“Shadows” of Sayyid Qutb.. Will the Brotherhood’s “Shamhorosh” manage to “bring the beloved”?
It seems that the bond of cordiality between the Arab peoples and the terrorist Brotherhood has been broken, and the organization has lost the “throne of power”, the darling for which it has been searching for a long time, it has been tested in different environments and has shown its failure.
With the withdrawal of the peoples of the Middle East from the group and the departure of its great thinkers, the group needs “work” in the kinetic sense, or perhaps in the sense used in charlatan literature, so that a new generation of its “charlatans” can survive in the circumstances that the group may it has not known throughout its history since it was founded in the city of Ismailia, east of the Egyptian capital, in the late 1920s.
A few days ago, Issam Talima, one of Qutb’s students, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, reprinted the first edition of Sayyid Qutb’s book “In the Shades of the Noble Qur’an”.
Qutb, who was executed in Egypt in the 1960s, is considered the foremost theoretician of Takfiri terrorism, and the godfather of brutal organizations from Al Qaeda to ISIS.
Many leaders and cadres of the Brotherhood rebelled after this step and considered it a transgression against the writer who abandoned what he had written in the first edition of Shadows, revised and added to it until it reached its present state in what was described as a summary of his thoughts on which he later a new generation of takfir was founded.
The Brotherhood raised coy questions about the real motive behind reproducing “The Shadow” in old clothes, so what is the wisdom of changing the nature of the book, with its crystal clear ideas that tend to accuse societies and rulers of redeeming their blood?
Is it a step within the new intellectual project that began in the “Kuala Lumpur Forum” to reproduce the old shadows within the project to improve the Brotherhood’s mental image by presenting an unedited version of a book accused of containing Takfirist ideas? Is it an attempt to obfuscate the research literature within a cunning plan?
Or is what Talimah has done just an individual step through which he seeks a role in the group’s theoretical journey to take the place of his teacher Al-Qaradawi after his departure and the retirement of Muhammad Ahmed Al-Rashed after he was burned by disputes between dissident fronts and the inability of the Brotherhood to invokes Saeed Hawa’s books after announcing his departure a few years ago. The group criticized her and criticized her ideas. Fathi Yakan, author of the book “False on the Path of Da’wa” wrote after he left the call and was marked by conflict and split by the group.
It is certain that the fragmented group needs a new writer to carry out the task of al-Ghazali in the seventies and Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the eighties and later, and their intellectual framework could not be completed without a foundation. what the group was based on, either in what was presented by the founder Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb or Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi, but these names and ideas have worn out due to their frequent criticism and reliance on them in the stages of improving the Brotherhood’s mental image and re-wearing the mask of peacefulness became an impossible task, and what made the dilemma difficult was that they reused the ideas of Sayyid Qutb in the preparation phase for the “Rabaa al-Adawiya sit” east of Cairo during their power struggle in 2013 and took up arms against national military institutions.
And it was necessary to get out of the impasse, not by excluding Qutb’s ideas, nor by disavowing his person, but by thinking about bringing back the writer and writer and bringing back the shadows without rule and ignorance and without the jurisprudence of going from a against society and hostility towards everyone, at least temporarily and gradually while deception does not deceive people and does not do marketing. Kutba to the writer, after which it is possible to return the real Kutba and the real shadows produced to us by wild generations. who kill and shed blood based on the ideas of Qutb, Al-Banna and the Brotherhood.
Presenting the creation of the book “In the Shadows of the Qur’an”, following the main stations through which the writer Sayyid Qutb himself went, he reveals to us the secret of renewing the shadows in his old dress before revision.
First stop.. “Shamhorosh”
The owner of the shadows was born on October 9, 1906 in the village of Musha, Assiut province, south of Cairo, to a father married to two wives.
His mother was his second wife, and she forced her son Kutba, whose father squandered his property, not to socialize with his peers, so he grew up in isolation that left a mark on himself.
But one day he bought a book used by charlatans to write spells and charms that simple people attach themselves to in order to realize their hopes of marriage, love and wealth, so at that time he knew how to flirt with the dreams of simple people and usurp his place in their society even if he was on the path of a charlatan.
Qutb fell in love with one of the girls who used his services, and after completing elementary school in 1918, he married her and moved to Cairo.
Second station.. melting in Acada
When he moved to Cairo, Qutb lived in the house of his uncle Ahmed Al-Moushi, in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood of eastern Cairo, and was a friend of the writer Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad.
Qutb found in Akkad what he needed to compensate for his father’s absence and open the door for him to work in the press, as he published his poems in the publications Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, Kawkab Al-Sharq, Al-Wadi and Al- Musawwar His personal traits began to emerge as a sharp-tongued writer who was sharp in his judgments.
Qutb published a research entitled “Artistic Images in the Qur’an”, which attracted the attention of the cultural community, and he also held a lecture entitled “The Poet’s Life Mission and Poetry of the Current Generation”, which he dedicated his presence to the scene at that time.
After graduating, Qutb worked as a teacher in the Ministry of Education at the Daoudia School in Cairo in 1933, during which time he wrote the novel “Ashwak” as a personal experience after a one-sided love affair he went through.
Qutb was active as a journalist near his teaching job, and he published his first collection, “Unknown Beach”, in January 1935. The collection did not receive any response from the writers, not even from Akkad, which left a negative impact on him.
Third station… an earthquake
In 1945, Qutb published the book “Artistic Pictures in the Qur’an”, which he hoped would be introduced to him by his mentor, Al-Akkad, but the book’s success and the welcome he received caused his anger to subside until Al- Akkad read a book by Muhammad Khalifa Al-Tunisi, then another work by the writer Abdullah Al-Qasimi.
At that time Qutb apparently felt that his journey with Akkad was ending, after neglecting his works, if he supported him in the cultural milieu.
In January 1948, Sayyid Qutb turned to the Brotherhood, in which he found compensation for the loss of Akkad’s role in his life.
Qutb met Muhammad Helmy al-Manyawi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and owner of Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, who decided to finance the weekly “New Thought Magazine”, on the condition that Qutb would supervise, publish and write a book for him.
The fourth station.. America
In mid-1948, the Ministry of Education decided to send a mission to the US without specifying a specific period or a specific mission, and it was not a specific university, which made the whole thing suspicious.
While Qutb was in America, he printed his third Islamic book, “Social Justice in Islam” in 1949. Then he decided to completely abandon criticism and critical studies and distance himself from the world of literature and writers. a letter he sent to Anwar Al-Maadawi in March. In March 1950 he said to him: “Are you waiting for me to return to take my place in the field of literary criticism? It is enough to find you in the field of literary criticism to be sure in this field.
Qutb returned to Cairo on August 20, 1951 and took his job in the Ministry of Education, as an assistant observer, in the office of the then Minister of Education, Ismail Qabbani, and then wrote his fourth Islamic book, “Battle”. Islam and Capitalism”, and the year barely ended with the publication of his fifth book, “Peace in the World and Islam”.
Fifth station… shadow generator
At this stage, the Brotherhood was present in Egyptian society with tacit approval, to counter the communism and socialism that had spread in society after World War II.
The Brotherhood promoted Qutb’s writings, and he became a brilliant writer among them, before Saleh Ashmawy, a well-known leader of the Brotherhood, obtained a license for “Da’wah Magazine”, in which Qutb wrote some of his social and religious articles, and he also wrote in the newspaper Al-Liwaa, the newsletter of the National Party, and Socialist Magazine, the newsletter of the Socialist Party. Founded by Ahmed Amin.
In the magazine “Muslimoon”, which was founded by Saeed Ramadan, the husband of Hassan al-Banna’s daughter, he wrote a monthly article on the interpretation of the Holy Qur’an, and for it he chose the title “In the shadows of the Qur’an”. used, but did not reach the level of extremism.
After the July Revolution of 1952, the group allied with the Free Officers’ Organization during the crisis of what was known at the time as “democracy”. In this atmosphere, Qutb collected his articles in the magazine “Muslims” to publish his book In the Shadows of the Qur’an in its first form.
Sayyid Qutb officially and organizationally joined the ranks of the Brotherhood in 1953, after the revolution and during the intimate relationship between the July officers and the Brotherhood, and was entrusted with leading the educational work of the group, such as publishing the “Muslim Brotherhood”. “, giving speeches on Tuesdays at the main headquarters of the Brotherhood and holding Islamic lectures on special occasions. The various organizations organized by the Brotherhood, before the conflict between the group and the Egyptian authorities after the Mansheya incident, in which President Gamal Abdel Nasser was subjected to an assassination attempt, accused of it was orchestrated by the Brotherhood, and Qutb was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The sixth station.. the end of the shadows
During his imprisonment, Qutb revised the first edition of his book, Shadows, and focused on the meanings and directions of the movement and jihadism, and inserted extremist perceptions, in which he distinguished between communities of faith and societies of ignorance, and came out with his deadly theory that relies on the trilogy (ignorance of society – governance – change by force), which is the theory followed by all takfirists, militants and Islamic terrorists in the world
And from the pages of the shadow, an exciting book was published that most influenced the later formation of violent groups, namely the book “Turning points on the road”, which he published in 1964 after being released from prison on medical leave.
Sayyid Qutb’s ideas were formed in the shadow of prison, and his Islamic self shone even more, and his new concepts, which he legally rooted, became popular in prison and outside, until they became the first engine for all theorists of Islamic terrorism in the world . . “.
Before his execution in August 1966, Qutb wrote a series of key concepts that a new generation of extremists would invest in formulating a violent, exclusive project in which there was no room for others, embracing leadership as an alternative to dialogue.
