http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-muslim-brotherhood-part-iv-sayyid-qutb
Part I – A Brief History of the Muslim Brotherhood (Can be found by clicking here)
Part II – The Muslim Brotherhood – Haj Amin al-Husseini (Can be found by clicking here)
Part III – The Muslim Brotherhood – Hitler’s Imam
If one wishes to understand the origins, ideology and goals of the modern-day Muslim Brotherhood, one must study the life and works of Egyptian theorist and writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). His writings remain enormously-influential within the Ikhwan and the Pan-Islamic movement generally, and are also vitally-important to any informed understanding of such figures as Osama bin-Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaki and groups such as al-Qaeda. Indeed, Qutb’s name has entered the lexicon of the Muslim world; those who follow his ideology and teachings are referred to as “Qutbists” or simply Qutbi. Despite his importance to Sunni Islam, Qutb is relatively unknown in the non-Islamic world.
Qutb was born in 1906 in the rural village of Musha, Egypt. His father was a well-known political activist and land owner. As a teenager, Sayyid was a quiet and artistic young man; he displayed few if any outward indications of the ideologue he was later to become.
After completing studies in Cairo at Dar al-‘Ulum in 1933, he took a post as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During the 1930s, he wrote extensively, trying his hand as a novelist and literary critic. In 1939, he accepted a bureaucratic post in the Ministry of Education, while continuing to write and move within Egyptian artistic and literary circles. In 1948, Qutb traveled to the United States intent upon studying educational administration; during a two-year period abroad, Qutb studied at Woodrow Wilson Teacher’s College in Washington, D.C., at Stanford University in southern California, and at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado. He traveled widely elsewhere in the United States during this period.
Upon his return to Egypt in 1950, Qutb resigned his civil service position, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and quickly emerged as one of its senior leaders. He became the editor-in-chief of the journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, and also took an active role in the propaganda section of the organization. Qutb’s sojourn abroad marked a watershed in his life; he returned to Egypt a very different man than the one who had left two years before. He had departed an unassuming and diffident man; he returned a hardened Islamic ideologue and firebrand. What had so changed him?
Shortly after his return to Cairo, Qutb wrote an impassioned article entitled “The America I Have Seen,” which provided an answer. A revealing window into his perceptions and thoughts upon the U.S. and the modern world generally, this work revealed the extent of his transformation. Qutb was fiercely critical of what he viewed as the decadence and moral degradation of Americans. He condemned everything from the individual freedoms of U.S. citizens to their materialism to what he believed to be the wanton and highly-sexualized behavior of American women. He accused his former hosts of having barbaric tastes in music and the arts, and abhorred the “animalistic mixing” of the sexes in churches and other public places. He decried the “spiritual degeneracy” of common Americans, and lamented their enjoyment of “primitive” sports such as boxing and football. His complaints even extended to the quality of the haircuts he received.