Qutb's Biography
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Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) lived through a period of profound transformation in Egyptian political and cultural life: the late years of British influence, the contested liberalism of the interwar monarchy, the revolutionary rupture of 1952, and the consolidation of an authoritarian postcolonial state. His thought cannot be understood apart from these conditions, nor apart from the less remarked but equally important fact that his public career began not as a religious activist but as a literary critic, civil servant, and educator.
Qutb was born in 1906 in the village of Mūshā, near Asyūṭ in Upper Egypt, a region often characterised by strong local religious culture combined with limited access to the cosmopolitan networks of Cairo. Biographical accounts consistently emphasise a childhood shaped by Qur’anic education and village piety rather than by clerical institutions. He is said to have memorised the Qur’an at an early age, a detail that later commentators have treated not merely as a devotional achievement but as formative for his sensitivity to rhythm, imagery, and language. From an early stage, however, his ambitions were literary and intellectual rather than juristic or theological in the traditional sense.
Village from the Asyut region, Upper Egypt
As a young man, Qutb moved to Cairo and trained at institutions associated with Egypt’s modernising educational system. He spent much of his early adult life employed by the Ministry of Education, working as a teacher, inspector, and administrator. This bureaucratic milieu matters for understanding his later critique of modern society: he was not an outsider railing against the state from the margins, but someone who had participated directly in the project of national education and cultural reform. During the 1930s and 1940s, he published poetry, literary criticism, and essays, and moved within the same broad cultural world as secular Egyptian intellectuals of the period. His early writings display little of the militant tone for which he later became known.
Qutb in his early thrities.
A crucial transitional phase came in the mid-1940s, when Qutb turned increasingly to the Qur’an as a literary and moral text. His work al-Taṣwīr al-Fannī fī al-Qurʾān (1945) approached scripture through categories of imagery, narrative, and aesthetic effect rather than through classical legal or dogmatic frameworks. This mode of engagement, neither traditional exegesis nor modern historical criticism, would later shape his most influential writings. It also helps explain why his later Qur’anic commentary would be read not only as theology, but as a work of moral and cultural diagnosis.
Between 1948 and 1950, Qutb travelled to the United States on an educational mission, spending time in Washington, DC, Colorado, and California. Later accounts consistently treat this period as a biographical hinge. His surviving reflections depict America as technologically advanced yet spiritually hollow, marked by what he perceived as aggressive materialism, racial injustice, and moral laxity. One frequently cited episode describes his discomfort at a church social event involving dancing, which he interpreted as emblematic of a broader confusion between religious form and ethical substance. Whether or not such anecdotes bear the full interpretive weight sometimes placed upon them, they illustrate how Qutb came to frame “the West” less as a rival civilisation than as a cautionary example of moral disintegration.
On his return to Egypt, Qutb’s writing took on a more overtly religious and political character, and he became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. This association coincided with the turbulent years surrounding the 1952 Free Officers’ coup and the subsequent rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Initial cooperation between the new regime and Islamist groups quickly gave way to repression. Following a crackdown on the Brotherhood in the mid-1950s, Qutb was arrested and imprisoned, a turning point that decisively shaped both the content and tone of his later work.
Qutb in the early 1950s.
Qutb behind bars.
Much of Qutb’s most influential writing was composed during long periods of imprisonment. His Qur’anic commentary Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān (“In the Shade of the Qur’an”) was drafted and repeatedly revised under these conditions. The work presents the Qur’an not simply as a source of doctrine, but as a total moral vision opposed to what Qutb increasingly described as modern jāhiliyya: a state of ignorance and moral disorder that, in his view, characterised contemporary societies, including those that considered themselves Muslim. The prison setting, marked by isolation, discipline, and coercion, lends the text an intensity that distinguishes it from both academic scholarship and conventional devotional literature.
In 1964, Qutb published Maʿālim fī al-Ṭarīq (“Milestones”), a short but programmatic work that distilled themes already present in his commentary into a more explicitly political idiom. The book argued that true Islamic life required a decisive break from corrupt social orders and a committed vanguard capable of re-establishing divine sovereignty. Shortly after a brief release from prison, Qutb was re-arrested, tried on charges of conspiring against the state, and executed by hanging in 1966.
Qutb’s death marked the end of his personal career but the beginning of his afterlife as a theorist. His writings circulated widely across the Middle East and beyond, shaping debates about Islam, politics, and modernity in ways that extended far beyond the Egyptian context that produced them. Later movements would read him selectively, sometimes abstracting his concepts from their original setting. Yet his thought remains inseparable from the specific historical pressures under which it emerged: the aspirations of postcolonial reform, the disillusionments of authoritarian rule, and the attempt to articulate a comprehensive moral response to the modern world.
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