CONFLICTED

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

2023-08-23

When it comes to the modern era, no Islamic intellectual has influenced modern Salafi Jihadism more than Sayyid Qutb. This unlikely Egyptian, steeped in Western literature and poetry, would come to define the ideological basis for modern Islamism. He was a poet, a writer and an aesthete who was a classic product of the tumult of the early twentieth century. How he became the most significant Islamist thinker today is quite the story…In this first of two episodes on this radical romantic, we take a look at Q...