth century Egyptian scholar, educator, and martyr, who many view as the real inspiration behind Salafi jihadism. Sayyid Khutb. He was a poet, a writer, an esthete, but also dogmatic, sexually repressed.

and obsessed with the purity of his religion. For me, he is the Voltaire. that the Muslim world craved. In it during the time of colonization. He's the final stop in this journey we've been taking through the Islamic thinkers who have shaped Salafi jihadism today, a truly modern, truly radical, romantic, let's get it. Yeah. So Amen, how is Sayed Kutab different from those Hanbali figures that we've been exploring in this series?

He was not a Hanbali. I think we need to make that clear from the start. Ahmad bin Hambal, Ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab are firmly in the Hanbali tradition, but Sayyid Kuttab is not. And yet he is equally, if not more important, to the phenomenon of Salafi jihadism and in general Islamist radicalism today.

So how is Kutub different from that tradition, Eamon? Oh, he is different. So different from all the other three figures that we have discussed earlier, Ibn Hambal, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Abdul Wahhab. And why? Because He differs from them in several areas. One, he is not a theologian. He is a writer, a poet, a thinker, a philosopher, and most importantly, an ideologue. who put together a political and an ideological and a philosophical

framework for radical Islam in the twentieth and twenty first century. He was a political visionary, really, a political visionary in a way that maybe bin Abdul Wahhab was. Obviously in in bin Abdul Wahhab's relationship with Muhammad bin Saud and the creation of a state to further the Dawah Wahhabia, the Wahhabi mission. But Sayyid Khutta was a modern political ideologue. Indeed, he was the product of his time. But also we have to state that he comes from a Sufi family.

He was never a Hambali or a Salafi. Nonetheless, this man, the most unlikely of people would have the greatest impact on Salafism and Hambelli Salafism to be more precise.

in the 20th and the 21st century. So as I've said, unlike the others in this series, Sayyid Kuttab was a modern man. Unlike the others in this series, he received no traditional religious education, apart from memorizing the Quran as a child. This is typical of many modern Islamist ideologues. They do not come out of the traditional medrasas.

of Islam. They do not receive the classical Muslim formation. They receive a modern education and based on that education bring modern categories of thinking to Islam to erect a new form of Islam, which is often called Islamism. Said Kutub was a voluminous writer, that's something he has in common with many of our figures, especially Ibn Taymiyyah. His main books Social Justice in Islam, Milestones. and in the shade of the Quran will come to as we unfold his life story. But these books

Have had an enormous impact on Salafi jihadism, especially. I imagine, Eamon, that when you were a young jihadist yourself in the Salafi jihadist movement inside Al-Qaeda. Sayed Kutta was in the air, to put it lightly.

Say Kotov was in my life before even I uh joined the jihadist movement in nineteen ninety four when I went to Bosnia. He probably influenced your decision to join that movement. Absolutely. I mean Because his books were an essential reading for many young men and women growing up in the Gulf. and in Egypt and in Iraq and in many other Muslim nations across the world.

So what about inside the jihadist movement once you were there? What was uh Sayyid Kutub's ghostly presence uh in in the movement? His book Milestones, which is in Arabic uh called Ma'alim al-Atarit. was considered the constitution of the modern jihadist movement. We'll get to milestones in our second episode on Sayyid Kuttab, but you you're saying that literally there were copies of the book around, people would quote from the book. I mean what about like

Osama bin Laden, people like that, were they clearly influenced by Sayyid Kutub? It was impossible not to see the fingerprints of Sayyid Kuttub's writings and ideology. influencing their sermons, influencing their strategy, influencing their tactics and recruitment. and literature. He was there. I mean he is the ever-present ideologue as if he was the man behind the curtain, the wizard of Oz.

I remember that one of our theology instructors from Al-Qaeda in one of the camps, he used to say that You see, we have thousands of scholars that we could quote on matters of theology and jurisprudence, but there is only one true. philosopher and an ideologue that we could rely on for the political and strategic framework of our movement, and that would be Sayyid Kotub.

Sayyid Kuttab. Well let's get right into his life. My reading uh in preparation for this episode. uh focused on John Calvert's classic book now, Sayyid Kuttab and the Origins of Radical Islamism. uh as well as Sayed Kutub's own writings, which, as I said, are voluminous, so it would have been impossible for me to read it all, but I certainly uh had a good dive into it. My goodness, what a great writer he was. As we'll see, So as you mentioned, Eamon, he was born in nineteen oh six.

Uh in a small village, the village of Musha in Upper Egypt, so that means southern Egypt. Uh it lay on the west bank of the Nile, along that narrow strip of cultivated land, you know, that makes Egypt so distinctive when when viewed from from above. Indeed, yeah. A world of farmers. You know, a relatively prosperous, relatively egalitarian village. I like the little detail that there was a Coptic monastery nearby. There was also the domed tomb of a Sufi saint. Sheikh Abdel Fattah, his name was.

So Sayed Kutub's childhood was really immersed in something like age old traditional Egyptian pastoral peasant Islam. Indeed. The other thing is that Said Kotub's birthplace is called also in Arabic a Said. Which also means a plateau, you know, a higher land. And the Egyptian listeners would feel some affinity when I tell them that it is the tradition in Egypt to make jokes.

about the people of Said. Said and Saidis, you know, uh as they are called, are the buttof you know the jokes in Egypt because they're always described as those You know, and simple. But Set Khotov was anything but dim. No, he was certainly not dim. He he was maybe a diamond in the rough in that sense, if if his fellow Saidis were uh were physically tough but dim witted people. Uh his father was a farmer. By that I mean a landowner, a small holding landowner. The family had once been rich.

But its fortunes had declined in the previous generations. Again, like many revolutionaries, like many radical thinkers, Sayed Kutub grew up. with a a family memory of past prosperity. I think this kind of sense of resentment coming from a a poorer background.

It may have sowed the seeds for what would definitely be a a common refrain in his adult life, of of contempt for the bourgeoisie, contempt for rich people. Sayed Kotov did indeed hate This massive inequality that was happening in Egypt, the stratification of the society in Egypt was so vast that the top

was so far from the bottom. And the bottom was resembling really Egypt's pyramids. I mean, really, you know, just like the pyramids in Egypt, the society was so stratified, you know, and the inequality was so outrageous. So he hated the bourgeoisies of Egypt. He hated that wealth concentration at the top. But that did not make him Acámenes. He was never a communist, unlike what some academics in later years would have described him as.

That's right. Kutbism, if you could call it that, and s and Salafi jihadism in general is often conflated with revolutionary communism, like with like the Bolshevik revolution. There's these sorts of ideas. And of course, there's some overlap, because it's all radicalism in the end of the day. But you're right, Said Kotub was not a communist.

He would have agreed with communists about some of the problems facing society, but his solutions to those problems were not communistic, as we will see down the line.

One important thing I think about his childhood and about the environment in which he grew up that left a lifelong sort of stamp on him. was the superstition, if you like. that saturated his village. Now you mentioned that he he came from a a Sufi family. There's no indication that he himself was ever initiated into a Sufi order. But Sufism, by which I really mean that traditional pre-Salafi, pre-reformed Islam of the classical Islamic world.

was powerfully present in his childhood. Demons, ghosts Uh revelatory dreams were everywhere. There were disheveled dervishes, you know, around, playing the fool whom the peasants considered holy men. And Sayyid Kutub believed intensely in this universe, in this enchanted religious universe as a child. Well the society around him was superstitious. There's no question about it. In fact he himself, when he was young, uh you know, uh practiced exorcism.

Of course, I mean, please, dear listener, don't think it is the same as, you know, you see in some horror movies about what exorcism in a Catholic sense feels like. It's a bit different. But nonetheless, he did practice exorcism.

you know, as a young man to cast away demons, you know, who possess humans. You know, Sayyid Kuttab would eventually, as we'll see shortly, have uh a modern education, and and as he emerged into adulthood, he would begin to dismiss uh the superstitions of his childhood as ignorant He would always romanticize this peasant way of seeing the world. like many reactionaries today, and I think this is really key, who talk about the quote unquote disenchantment of the world.

Sayed Kutub mourned that disenchantment in the modern world around him, and then eventually he would see that peasant. superstitious faith, let's say, driven, imaginative way of seeing the world as Quranically grounded, he would go full circle and return to affirming quite powerfully that way of seeing the world, the enchanted way. But we'll get to that in the next episode. For now.

As a child, Kutub craved education. He really wanted to learn. Two of his uncles had studied at Al Azhar, the great uh center of Muslim learning, in Cairo, and Al Azhar scholars visited uh the village of Musha when he was a child, and he would attend lectures by them on Tefsir, on Quranic uh interpretation. He loved Education. At age six, just like many children in Egypt at that time, he enrolled into a state.

run primary school that was generally secular but with some Quranic instructions there and Arabic as well. However, Two years into his education in that state school, uh, there were rumors that the state is going to Stop altogether Quranic instructions. in the schools uh that they run. So of course, like in his father, who was deeply religious, thought, ah no, no, no, no, no. So he withdrew him from that school and enrolled him into a proper Quranic school.

It's an early hint of that kind of paranoia that would haunt Sayed Kutab all his life, that modern westernized or westernizing institutions were always on the verge of attacking Islam. His father must have felt that. The the people of Musha definitely felt that. And so yes, he was pulled out of the state school, enrolled in a traditional Quran school, which Seyed Kutub absolutely hated.

Well, he did enroll into the Quranic school, but unlike the state-run school, the Quranic school wasn't properly funded, wasn't properly run, it was dirty, it was makeshift. And he just wasn't happy there. He wanted to go back to the rigorous, well-run, well-funded school, and his father in the end agreed with him. And again there you see there's hints of that Puritanistic kind of O C D tendency when when he you know, he liked the ordered, clean, hygienic world of modernity.

While at the same time hating hating that world for spoiling or polluting the ideological and idealistic purity of his mind. You know, it's a very confused kind of dualistic way of approaching things. very common to lots and lots of radicals. So yes, he he he begged his father to send him back to the state school. His father capitulated, and yet Sayed Kutta didn't want to uh neglect Quranic studies, and in fact In the state school, He organized pupils to memorize the Quran by themselves.

And by the time he was 10 years old, he had memorized the Quran. Later on, he would claim that this Quranic memorization was what. planted the seeds of what was going to soon emerge as an intensely creative uh side to his character. To be honest, I've seen a lot of my friends, and that actually include myself, those young boys who

embarked on memorizing the Quran. From a young age, I started when I was nine and I finished when I was twelve. I can relate to his experience because really the memorization of the Quran open the mind so much to many other possibilities. So actually, my love for poetry when I was young, my love for reading, All sparked because of the memorization of the Quran. His experience was ours. Exactly. So I can relate. He definitely loved reading. He would eagerly collect books.

Uh, going to traveling booksellers and buying whatever they had to sell. According to Calvert, he collected twenty-five books over his childhood. Uh, books that straddled the divide between uh traditional subjects and modern subjects. So he loved Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, which I love. That's hilarious. But he also read books on astrology and magic. As you said, he began performing exorcisms.

And then in as a teenager, he began to become politically aware. I think we need to kind of remind the listener, especially the listener who followed last season of Conflicted when we talked. about Egypt, you know, in great detail, that he grew up in a world that was living in the shadow of Muhammad Ali's reforms to Egypt's political economy. You're gonna have to go back, listener, to episode six

of the last season to to learn all about Muhammad Ali, who, beginning in the early nineteenth century, radically transformed Egypt. So a strong centralized state had emerged. It had abolished tax farming and instead introduced a modern tax gathering bureaucracy. This had forced the peasants to grow cash crops for export in order to generate cash to pay the state. This is all very modern sort of thing. This had led to what is like the equivalent of the British enclosures.

So the land had become a commodity, and the the central government had been dispensing parcels of land to members of the aristocracy. creating this wealthy new overclass. So in a way, the process that sort of England had undergone in the 16th and 17th centuries, Egypt had undergone in the nineteenth century. Law had been somewhat secularized. The Sharia had been limited to domestic affairs only.

So though we said before that Kutub grew up in a world that was traditional in terms of its worldview, in fact that world was modern, and it was a village world that was in profound flux. he was living in a world that had been radically transformed and perhaps uh unsurprisingly, it led to political agitation on the ground. Oh, you know, Egypt was going through turmoil, you know, when he was born. The year he was born, nineteen oh six, there was

an incident in Egypt is called the Donshui incident. Don Shui actually was a massacre which happened when a clash happened between villagers, farmers in uh the village of Donshui, you know, in the West Nile Delta. When they clashed with uh British soldiers. So the British opened fire. Many people were killed, including women. And that, of course, led to demonstrations across Egypt and the calls for the British to leave, of course. And I mean, that never happened. But nonetheless.

This is the same year that Setkutub was born, and then of course Egypt remained under direct British uh mandate all the way until nineteen twenty two.

So by that time, Sayyid was a 16-year-old, the teenager. He was, of course, aware of all the agitation, the riots, the demonstrations, you know, the clashes with the British authorities, to the point where The uh king of Egypt at the time, you know, who was known as the Sultan, decided that, you know what, the British need to grant some independence, at least even if it is

Superficial just to please the masses. And this is exactly what happens. So this is the society The agitated Egypt that Said Khotub was living in at that time. And not to mention, of course, uh during his childhood the First World War broke out and the two of the parties in that war were the British against the Ottomans, and Egypt was sort of technically still part of the Ottoman Empire, even if the British in fact dominated it entirely. And families like Sayed Kutubs, Tended to support

the Ottomans against the British in that war. And uh Sayyid Kutub's father was no different. His father became a political activist at that time. And Sayed Kutub would join in his father's meetings and would be asked to read out nationalistic articles to the largely illiterate activists. So that's an important point to stress. Nationalism was in the air. Now some nationalists in Egypt wanted Egyptian nationalism to be modeled on European norms.

Others were already inclining toward a more Islamic conception of Egyptian national identity. As Sayyid Kutub would have been caught in the middle of this sort of s swirling nationalist. discourse, but at that time he became animated in his fervor against the British, And this was given even greater impetus in nineteen nineteen during the nationwide uprising against the British that occurred following the First World War.

uh when Egypt was refused an independent place at the Paris peace conference, the British wanted to negotiate on their behalf. Again, thirteen year old Sayyid gave nationalist speeches in mosque.

And already in these nationalistic speeches, he was praising the caliphate. He was praising Islam. So the seeds of his later ideology were were already being sown. Again, Thomas Feeling the sense of endangerment to identity, to faith, to the pan Islamic bond that bonded many of the world's Muslims together.

Now, Sayyid in his speeches, because don't forget, many of them are not his, but he was reading in the articles, he was borrowing from all of these writers, but at the same time he is not forgetting. his Islamic education, that the caliphate is still there, even though it is as Western as it could be. I mean the Caliphs were living a Western lifestyle. I mean, they were wearing Western uniforms, they were drinking Western wines and whiskies, they were absolutely as detached from

proper Islamic way uh you know as it could be. And yet he felt it. He felt that, you know, impact because of pan Islamism, which shows that even in the late nineteen tens, the feeling of pan Islamic solidarity was still strong, even in the remotest parts of the former uh Ottoman Empire. Would be abolished just few years later by Kamal Atatork. And of course we talked about it in the Turkey episode of season three. Please, dear listener, go and listen to it.

By that time Said was already in Cairo. In fact, he moved uh aged fifteen in nineteen twenty one to Cairo to finish his education there. So that must have been a huge shock to him. Uh Cairo was uh a a divided city. Uh it had a very modern European half and a very medieval Islamic half. In a way, it still has that to to this day. The population of Cairo had only recently reached one million.

these days doesn't sound like a lot to us, but in the early twentieth century was a lot indeed. Compared to his village upbringing, the young Sayed Kutub's experience of Cairo must have been incredibly shocking, especially this division that it manifested between the modern West

in the medieval Islamic world. He finished his education in Cairo at a state secondary school, and then a few years later, age twenty three, he was admitted to the Dar al Aloom, which was a sort of teacher training institution. and would, after graduating from there, begin his career inside Egypt's Ministry of Public Instruction and then he would move later to the Ministry of Education.

And that's where we'll leave him, uh, while we take this break. We'll leave him freshly minted, uh, young uh educationalist working inside the ministry of education inside Cairo. And when we get back, we'll see that he's just on the verge of a new chapter in his life as he joins the glittering, a high society world of Cairo's burgeoning literary elite. We'll be right back.

We're back, dear listener. Sayed Kutub is our subject. Uh he is now what is he twenty-seven years old. The year is nineteen thirty three. He's living in Cairo. Uh he is working inside the Ministry of Education. And um his father dies. Now Eamon, I don't know, you can perhaps speak to this from a Middle Eastern point of view. I think it would have been expected at that time for him to then go home and to take up the sort of family business of farming. but he didn't

Well, of course he didn't. Because how could you expect someone who experienced modern Life and modern education to go back and take up farming. I mean, it would be way beneath him. It is the literary circles. Of Cairo, those beautiful cafes where intellectuals would meet and debate and talk about the latest issues of politics. Wars brewing in Europe.

one of Kuttob's possible influences, I would say, would take power in Germany, Hitler. Europe is going through political turmoil again. And therefore, why would Seth Kutub You know, leave Cairo where he is in touch with the rest of the world and go back to the in no backwater village where he come from. No, no, no, no. That's not Sayyid Khotub's destiny. Yeah, for seven years he'd been a primary school teacher in various places across Egypt, but yes

Cairo was always sort of beckoning him back. He eventually settled in the well to do and modern Kyrene suburb of Helwan. He bought a house uh and invited his mother and his siblings to join him there. So you know.

He he's gonna become the anti Western, anti modern ideologue, but he he quite likes the comforts of modern life as well. This is not unusual. Isn't that all radicals, Thomas? I mean, have you noticed like in I mean many hate preachers and Many of these Islamist uh jihadists, you know, living in London and Paris and Berlin and Munich and preaching from there.

Sending people to die, but they and their kids like you know stay in the comforts of these places. I mean come on, like you know, it's as old as this. The beginning of the century. Calm down, calm down. We have to do Sayyid Kutub justice. He was not yet an Islamist firebrand. In fact, he was a poet. a novelist, a literary critic. He was part of a very ex uh vibrant, a very dynamic literary scene in Cairo. In fact, it was his literary criticism, which he was publishing in journals,

uh up and down uh the country that brought Nagib Mafuz to the public's attention, for example. I mean Sayyid Kuttub can be attributed with with sort of um discovering that man who would go on to to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and is inarguably the greatest uh writer of modern Egypt. Incredible. Sayed Kutub adopted a modernist literary style. Now, again, a bit of an irony. He loved modernist writing, its clarity, its straightforward means of expression. He didn't like

the classical Arabic style at all. He thought that it was too complicated, he thought that it was too elite, it was too formal. He liked the rigorous but sort of direct expressiveness of modernism. And at this point in his career he was laying the foundations for a literary style that I think Aamon you would agree became extremely powerful. In fact it became the standard can be partially accredited with modernising the modern Arabic writing that is

Easily accessible to the uh new generations of Arabs in the 20th century. Before that, most Arabic writing was. theological and formal, and to some extent really inaccessible to the vast majority of people. So the way he made modern writing seem so eloquent, elegant, with deep, beautiful prose that would enchant

those who read them. You see, this is, you know, his magic, you know, not the demon's magic, not the exorcism magic, but the magic of the pen. And he will wield this magic so powerfully in the next decades. I mean not only prose. As I say, he was a poet, and uh Sayed Kutub's poetry is very similar to the romantic existentialist poetry of Europe of that time. But more than just the poetry itself. It was like

the philosophy, the literary philosophy of the time, he found very appealing. He believed that poetry appealed to the emotions, Not the intellect. And he began to develop a theory of the imagination as the primary means whereby the mind knows things. So there was a bit of an anti rationalist bent to his understanding of the human mind. He was much more of an eesthete, he was much more of an artist

than a true philosopher in that sense. And in this way, he found himself a fellow traveler amongst a whole generation of reactionary, right leaning literary figures in Europe. people who valued the the the imagination. Someone like D. H. Lawrence in England. Someone who believed in things like the blood. things like the instinctive engagement with the world, things like how n natural forms trees, dirt, ocean, sky,

impinged themselves on the imagination and revealed truths that transcended the reason. This kind of world is the one that Sayyid Kutub was swimming in,

And I think it would influence his Islamist ideology down the line profoundly. Indeed. But remember, Thomas, that Sayyid Kutub in fact was the quintessential Egyptian bureaucrat. He is Precisely similar to the people who would wear a bowler hat in England and be the typical quintessentially English civil servant.

It's true that he was a sort of d he had a dual character. He had this inner self of imaginative fire, but an external self of a kind of technocratic bureaucrat, as you say, they were known as offendies. Yeah, you see, Egypt was a very class oriented society. In fact

That class divided society in Egypt of the first half of the twentieth century is still influencing Egypt to this day. Can you believe it? So he was an offendy, and they are given that respect. So he was a respected And in his work as a bureaucrat within the Ministry of Education, he, for example, opposed religious conformism and called for the teaching of secular subjects alongside religious subjects.

I mean this is again, you might be surprised by this, dear listener, because he is the great anti-Western, anti-modern ideologue of Salafi jihadism, but he actually Hated and was rather embarrassed by the traditional, superstitious Islam of the peasant world. And he wanted the state. to transform Egyptians into modern, let's say, efficient people, people who could uh stand shoulder to shoulder with modern Westerners. Indeed, because don't forget he is not

A traditional theologian. He wasn't a theologian. He was, at the end of the day, the product of a modern education in Egypt. And he wanted Egyptians to master engineering, medicine, architecture, and the ability to start industry. He he really envisioned an industrial Egypt at some point in the future. And therefore, how can you have an industrial Egypt?

without industrious minds that are graduated from industrious schools. You can't do that from Al Azhar. You have to have a proper education that is based on modern science. Romantic poet

Uh utilitarian technocrat, that Sayed Kutub at this time in his career, a kind of uh seems to us a a contradiction, but at the time it was not a contradiction. There were a lot of such people around as the new modern world was being forged, out of the Great Depression and all the swirling political, geopolitical, economic, and cultural chaos of the nineteen thirties, which did not leave Egypt untouched, and it is in that swirling Great Depression inflected chaos that friend of the show

Fat Farouk arrived on the scene. Dear listeners, you remember you remember Operation Fat Fucker from from Ep from series three when Fat Farouk was ousted. uh by the colonels, including Nasser, who would overthrow the monarchy in Egypt. That's down the line. In nineteen thirty six, aged only sixteen, Fat Farouk became the king of Egypt.

And at the time nationalists, including people like Sayyid Khutub, I think at this time he would still have considered himself a nationalist, had big hopes for fat Faruk. They thought that his father, King Fuad, had capitulated too much to the British during his reign. And so they hoped that King Farouk who actually was not yet that fat would uh

Tilt the balance back in favor of Egyptian sovereignty. That very year, nineteen thirty six, he did sign the Anglo Egyptian Treaty, which was seen as a step forward by Egyptian nationalists, as it relegated British troops to the Suez Canal zone only. But their high hopes for good old fat fruk didn't last long. They were particularly upset, especially I think the uh more conservative among them, like Sayed Kutub, they were particularly upset by King Farouk.

notorious moral turpitude, if if you could put it that way. Well, Thomas, whatever fat hope that those nationalists had in Fat Farouk, unfortunately that fat hope didn't materialize You see, Farouk was a gluttonous an individual with a incredible appetite for oysters and women. But nonetheless, like I mean, of course if you are going to do that in Egypt in the nineteen thirties and forties. Remember that Egypt was at that time extremely stratified. I likened it to a pyramid.

The Egypt of the nineteen thirties and forties that many Egyptians right now romanticize as the age of the Cadillac scars, you know, and the Mercedes bands and the parties and all of this opulence. This was only i you know experienced by less than two, three percent of the society. The rest of society was nothing but peasants. And this is You know, why the anger towards Farouk's reinforcement of this stereotype of the detached elite and the fact that he has immersed himself.

So indulgently in all of these vices has more or less disappointed his subjects who are growing weary with the fact that the world around them is changing. There is a war, a world war about to happen. Just three years into his reign. King Farouk would see Egypt even being more controlled by the British to prevent the Suez Canal from falling into the Italians and the Germans. And with the world

falling around them, the Egyptians didn't have that much confidence in their king and his ability to rule. Kutub was certainly among those Egyptians. His thinking, which was appearing more and more often as essays in journals,

he was becoming more well known as a as a writer, as a thinker, in addition to his work as a poet and a novelist, his thinking focused more on more on Turath, on heritage. And in his thinking about Egypt's Taroth, its heritage, he characterized Egypt as having something uniquely spiritual and ethical about it. And again, in this vein of thinking, he was not unlike a lot of continental European, especially thinkers at the time.

thinkers who talked about how like the spirit of a nation is a a kind of metaphysical substance and each nation has its own spirit. That that the the nation must live truly buy. And especially in places like Germany, this kind of thinking was widespread. And in the same way that uh some thinkers at the time were talking about the German nation.

Kutab was talking about the Egyptian nation. Now, the difference of course is that Sayed Kutub was a Muslim, and Islam can easily cut against European style ethnic nationalism. Because of the concept of the Ummah. So there's a tension at this time in Sayyid Kuttub's thought. He's always talking about Egypt. Egypt particularity, its especially spiritual nature. He's also talking about the Islamic Ummah, the loss of the caliph, and how the how Islam in general has this unique

spirit against which the West is is corruptive and corrosive. So there's a tension there. that is going to be tipping more and more in the more Islamic direction as his life unfolds, especially thanks to a new movement

that just at this time was gaining speed in Egypt. What movement, Eamon, am I talking about? Well, of course, since nineteen twenty eight Egypt was going through a Steady and well-organized spiritual transformation, especially among the middle classes and the upper middle classes, led by a man called Hassan Al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan Albana. Again, dear listener, you'll recall that in the last series of Conflicted, we talked about Hassan Albana at some length.

For now, I think Eamon you'll agree, Hassan Albana and Sayed Kutub have a lot in common. Like Kutub, for example, Al Bana was also a village boy who left the village to become a school teacher. He also attended the the Dar al Aloom in Cairo, the teacher training college. He was also somewhat mystically inclined. But the differences are as vast as the similarities, because unlike Sayyid Kuttab,

Bena was always intensely pious. He n he didn't go through a similar phase of being a kind of liter literary figure and Easthead. Hobnobbing with the new intellectual elite within Cairo. He was always an intensely pious Muslim, and instead of becoming a man of letters, Bana became a preacher activist from a young age. Indeed. And this is why, while The two never met.

You know that. Well, I think we we need to point out, Eamon, that Sayyid Kutub didn't join the Muslim Brotherhood until nineteen fifty three, you know, much down the line. So you know but we're we're at least saying that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the air. So while حسن البنّة و سيد قطب لم يتحدث. ولكن عندما سيد قطب يتكلم عن حسن البنّة في الماضي، سيد قطب يتكلم عنه حسن البنّة. وكذلك يتكلم عنه حسن البنّة. وكذلك يتكلم عنه حسن البنّة.

When Bana moved the Muslim Brotherhood organization to Cairo in nineteen thirty two, he adopted the full range of modern political means of spreading his movement. Now, like Kotub, he had an almost populist admiration for the Egyptian people. Hassan Albana would talk a lot about the Egyptian people and their unique character as well. And so the means, the propaganda means, if you want to call them that, that he adopted

did dovetail quite neatly with Nazi strategy to some extent. And I think, Eamon, there's even some indications that Hassan Albana would have been influenced By the the example of the growing national socialist movement in Germany. So, for example, Hassen Albena established the Rover Scout Unit.

uh instilling in young male recruits a sense of chivalry, futua, but very much along a kind of modern disciplined lines. Yeah, it was there because you see, remember that it was the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. The political movements in Egypt and in Turkey and many other places, when they see the success.

of Mussolini's fascists and then later with Hitler's Nazis, to benefit from the experience of other movement doesn't necessarily mean that you emulate them entirely, you just emulate the tactics. I mean, just like Al Kaida used to teach us about the uh successful takeover of Cuba.

you know, by Castro and Guevara. It doesn't mean basically that they they they they they lack these communists, you know, of course, far from it. I mean they would have killed them on the spot if they meet them. But it's just how to emulate In a successful strategy when you see it.

And don't forget, you know, Hassan Albana was not an ideologue. He really wasn't. He was a moral campaigner, he was a a good political organizer, but his ideas, you know, his religious ideas Were more or less traditionally, you know, fundamentalist Salafi ideas with some Sufi inflections, you know, but he wasn't a brilliant.

ideologue. And in fact, the Muslim Brotherhood at first didn't really possess an ideological program. This is something that people often don't quite get. The Muslim Brotherhood lacked an ideological superstructure until a bit later in its development, when a certain Sayyid Kuttub joined it. Now, as I said, that's not gonna happen until nineteen fifty three, and at the time, in the nineteen thirties, we're still in the thirties, the Second World War was on the horizon.

Ah, Said Kutub was not attracted to the Muslim Brotherhood. He was still an Isthid, he was a literateur. He thought that writers and thinkers like himself would be able through their work to organically influence the Egyptian nation, to embrace their ideas. He was not writing about politics per se. He was writing about cultural identity. His writings were more in defense of the Egyptian Muslim culture against what he sees as the European and Western decadence and lack of morality. Yeah.

And the fact that such influences are corrupting the Egyptian society. Remember, it was all written, not from a political point of view, it was all written from the perspective of. culture and not from the perspective of politics. And of course, it was all written during the time when King Farouk, of course, was known for his you know extravagant, over-the-top partying and drinking and famous, you know, gluttonous indulgence.

And I think it was more of an attack on the Western influences on the local culture, not necessarily because basically he wanted to uh declare jihad against the West or anything like that.

No, not at all. I mean, you know, he he he he was a cultural figure still. But within this sort of thinking about culture spiritual things were creeping more and more into his writing. You know, in fact, in the early forties, he came under the influence of a French reactionary thinker called Alexis Carel, who, you know, he was actually a eugenicist. He had views that we would now consider to be really beyond the pale. But at the time he was a a respected thinker and he influenced Kutub.

who began to argue, you know, that Western modernity w uh was like the worship of the machine. He became obsessed with this idea that that the the Western world worshipped machines. uh an elevated machines over the spirit. Unlike Egypt, unlike Islam, unlike the East. in general. Considering the technology that was existing in the nineteen uh thirties and forties.

and he said that the West is uh worshipping machines, what would he say right now with AI? I mean, what would he say? But see the thing, Amen, is that this kind of

talk about the, you know, that the mo modernity as the worship of the machine against the human spirit is still very much with us. As we bring this episode towards its conclusion, I think that's where we should kind of be be leaving it. That Sayed Kutub's thinking is i especially at this point in his career, before his uh Islamist turn. Is still so powerfully persuasive to people. I mean, even to like people like me. When I read what he has to say, criticizing uh modernity.

criticizing the Western uh modern civilization. It just resonates. You know, as you said at the beginning of this episode, the quote that I quoted could have been me at the end of last season. You know, and it And it's true. I you know, you look around and you do think that the modern world does uh worship the machine. It is

highly utilitarian. It is highly materialistic. Uh and it does tend to gobble up, absorb, destroy, and neutralize all other cultures. I mean that that just is true. Kutub isn't isn't wrong. The question is, is he an asshole? Well, uh unfortunately it falls you know to me, uh Thomas, to defend the world aga you know, and the modern world against uh fundamentalists like you. Yeah.

Okay, how do you defend it? I don't really I still don't quite understand. I mean I'm not saying I want to burn the world down. Not at all. I believe in God's providence. You know, I believe that ultimately all will be well and all manner of thing uh will be well. But you know it's

It's it's still kind of dispiriting living in this modern world, isn't it? I mean it's a bit of a bit of a you know disappointment. Not necessarily seeing how many people lifted out of poverty, how many diseases has been cured. How many people no longer having to succumb to natural disasters because of uh modern world? I mean, I would say the modern world is a blessing. Well, Eamon, you know, honestly you're

You and I will never we're never gonna completely agree on this. Uh how is it how is it that I'm being schooled in embracing the modern world? By a former member of Al Qaeda. The modern world will never, ever cease to amaze me. Well, let's bring this uh episode to a close, Eamon, this first half of the life of Sayyid Kutub. This is the story of Sayyid Kutub before his Islamist turn. We're leaving him on the brink of the Second World War.

We're leaving him uh a fully paid up member of Egypt's effendi class of bureaucrats and its growing and powerful literary elite, its poets, its novelists, its literary critics, its thinkers. he's firmly opposed to Western culture now because it seems to him to be undermining Egyptian culture, and he's about to link that complex of ideas to the complex of ideas that is emerging and which is called

Islamism and which he will do more uh than anyone else to firmly and fully define. So that's where we'll leave him, a very much a twentieth century figure, very much A a 1930s style reactionary figure. And when we come back to the next episode, we'll take up the story from the Second World War onwards. As Sayyid Kutub will find himself propelled, really, into global and certainly Muslim superstardom as the chief ideologue. Muslim Brotherhood. We'll see you next week. Stay tuned.

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