Islam as a ‘system’ in the later writings of Sayyid Qutb

Abstract

Over thirty years ago Wilfred Cantwell Smith remarked of the influential Indo-Pakistani writer, Sayed Abul Ala Mawdudi, that he 'would appear to be much the most systematic thinker of modem Islam; one might even wonder whether his chief contribution, in the realm of interpretation, has not been for good and ill his transforming of Islam into a system or, perhaps more accurately, his giving expression to a modem tendency so to transform it'.' I believe that this point merits more attention than, to my knowledge, it has received and that it could lead us to a more adequate understanding of the tendency commonly labelled Islamic 'fundamentalism' (but which I would prefer to call 'radical Islamism'),2 of which Mawdudi is an eminent representative. In this article I shall deal with another influential representative of this tendency, the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, whose later writings present views similar to those of Mawdudi and are, indeed, influenced by him, and in which the idea of Islam as a system is no less prominent. I shall attempt to spell out with some precision in just what sense he considers Islam a system and to show how this idea undergirds and illumines certain other aspects of his thought, such as his particular combination of rigidity and flexibility, and how it may help us to evaluate the relation between 'tradition' and 'modernity'3 in his thinking. In the process I hope also to illustrate some of the reasons why his thinking has considerable appeal among Muslims today. Sayyid Qutb was born about 1906 in the village of Qaha, in Asyut Province, into a landowning family that was both pious and touched by modem ways, his father being a member of one of the political parties fonned about the beginning of the twentieth century.4 He was sent to Cairo at the age of 13 for secondary education and then studied at Dar alUlum, an institution that offered an education which might be described as intermediate between the traditional Islamic education of the Azhar and the Westemized education of the Egyptian University (now University of Cairo). He was for a time an inspector in the Ministry of Education but soon left to become a full-time writer. In 1948 he went to the United States on an educational mission and spent about two and a half years there. On his retum, it appears, he joined the Muslim Brethren (Allkhwan al-Muslimun) and rapidly became one of its leading ideologues. After the 1952 revolution he was close to the new government for a short time but was disappointed by its failure to adopt the kind of Islamic program the Brethren stood for, and when the Brethren fell out with the government in 1954 he was arrested and spent most of the rest of his life in prison, where he continued writing and maintained contact with the