Sayyid Qutb was one of contemporary Islam’s most important theorists, and one of the most consequential shapers of Muslim Brotherhood ideology. His view of America is the Muslim Brotherhood’s view of America. His view is also the view of every modern Islamic movement. And it remains, to this day, the view of most Muslims, not their view of America alone, but of the entire West, with America at its head.
If we want to understand how the collective mind of the Middle East was programmed against America, we have to study what the films did, what the media did, what education did. Qutb’s thought is the model on which the media and the education systems of the Arab world were built over the last century.
Qutb had a project. It was built on hatred of the West: a Brotherhood project, an Islamic project, a project for a state, a project for the whole Middle East, a project to raise generations on hatred of the West and hatred of America. This is the Muslim Brotherhood’s project, it is Qatar’s project, it is Al Jazeera’s project, it is the project whose consequences we are living with today.
Who Was Sayyid Qutb?
Qutb was born in Egypt in 1906. He graduated from Dar al-Ulum University in Saudi Arabia in 1933, and then worked as an Arabic teacher, later as an inspector, and then in Egypt’s Ministry of Education. In 1948, Qutb was sent on an educational mission to the United States, funded by the Ministry of Education. He returned in 1950 and left the ministry in 1952.
Some people hold to a conspiracy theory that it was America that made him a radical; that the trip is what turned him. This is false, and the historical record refutes it. According to the historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, it was he and Ismail al-Qabbani who proposed to place Qutb on the mission, even though he was unqualified, because he had been causing problems at the Ministry of Education. Qutb was forty-two, in poor health, with bad eyesight and other ailments. Neither his age nor his health would ordinarily qualify a man for such a mission.
The ministry of Education was moving in the direction of adopting Western curricula in education, and Qutb was among those who opposed this. He was not alone; there was a group of opponents. They sent him to the United States in the hope that his outlook would broaden and change, that he would see America for himself, do some comparison of educational curricula, observe how they were run there, and return reassured that Egypt should adopt what America had.
What actually happened is that he already hated America before he went there. He did not become a radical after his visit. He went as a man who already hated America, hated the West, hated Western curricula, wanted to overhaul the Ministry of Education. He had even started a journal, al-Fikr al-Jadid (The New Thought), before he left for the United States, with Muslim Brotherhood funding: al-Hajj Muhammad Helmy al-Minyawi, a Brotherhood member, was its financier. Qutb’s ideas already aligned with those of the Brotherhood, though he had not yet joined the organization formally, that came only later, in 1952.
Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952, two years after his visit to America. He was arrested in 1954 accused of conspiring to overthrow the Egyptian government. He served ten years and was released in 1964. He was re-arrested in 1965 for leading a Muslim Brotherhood effort overthrow of what he saw as non-Islamic governments. He was tried and executed in 1966, sixty years ago this August 29.
In 1952, in al-Risala magazine he wrote:
“We will not be able to overcome this colonialism, unless we destroy it in our own feelings, and destroy with it the machinery that crushes our faith in ourselves: the machinery represented by the Ministry of Education and the institutes of pedagogy, and the treacherous, deformed pens.”
In his view, no pen that praises Western civilization or says it is superior to Egypt can be permitted. The curricula must go; the Ministry of Education must be destroyed.
“We must crush this machinery that once sang the praises of France, or England, or America, any one of them; we must grind them down.”
Did Qutb succeed? Look at the level to which education in Egypt has now sunk. Look at the extent of the hatred of the West and of Christianity. The Muslim Brotherhood project succeeded in destroying education in Egypt and across the Arab world. What Qutb himself could not do, they are doing now, and have done after him.
