The impact left by Sayyid Qutb on theorists of violence (8)

In the previous article, I explained that Sayyid Qutb's formulation of the concept of jihad had a profound impact on the so-called contemporary "jihadist project." I said that the impact that Sayed had on violent groups emerged in three things: the formulation of the intellectual foundations of the contemporary jihadist current, which was addressed in the previous article, and two other things remained that I dealt with in this article: the impact of Sayed on the formation of theorists of violent groups, and how a number of Western scholars also captured this effect. As I said earlier, these three features are mutually reinforcing, which confirms the clarity of Sayyid's ideas and the clarity of their impact on the so-called "jihadist project", regardless of the apologies of the Qutbists, but before I address these two issues, I will discuss a theoretical introduction to the breadth of Sayyid's influence and the different degrees of those affected by him.

The amplitude of Sid's influence and the difference of those affected by him

As before, Sayed formulated a kinetic intellectual approach that paid off with the emotion of a wide spectrum, which included resistance movements and violent groups together. Rather, Sayyid's thought has shaped a source of kinetic thought in general, whether the Muslim Brotherhood, Sururiyya, or violent groups. However, his thought did not have the same effect on all those affected by it, as is evident from the diversity of the spectrum of those affected by it from those who preceded it. The varying degree of influence of Sid in those affected by him can be explained by at least two things:

• First: Sayed's readers vary in their tendencies and natures, and in the extent to which they go deep into his texts on the one hand, and the extent to which they absorb them on the other hand.
• Second: the diversity of forms of emotion; emotion is not a mechanical matter, and therefore is not limited to the meanings of the text alone, otherwise each text must have the same effect in each reader, and this is unrealistic. Sayyid's texts are vast, and each party quotes them according to their interests on the one hand, and according to their capacity on the other. There are those who read an idea and transfer it from paper to movement, and there are those who stand at the limits of theoretical intellectual influence without translating it into action, especially since Sida himself did not practice violence in his life, despite his revolution.

The conclusion of the above two things is that the variation and diversity of influence is not necessarily due to the strength of the revolutionary idea and its clarity or fading only, but there are other factors that bring the idea to life, such as living in an appropriate context, personal impulses, availability of possibilities, etc. Didn't Sayyid himself say – in the course of theorizing the transition from the jurisprudence of papers to the jurisprudence of movement – that it is movement that generates meaning? Sayed's texts, especially in the second revised version of Shadows, are explicit to those who have read them carefully, attentively, and inquiringly as well.

As for the interpretations that the apologetic people are interested in, they are interjected from outside Sayyid's texts: such as researching his intentions and intentions based on personal belief or experience of him and not his texts, and as giving testimonies of those who lived with him in prison based on private conversations, as if he was praying Friday behind so-and-so or Allan to conclude that he was not disbelieving him, etc. The decisive factor or starting point here is the texts of Sayyid that are read by the general public and the intellectual foundations through which he built, and they benefit from explicit meanings that have their requirements and obligations, knowing that Sayyid - as I decided in a previous article - was not busy judging individuals with faith or disbelief, and this was not among his priorities;

Because of this diversity in the degree of vulnerability and diversity on the one hand, and because of his controversial personality (whether before or after joining the Brotherhood) on the other, Sayed's relationship with the Brotherhood's own organization (or what was known as the 1965 organization) will remain problematic, and his role or impact in the splits that occurred in the sixties within the Brotherhood organization will remain controversial. It has always differed attention and testimonies in that between proven and Naf, and then it was said: The organization of the Brotherhood dived thought of the master, it is not the fate to digest nor is the fate to pronounce it, and the site of the master between Hassan al-Banna and Yusuf al-Qaradawi – may God have mercy on everyone – will remain the subject of study and analysis.

Are the three disparate or complementary projects? In my opinion, the Qaradawi project was in contrast to the Sayed project, and those who compare between Sayed and al-Banna find that Sayyid is a large and independent personality closer to being a counterpart to al-Banna not affiliated with him, especially since he was able to fill the intellectual vacuum within the Muslim Brotherhood movement before Qaradawi came later to establish his project on criticizing Sayed's thought while providing an alternative to it at the same time, in terms of atonement, governance, ignorance, jihad, ijtihad, and so on.

Sayyid's impact on the theorists of jihad and violence

Influence does not take one form, but I declare direct quotation with follow-up, and one of the forms of influence is also the congruence of ideas or building on them and advancing them a step forward, even if the transfer is not authorized, and I have dealt with these two forms in the past, and I am concerned here with another form of influence is the model (model) that is emulated, Sayed did not provide intellectual theorizing only, but charged it with emotion and literary conscience and then narrated it with his blood, so he provided an example for the jihadists on two levels: The doctrinal level (based on governance), and the practical level of kinetic where he paid with his life for his ideas. Pathos in this model can take one of two forms: first: adopting the intellectual approach (words and ideas) to follow or convince, and second: imitating the person of his own master (biography) resulting from direct experience of him or his ideas.

If the leaders of the so-called 1965 organization were closer to the second form (influenced by coexistence), some later ideologues of jihad and violence followed the first path (influenced by the intellectual model), including: Saleh Seria (d. 1976), Shukri Mustafa (d. 1978), Abdullah Azzam (d. 1989), Fathi Shikaki (d. 1995), Ayman al-Zawahiri (d. 2022), Abu Qatada al-Filistini, and others. It is true that there are differences between them, but they are united by the project of applying jihad in the contemporary context (whether against the regimes or against the West), and Sayyid's influence extended to include some symbols of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and I may single this out in a later article.

Let's start with Saleh Seria, who was the author of the first effective application of violence in Egypt in 1974 through the Military Technical Organization. Sarya believes that one of the best interpretations of the "true interpretation" of the Qur'an is the book "In the Shadows of the Qur'an" in its recent editions, which included the ideas of governance, ignorance and takfir as above. Abdullah Azzam (the pioneer of the Afghan jihad) says: "Sayyid Qutb directed me intellectually, Ibn Taymiyyah doctrinally, Ibn al-Qayyim spiritually, and al-Nawawi jurisprudentially.

Ayman al-Zawahiri (d. 2022) – according to Abu Qatada al-Filistini – had lived his youth "excited by what Sayyid Qutb wrote" until he met young people like him and founded al-Qaeda, and al-Zawahiri had given – in his book "Knights under the Banner of the Prophet" – a central position to Sayyid in jihadist thought at the doctrinal and practical levels. Abu Qatada was also very enthusiastic about Sayyid's thought: "Islamic movements generally stopped advancing for the better, and one of the explicit examples of this is the work of the Muslim Brotherhood; Sayyid Qutb – may God have mercy on him – was the good result and the advanced position after Hassan al-Banna." Fathi Shikaki (the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) considered Sida, Ali Shariati and Malik Bennabi to be "a dangerous triangle in modern Islamic thought," and Milestones in the Road was one of the things Shikaki used to "The Revolutionary Formulation of Islamic Thought."

This information confirms the actual place that Sayyid occupied among these figures in jihadist work (in its broad sense), as well as the prominent revolutionary feature of Sayyid's thought that inspired them and constituted a model to be followed, a feature that Shikaki alerted and benefited from in the revolutionary formulation of Islamic thought. Abu Musab al-Suri was therefore accurate when he decided that Sayyida had laid the intellectual foundations for the jihadist project, as we explained in the previous article.

The book of shadows here is a reference in terms of that it represented the full and comprehensive formulation of the kinetic approach based on the Qur'anic reference text, which is the "right interpretation" according to Saleh secret, and the book "Milestones in the Road", which formed something like a practical curriculum drawn from the shadows with additions and modifications, and thanks to this theorizing formed the intellectual structure when Azzam said that Sida directed him intellectually, or that he occupied the advanced position after al-Banna in the kinetic intellectual construction as Abu Qatada said, and that the master filled the void The intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and laid the foundations of the kinetic and jihadist approach on the other hand, and then his intellectual position was advanced after al-Banna, according to Abu Qatada.

This guidance given by Sayed Lazam, the emotion he generated in Zawahiri, and the revolutionary that inspired Shikaki all illustrate the depth of the impact that Sayed left on the "jihadist project" in both parts: the conflict with the West and the superiority of Islam, and the conflict with the existing regimes that formed the basis of ignorance and an obstacle to governance.

Saleh quoted secretly – in his "Message of Faith" written in 1973 – from Sayyid that the laws of governance and legislation are "the first imposition, because they are the basis of monotheism and polytheism in this era," and then concluded by saying: "All regimes – as well as all Islamic countries that have adopted curricula, systems and legislation other than the Qur'an and Sunnah – have disbelieved in God and have taken themselves as gods and lords; Abu Qatada had also explained that the first basis for the legitimacy of the work of the "Salafi jihadist" movements is that Dar al-Islam "has turned into the house of Kafr Warda, because it was ruled by apostates, and because infidelity has extended its authority over it through its rulings and constitutions," and that it is the "victorious sect," and this is the same content of what we find in Qutb's books.

The central idea on which the book of Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982), the author of the prominent role in the assassination of Sadat, is to start the jihad of infidel regimes, and that "the rulings that are superior to Muslims today are the rulings of infidelity," as he said in the book "The Absent Obligation" written in 1981, in which he talked about the infidelity and jihad of regimes, the separation of society, and "calling people to Islam" and other things that we find in Sayyid. The same is found in the publications of the Egyptian "Islamic Group" regarding jihad, Sharia arbitration and confrontation with regimes, and so we find in the group of atonement and migration founded by Shukri Mustafa, who was said to have been close to Sayed in prison, and the book "Preachers not Judges" signed in the name of Hassan al-Hudaybi (d. 1973) came to respond to his ideas and his group, all of which supports the statement of Abu Musab al-Suri in attributing credit to Sayyid in laying the intellectual foundations of the jihadist project.

The master and legacy of contemporary jihad in the writings of Western researchers

A number of Western scholars have been aware of this impact that Syed has had on the jihadist project, including Olivier Roy, John Esposito, Paul Berman, Bruce Lawrence and others. Olivier Roy says: "This extremism in the exploitation of jihad is new, as it goes back to Sayyid Qutb and to the Egyptian groups in the seventies to which Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj belonged, who considered jihad an obligation of faith." After John Esposito lists three "godfathers" of armed jihad – Hassan al-Banna, Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi, and Sayyid Qutb – Sayyid is considered the main figure in the development of armed jihad, and that his defense of combat jihad influenced large numbers of those who later turned to violence, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operatives, although none of these three godfathers practiced violence himself.

Paul Berman picked up that Sayyida rejected the secular idea of separating the sacred from the mundane or the profane, and that it must be fought with a jihad that would restore everything to the rule of God, and then concludes that Osama bin Laden was Sayyid's intellectual disciple. Bruce Lawrence also noted that modern jihadists frequently quoted Sayyid: "Sayyid Qutb is the ideologue he is often cited for Islamic militancy or fundamentalism."

Sayyid therefore laid the intellectual foundations of the jihadist project, and contributed significantly to shaping the thought and conscience of some ideologues of violent groups, as their project was based on the main ideas formulated by Sayyid in the shadows, although they differed from him in some of their details. Because of the clarity of Sayyid's ideas and the clarity of their impact, they were recognized by the leaders of the so-called jihadist project and confirmed by their quotations about him and their conformity with his ideas, and pushing them to the maximum, as realized by a number of Eastern and Western scholars. This conclusion does not affect the varying degrees of those affected by Sayed's thought, because the influence varies in its forms, and is not subject - only - to the connotations of the text, but must interact with a number of factors that join the text, and this does not mean that Sayed's text did not carry those contents, but rather its coherent and clear intellectual structure, which formed what was called the kinetic approach, and God knows best.