Sayyid Qutb - Milestones

Milestones

Milestones

by Sayyid Qutb

Copyright SIME. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Sayyid Qutb was born in 1906 in the village of Musha in the province of Asyut province of Upper Egypt. His father, Ibrahim Qutb, was a respected farmer and a community leader. The family, however, traces its roots to India. Qutb had three high profile siblings: one brother, Muhammad, and two sisters, Aminah and Hamidah, were also writers and they were all arrested in 1965.

Sayyid Qutb received his primary education in a school in the local village where, by the age of ten, he had memorized the entire Quran. When he was thirteen years old, Qutb moved to Cairo to pursue a degree in education. There, he was influenced by Western ideas, socialist and otherwise, as were many Egyptian intellectuals. In 1929 he was admitted to Cairo University. After graduation, he was hired by the college and he taught there for some time before joining the Ministry of Education as inspector of schools.

In 1949, Qutb was sent to the United States for further training. In the U.S., he attended a number of institutions including Wilson Teachers' College in Washington, D.C., Colorado State College for Education in Greeley, and Stanford University. He also traveled to other cities in the U.S. and visited Europe on his way back to Egypt. He thought that Western society was materialistic, corrupt, immoral, and filled with injustice. He was especially disturbed by what he characterized as pathological racism against Arabs and people of color in the United States and resented what he saw as prejudiced support for the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948. His book, Social Justice in Islam, is primarily a critique of American society and a commentary on Islamic ideals as he saw them.

Before leaving for the U.S., his ideas were mostly of socialist bent. It was after he returned that he formally joined the Society of Muslim Brothers ( al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun ), the foremost Islamist movement founded in 1929 by Hassan Al-Banna.

In July 1954, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the groups newspaper until it was closed by Nassers regime two months later. Many of the leading figures of the group were subsequently arrested including Sayyid Qutb, who was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. It was during this time that he wrote a commentary on the Quran, In the Shadow of the Qur' n , which consisted of thirty parts bound in eight volumes.

Sayyid Qutb was released but arrested again few months later and charged with treason and of attempt to overthrow the Egyptian government. It was believed that the content of this book, Milestones , that prompted the government to act. On August 19, 1966, Sayyid Qutb and two associates were handed a death sentence by a military tribunal. He was executed August 25, 1966.

Many scholars and commentators have written about Sayyid Qutbs ideas, including the ones contained in this work. This translation, however, should be a welcomed addition providing scholars and students with direct access to one of the primary literature in the field of modern Islamic thought.

Mankind today is on the brink of abyss, not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head-this being just a symptom and not the real disease -but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress. Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.

Democracy in the West has become infertile to such an extent that it is borrowing from the systems of the Eastern bloc, especially in the economic system, under the name of socialism. It is the same with the Eastern bloc. Its social theories, foremost among which is Marxism, in the beginning attracted not only a large number of people from the East but also from the West, as it was a way of life based on a creed. But now Marxism is defeated on the plane of thought, and if it is stated that not a single nation in the world is truly Marxist, it will not be an exaggeration. On the whole this theory conflicts with man's nature and its needs. This ideology prospers only in a degenerate society or in a society which has become cowed as a result of some form of prolonged dictatorship. But now, even under these circumstances, its materialistic economic system is failing, although this was the only foundation on which its structure was based. Russia, which is the leader of the communist countries, is itself suffering from shortages of food. Although during the times of the Tsars Russia used to produce surplus food, it now has to import food from abroad and has to sell its reserves of gold for this purpose. The main reason for this is the failure of the system of collective farming, or, one can say, the failure of a system which is against human nature.

It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!

The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak. The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.

It is necessary for the new leadership to preserve and develop the material fruits of the creative genius of Europe, and also to provide mankind with such high ideals and values as have so far remained undiscovered by mankind, and which will also acquaint humanity with a way of life which is harmonious with human nature, which is positive and constructive, and which is practicable.

Islam is the only System which possesses these values and this way of life.

The period of the resurgence of science has also come to an end. This period, which began with the Renaissance in the sixteenth century after Christ and reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, does not possess a reviving spirit.

All nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies which have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories derived from them, have also lost their vitality. In short, all man-made individual or collective theories have proved to be failures.

At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived -the turn of Islam, which does not prohibit material inventions. Indeed, it counts it as an obligation on man from the very beginning of time, when God deputed him as His representative on earth, and regards it under certain conditions a5 worship of God and one of the purposes of man's creation.

"And when Your Sustainer said to the angels, I am going to make My representative on earth." (Qur'an 2:30)

"And I have not created Jin and men except that they worship Me." (2:143)

Thus the turn of the Muslim community has come to fulfill the task for mankind which God has enjoined upon it.

"You are the best community raised for the good of mankind. You enjoin what is good and forbid what is wrong, and you believe in God." (3:110)

"Thus We have made you a middle community, so that you be witnesses for mankind as the Messenger is a witness for you." (2:143)

Islam cannot fulfill its role except by taking concrete form in a society, rather, in a nation; for man does not listen, especially in this age, to an abstract theory which is not seen materialized in a living society. From this point of view, we can say that the Muslim community has been extinct for a few centuries, for this Muslim community does not denote the name of a land in which Islam resides, nor is it a people whose forefathers lived under the Islamic system at some earlier time. It is the name of a group of people whose manners, ideas and concepts, rules and regulations, values and criteria, are all derived from the Islamic source. The Muslim community with these characteristics vanished at the moment the laws of God became suspended on earth.