The Arabs: A History

However much Qutb disapproved of Western imperial powers, his first target was always the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, and Nasser’s government in particular. In his exegesis of the Qur’anic verses on the “Makers of the Pit,” Qutb draws a thinly veiled allegory of the struggle between the Muslim Brothers and the Free Officers. In the Qur’anic story, a community of Believers was condemned for their faith and burned alive by tyrants who gathered to watch their righteous victims die. “Doomed were the makers of the pit,” the Qur’an relates (85:1–16). In Qutb’s commentary, the persecutors—“arrogant, mischievous, criminal and degraded people”—took sadistic pleasure in witnessing the pain of the martyrs. “And when some young man or woman, some child or old man from among these righteous Believers was thrown in to the fire,? Qutb wrote, ?their diabolical pleasure would reach a new height, and shouts of mad joy would escape their lips at the sight of blood and pieces of flesh??graphic scenes absent from the Qur?anic tale, but perhaps inspired by Qutb?s experiences, and those of his fellow Muslim Brothers, at the hands of their torturers in prison. ?The struggle between the Believers and their enemies,? he concluded, was essentially ?a struggle between beliefs?either unbelief or faith, either Jahiliyya or Islam.? Qutb?s message was clear: the government of Egypt was incompatible with his vision of an Islamic state. One would have to go. Qutb was released from prison in 1964, the year Milestones was published. His standing enhanced by his prison writings, he quickly reestablished contact with comrades from the ba

The Islamist challenge spread from Egypt to Syria in the 1960s. The influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb’s radical critique of secular government, combined to create a revolutionary Islamic movement bent on the overthrow of Syria’s praetorian republic. The conflict took Syria to the brink of civil war and claimed tens of thousands of lives before reaching its brutal climax in the Syrian town of Hama. The founder of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa al-Siba‘i (1915–1964), was himself a native of Hama. He studied in Egypt in the 1930s, where he came under the influence of Hasan al-Ba