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JEWS and ARABS from WW2 to 1967 (7 of 10)

Sayyid Qutb in Egypt. He was more puritanical than John Calvin and devoted to faultlessness and intolerance. He believed that most Muslims had abandoned Islam. Nasser thought him unfit to live. Extremists view him as a most accomplished intellectual.

In Egypt, a Pakistani writer, Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), was being published. He had a fear similar to other Muslims who had been subject to British colonialism. Mawdudi was afraid of Western influence overwhelming Islam. He found remedy in his fellow Muslims joining together as a political force against secularism. He believed that humans exercised their will in a universe ruled by God's will alone, and he extended this to the belief that people were obliged to followed God's laws, not man's. As he saw it, people had no right to make their own laws. In other words, he favored following only Islamic law -- the Sharia. His was a liberation ideology of sorts. People could defy secular authority and pursue their reverence to God. Without saying so, the advances that had come to Western Society by way of secular law -- through the Dutch, to the British, and the creation of the U.S. Constitution -- were a part of the Western influence that Abul Mawdudi rejected.

An Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, was influenced by Abul Mawdudi. In his youth, Qutb was attracted to Western literature. He studied in the United States. But in the 1940s he became disillusioned with the West, disliking what he saw as excessive materialism and support for Israel. In Egypt, in 1953, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and, in 1954, Nasser's regime sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. In prison, Qutb became more vehement and resentful. He had been a reformer and a democrat but now he hated Nasser and Nasser's secularism. Good Muslims, Qutb concluded, could not live in peace in a society like Nasser's Egypt. The Islamic world, he believed, was riddled with evil. Humanity, he said, was living in a large brothel. Like Mawdudi, he wanted to turn back the rising tide of secularism. He wanted a return to the Islam created by the Prophet Muhammad. He had become a born-again Muslim and wrote books that appealed to Egyptians unhappy with society.

About Jihad he wrote:

Before a Muslim steps into the battlefield, he has already fought a great battle within himself against Satan, against his own desires and ambitions, his personal interests and inclinations, the interests of his own family and of his nation; against anything which is not from Islam; against every obstacle which comes into the way of worshipping Allah and the implementation of the Divine authority on earth, returning this authority to Allah and taking it away from the rebellious usurpers.

About Jews he wrote:

History has recorded the wicked opposition of the Jews to Islam right from its first day in Medina. Their scheming against Islam has continued since then to the present moment, and they continue to be its leaders, nursing their wicked grudges and always resorting to treacherous schemes to undermine Islam.

Sayyid Qutb was executed in 1966, at the age of sixty. According to his admirers he died smiling, "showing his conviction of the beautiful life to come in paradise."