Islamic Radical Political Thought and the Struggle for a Righteous Society: Sayyid Quṭb’s Al-ʿadāla al-iǧtimāʿiyya fīʾl-Islām (Social Justice in Islam)

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to investigate if and how Sayyid Quṭb’s social insights can be considered an example of radical political thought – not in an Islamic sense, but as one of the “counter-hegemonic articulations” within the Egyptian political debate in the 1940s and 1950s. The essay also wants to re-discuss the widespread belief that Qutb’s intellectual production underwent a clear transition in two distinct periods of his life. In fact, Quṭb’s political thought is generally described (especially by those who only consider him as the mentor of international jihadism) as initially characterized by a phase of nationalistic commitment and later by his “changeover” to extremist, fanatical and violent Islamism. To underline how this transition was in fact far more nuanced and gradual, I will focus on Quṭb’s essay Al-ʿadāla al-iǧtimāʿiyya fīʾl-Islām (1949), its particular editorial history and its enormous resonance among Egyptian intellectuals.