Sayyid Qutb

Brotherhood members assassinated Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Nakrashi in 1948 and tried to kill Egyptian President Nasser in 1954.

And the writings of Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb later supplied the theological framework for both al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The theological framework.

Let's say that just again.

It calls me as many moments in this piece on your earlier work to recall how weirdly Western-oriented some of these key jihadi maestros are.

You know, Sayyid Qutb went to study in America.

Of course, he ended up hating it, but then he famously wrote into his main text a sort of almost incel tract that he was both full of loathing and sort of almost... desire for American women.

It's mad.

In the piece, I make the case, and I stand by it, that Syria is effectively the first country to be conquered by the base, Ahmad al-Shahra's leadership of Syria.

So it's more the way in which the argument or part of the core claim in the paper is that modern Islamism, the way in which it's developed is around its hostility to the idea of state sovereignty.

And Sayyid Qutb was instrumental in this because he claimed to, or he aimed to demolish the legitimacy of the post-war nationalist regimes in the Arab world by claiming that nationalism was idolatrous.

And the effort to build these independent nation states was itself a form of political idolatry that took away from morality to sharia, to God's revealed law.

It's not what they're telling you.

And so many of you stay home and you go to Qutb after Qutb and you pray five times a day and you think you're a good Muslim, bro? There's a lot more to Islam than praying five times a day.

Guess what? That doesn't make you righteous or virtuous.

It's what you do besides those actions that are deemed non-negotiable with the Creator.

Okay, so the Muslim Brotherhood basically has been a group that was set up by effectively Islamic philosophers who believed that there was a future clash between Western values and Islamic tradition because if people didn't follow the purity of Islam in their voice and in their view, the purity of Islam being Sharia law and the implementation of that in every facet of society, both politically, structurally and religiously, then Islam would be weak and would fold under Western colonialism and under Western influence.

So we have people like Sayyid Qutb and others over time coming up with these ideas that actually we can't get on together.

We, the Western Muslims, can't get on.

There will be a clash.

This has been a violent extremist group in, in, in Egypt for a very long time.

Uh, Sayyid Qutb, the, the, in-

And beyond

...

Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of radical Islamic terrorism, was one of the foremost thinkers in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egyptian, uh, Islamic Jihad, uh, Al-Zawahiri was one of the leaders of, of, of that group.

And you can [laughs] very quickly go from Sayyid Qutb to Al-Zawahiri to Osama Bin Laden.

So, like, people actually needed to know-