Yet another publication about Sayyid Qutb? Even if we limit ourselves to books about Qutb (1906–66) written in Western languages, we cannot escape the fact that authors such as Calvert and Toth have already written full-length biographies of this Egyptian radical Islamist thinker.1 Others—like Moussalli, Musallam and Khatab—have authored books on (aspects of) his ideology2 and still others (including Carré and Shepard) have taken specific books written by Qutb as the subject of their own monographs.3 Especially when taking into account that this leaves out numerous studies in Arabic and dozens of articles on the subject, it would be difficult for any author to come up with enough new material to justify another book on Sayyid Qutb. Fortunately, Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė has done precisely that in this major contribution to the study of Qutb’s intellectual development.Šabasevičiūtė, a research fellow at the Oriental Institute in the Czech Academy of Sciences, has based this book on her PhD thesis, in which she combines “the French school of sociology, Anglo-American scholarship in intellectual history, and the Egyptian tradition of literary writing” (xi). Using this combination, she tackles the question of whether Islamism is as opposed to literature, aesthetics, and the arts as is often assumed. Her book explores how this idea of literature as secular emerged in Egypt and, more specifically, looks at whether Qutb’s move from literary critic to Islamist author was the ideological break many have described it as, or a much smoother shift. The difference between a break and a shift may seem slight, but given that the prevailing idea among scholars seems to be that Qutb broke away from the world of literature, he is often treated solely as an Islamist, rather than an important figure in Egypt’s literary history. Šabasevičiūtė believes this does not do justice to Qutb’s role in Egyptian culture. As such, her book “aims to reverse Qutb’s excommunication and to reintegrate him into the archive of Egypt’s intellectual history” (6).In order to show how and why Qutb shifted from a literary critic to the radical Islamist thinker he would eventually become, Šabasevičiūtė not only focuses on his ideas as such but also—and particularly—on the changing intellectual circles that Qutb was part of during his life. These circles existed in a context of three generations of literary figures, Šabasevičiūtė writes, who succeeded the authors of the Arab cultural and literary renaissance (nahda) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the first was a modern generation of literati (jil al-udabaʾ) that emerged after World War I; the second was that of aspiring authors—including Qutb—between the two world wars who often acted as disciples of the udabaʾ; the third generation emerged after World War II and consisted of intellectuals who were committed to political causes and dominated postcolonial thinking in the 1950s and 1960s.In this context, Šabasevičiūtė (borrowing a term from French sociologist Bernard Lahir) argues that Qutb’s “existential problem”—“the nagging question [that] is the origin of artistic inspiration,” “takes possession of an author and instills in him the irresistible drive to write” (10)—was initially given concrete form in Qutb’s Romantic literary attitude to understanding humankind through art, as represented by the first generation of literary figures. This did not address the earthly concerns of a postwar society trying to get rid of colonialism, however. The latter dimension was taken up by the realist and committed views of leftist writers of the third generation, but they lacked the spiritual dimension that Qutb sought. Islamism gave him the means to achieve the same lofty goals that poetry provided him, but now with a more politically relevant message, Šabasevičiūtė argues. The shift that Qutb made from one position to the other was not only too smooth to label it a “break,” the author writes, but it also shows that Islam and literature are not as diametrically opposed as is often believed.Chapter 1 of the book deals with how the generations of writers and literary scholars succeeded one another, how this shaped Egyptian culture, and how Qutb fit into this. Central to this chapter is the transition from the generation of the nahda to that of the udabaʾ after World War I (the first of the three distinguished above). The udabaʾ, led by writers and poets such as Taha Husayn (1889–1973) and ʿAbbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad (1889–1964), tried to move away from “old” forms of poetry and their ornamental styles and rebelled against the nahda writers who propounded such forms. They also presented literature and religion as two different worlds, advocating scientific skepticism and freethinking, and proposed Romantic literature as the new literary modernity in response to the previous styles of writing. Qutb was a strong supporter of this way of thinking and was particularly close to al-ʿAqqad, whom he regarded as a mentor. Unlike him, however, Qutb did not just advocate reason to understand the world but also emotional inspiration.Religion was not entirely abandoned by the udabaʾ, however, as Šabasevičiūtė makes clear in Chapter 2. They rejected European modernity as tied to colonialism and, as an alternative, came up with a local modernity that integrated Islam. They viewed Islam as a rational religion but also understood that not everything could be reasoned away rationally. Qutb’s role in this was a rather peculiar one. As a proponent of Romantic poetry, he was skeptical of human reason as the sole focus and was not convinced that rationalism should be the entire basis of cultural modernity in Egypt. He believed that “the affective realm of human cognition” (71) was the link between people and God and claimed that the Qurʾan exhibited a perfect harmony between content and aesthetics. As such, he distinguished between reason and emotion. In his Qurʾanic studies, Qutb ascribed these to two different zones of human cognition and claimed that the Qurʾan activated both: it addressed reason by its content and emotion through its aesthetics. As such, Qutb was a proponent of both literary Romanticism and scientific positivism. Apart from both being present in his works on the Qurʾan, he applied the former to literature and the latter to his views on political reform.In the postwar period, which Šabasevičiūtė analyzes in Chapter 3, the intellectuals of the interwar period became increasingly associated with the corrupt ruling elite prior to Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir’s rise to power in the 1950s (r. 1954–70; Nasser). Younger authors, who wanted to reshape Egyptian culture and decolonize history and literature, also blamed the udabaʾ for their lack of political commitment (iltizam). As a result of such accusations leveled at the udabaʾ, authors of the second generation broke with their former teachers. One of these was Qutb, who fell out with al-ʿAqqad. This happened not only because of the literati’s association with the ruling elite but also because Qutb was disappointed about not being given a chance by al-ʿAqqad to strike out on his own as an author. In this context, Šabasevičiūtė points out, Qutb—no longer tied to the udabaʾ and ill at ease with the left—lost faith in institutionalized politics, rejected the compliance of socially detached literature, and saw the need for action. It was this, Šabasevičiūtė states, that led him from inward-looking poetry to political Islam: he wanted to focus on literature, like the udabaʾ but not in an uncommitted way. Yet committed literature from the left compromised his higher aim of striving for transcendence. The answer that fulfilled both his wishes was Islam. It was in this context that he wrote his famous book Al-ʿAdala al-Ijtimaʿiyya fi l-Islam (Social Justice in Islam [1949]) and it was also during this period that Qutb slowly but surely engaged with the Muslim Brotherhood (officially joining in 1953) and became their main writer in the 1950s.Chapter 4 concentrates on the rise of specifically Islamic literature, which combined the political commitment of leftist works with the transcendent spirit found in poetry. This effort was an attempt by literary figures associated with the famous Salafiyya Bookstore, the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA) and, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, to “save” literature from “atheists.” It was in this way that Sayyid Qutb, together with his brother Muhammad as well as his sisters, became a prominent exponent of Islamic literature. They were able to turn their work into a branch of literature in and of itself, combining Islam and literature and showing that these were not opposites.Chapter 5 concentrates on the role of the state in the cultural milieu of Egypt and in Qutb’s thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In this period, many intellectuals, believing that the interwar literati had sustained Egypt’s colonial situation through their relative reliance on Western culture, called on the state to intervene in cultural affairs—which it did by purging institutions of liberals and Marxists. However, this cultural change did not just happen from the top down. Many intellectuals also embraced the new regime, the result of a coup in 1952, and/or received positions in it. Given that Islam became part of the cultural output of the regime as a culturally authentic alternative to Marxism, some Islamists also got jobs in the regime. Yet Qutb—who, as mentioned, had lost faith in politics as usual—saw the pan-Arab Nasserist state as an obstacle because he believed liberation would take place outside its realm. By this time, Qutb advocated a social and political interpretation of the Islamic confession of faith (shahada) that led him to conclude that Egypt was not a truly Islamic society. Instead, he claimed it lived in jahiliyya (typically used to denote the pre-Islamic period of ignorance) because it was not ruled by the laws of God alone. This conclusion was expressed most forcefully in Qutb’s book Maʿalim fi l-Tariq (Signposts on the Road [1964]), a book that advocated forming a vanguard of true believers that would take action on the basis of Islam. Although Qutb initially applied jahiliyya to the West, he later redirected it to the Egyptian state because of its role in sustaining the faith. This meant that the current state had to be overcome through revolutionary action, with a new, Islamic state to be set up in its stead, a necessity for a truly Islamic order.It goes without saying that Qutb’s ideas on the state clashed with President Nasser’s, the repercussions of which Šabasevičiūtė deals with in Chapter 6. More specifically, this final chapter concentrates on the schismogenesis, which refers to “the routinization of violence as a result of extreme levels of social and political polarization” (176), directed against the Muslim Brotherhood. Šabasevičiūtė shows how, from the 1950s onwards, the Egyptian regime went through several cycles of marginalizing and repressing the Muslim Brotherhood and especially Qutb. While this started in the 1950s, it happened again in the 1960s as Nasser’s regime was failing, causing it to crack down on the Brotherhood (including the execution of Qutb himself in 1966) as a group that offered an alternative form of Islam. This cycle was not just military in nature but also involved the media, which participated in the vilification of Qutb and the Brotherhood: the regime and its supporters marginalized Qutb to such an extent that he became an outcast, losing any credit he deserved as a figure of influence in Egypt’s cultural milieu of the time. This process of ostracizing Qutb and the Brotherhood was so extensive that it could be used again in 2013, when the Sisi regime clamped down on the organization, further cementing the Brotherhood’s and Qutb’s reputation as undesirable, dangerous, and outside of Egyptian literary culture.As mentioned, this book is a major contribution to the study of Sayyid Qutb, his work, his beliefs, and the cultural environment of Egypt in the mid-twentieth century. Although other studies do address this period and the literary milieu in which Qutb came of age,4 particularly some in Arabic,5 Šabasevičiūtė tackles this topic in a way that is far more detailed, insightful, and closely connected to Qutb’s actual life choices than that of her predecessors. As such, she sheds new light on much of what we know about Sayyid Qutb and his ideology, showing that he did not undergo a Damascene conversion of sorts but that his ultimately radical views were the result of a long process (or “shift”). She also shows convincingly that Qutb, despite his later reputation, was a major figure on Egypt’s literary scene before and particularly after World War II.This is not to say that the book does not have its faults. It would have benefited from a more transparent structure, for example, which would have made the book more accessible without compromising on the content. Šabasevičiūtė’s argument is multilayered, detailed, and complex—not only because she has taken on a subject that touches on several different academic fields but presumably also because much has been written about Qutb already, forcing her to push her topic beyond what we already know. This means that, combined with her rather dense style of writing, the book is clearly not suitable as a first introduction to Sayyid Qutb or as a textbook for classes on political Islam. For those specialized or professionally interested in Qutb, however, this is an excellent book that they simply cannot afford to miss.