Sayyid Qutb

A literary critic and education official who turned to Islam after two years in the United States (1948–50), Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, spent most of his last twelve years in Nasser's prisons, and there wrote the thirty-volume Qur'an commentary “In the Shade of the Qur'an” and the manifesto “Milestones” (1964). He taught that sovereignty belongs to God alone, that any society which legislates for itself, including the nominally Muslim states, has reverted to the pagan ignorance (jahiliyya) of pre-Islamic Arabia, and that a vanguard formed on the Qur'an alone must withdraw from it and then, by preaching and by jihad, remove the political systems that stand between people and God's law; no one is forced to believe, but no jahili order may be left standing. “Social Justice in Islam” (1949) set out an Islamic economy of private property under zakat, without usury or great wealth; he rejected nationalism, capitalism and communism alike as idolatries, scorned philosophy and theology as foreign to the first generation, and read the Qur'an as a total program for life.

Why he matters: Catholics in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Middle East live with the movements he inspired, and the Catholic Islamologists (Samir Khalil Samir, the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies) use him to show what the Church's dialogue partners are not, and what some of their neighbors are; he is also the sharpest modern form of the divine-command theology Benedict XVI addressed at Regensburg. Reading him explains why the Church insists that religious freedom and the distinction of the two powers are not Western accidents.