Sayyid Qutb on the 60th anniversary of his martyrdom (I): and 60 years later Milestones is still with us

Sixty years have passed since the martyrdom of Sayyid Qutb. When he walked to the gallows on 29 August 1966, he was 59 years old. Today the time that has passed since his death has almost reached the whole of the life he lived. But the lives of people who sacrificed their lives in loyalty and fidelity to the right and the truth do not end with their biological lifespans. They go on living through what they wrote and said, the paths they opened, the loyalty they awakened in their friends and the reaction they provoked in their enemies.

What took place on the day before his martyrdom forms a striking final scene of the relationship between his thought and his life. According to his sister Hamida Qutb, the regime had shown him one last way out. It was conveyed to him that he could be saved from execution if he admitted that the movement he was alleged to lead was connected to a foreign center. Qutb very plainly rejected this offer of a "confession that would involve lying and save his life": had such a relationship truly existed, no power on earth could have stopped him from saying so; but he would not say something that had not happened in order to save his life. "I will never lie," he said.

In accounts of his last days it is likewise related that he was asked to beg Abdel Nasser's pardon, to which Qutb gave this famous reply: "Why should I ask for pardon? If I have been rightly sentenced, I accept the judgment of the truth; if I have been sentenced wrongfully, I have too much honor to ask pardon of falsehood." And then these words, which have become legendary: "This index finger, which bears witness to God's oneness in prayer, refuses to write a single letter approving the rule of a tyrant (taghut)."

Thus, in the last scene of his life, he in effect embodied the freedom he had depicted in Milestones (Ma'alim fi al-Tariq, "Signposts on the Road") on the basis of the Qur'an. For Qutb, freedom was not a human being's being able to do whatever he wants, but his never falling into a position of servitude before anyone other than God. This was exactly what he said earlier when he wrote, "My brother, you are free even behind the bars, even if you are put in these chains. If you rely on God, what can the tricks of a servant do to you?" The dungeon could imprison a person, but it could not seize the will of the person who held fast to God. Ten years ago, in the 50th year of his martyrdom, we also drew attention to the relation of this stance of Qutb's to his strong political will and to his understanding that never gives up, under any condition, the responsibility of changing the world.

Ten years later, that is, now in the 60th year of his martyrdom, Qutb's most debated book is still Milestones. This book, which has been translated into many languages of the world since it was written and, read by millions, has been and still is inspiring in the construction of the Islamic subject, has of course not been read by everyone in the same way. Indeed, some clichés that have formed about the book have in places gotten in front of the book itself. Readings made through superficial political instrumentalizations of the concepts of jahiliyya, hakimiyya and jihad have determined positive or negative attitudes toward the book. Yet condemning a work by what its most superficial or worst readers do is a facile method developed for not reading that work.

Milestones is not an angry political pamphlet standing at the edge of Qutb's thought. It is, to a large extent, the distilled essence of the thought formed throughout Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an). It is a road map in which Qutb this time places before the Muslim setting out on the road the signs he saw in the shade of the Qur'an. For this reason, the book's essential concern is neither a model of the state nor the seizure of power. The essential concern is the construction of the Muslim subject.

It is no coincidence that the book begins with "the unique Qur'anic generation." Qutb does not explain the success of the first Muslim generation by any racial, cultural or historical superiority of the Arabs. Their difference lies in the source from which they drew nourishment and in the relationship they established with that source. They read the Qur'an not to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, to enrich their culture or to acquire knowledge to use in debates, but asking, "What does it want from me today?" For them the Qur'an was, before being an object of knowledge, an address that rebuilt their lives.

Is it possible for the idea here to be surpassed, not after 60 years, but even after 600 years? Has the need of Muslims to make the Qur'an their most basic source of reference, inspiration and motivation disappeared? In our age, in which knowledge has multiplied to an unprecedented degree but the power to transform the human being has diminished to the same degree, this question is perhaps even more current than sixty years ago.

The same holds for Qutb's critique of racism and his idea of Muslim identity. Qutb's ummah stands against all claims of superiority built on blood, lineage, color, land and tribe. He regards people's producing an ideology of superiority from biological or geographical traits they did not choose as one of the manifestations of jahiliyya. In a day when racism, xenophobia and ethnic nationalisms are rising again in every corner of the world, that is, when jahiliyya, in his description, has become more popular and more adopted as identity than ever, it is destined that Milestones will be rediscovered again and again as the most effective answer given to this jahiliyya and be read so as to hit the mark.

But perhaps the book's strongest side is its will to construct the Muslim subject who will make history. Qutb did not emerge from Nasser's dungeons having given up hope in politics. On the contrary, he arrived at the idea of a subject strong enough to dare to start everything anew. What he tried to realize was not applying a closed package of sharia to a state apparatus to be seized, but forming the community that would constitute the subject of Islamic politics.

Jihad is the natural dimension of this existence. But to reduce jihad in Qutb to war alone is to miss his idea of movement. Jihad is the continuity of living by bearing witness to the truth, of freeing human beings from servitude to human beings, and of struggling against the obstacles encountered in this cause. Moreover, this struggle is not a romantic activism. The fiqh of movement he developed in Zilal, especially through Surah Yusuf, rests on a serious strategic reason that takes into account power, time, conditions, alliances and means. As the road is walked, conditions change; the rulings of the road also become clear within the reality of life.

The concept of jahiliyya, too, must be understood within this wholeness. Jahiliyya is not merely an epithet used to condemn others but a distinction that makes the claim to truth possible. It is the name of the boundary between truth and falsehood, between servitude to God and servitude to human beings. When this distinction is abandoned, Islam can be reduced, within the existing world, to a harmless and comfortable cultural identity. Those who find this conceptualization too much for Qutb and consider him radical meet it with a childish astonishment, paying no attention at all to the fact that nearly everyone, according to their own claim to truth, classifies all people in some way. All philosophers and religious views that have a claim to truth in fact make this distinction. Is the heedlessness-forgetting of Being that Heidegger attributes to all contemporary humanity a small imputation of jahiliyya, for example? Or what Marx did in his own way, or the pessimism Derrida put forth that truth can never be here and now?

Perhaps the ease of saying that Milestones has been "surpassed" lies right here. As one moves away from the obligations that Islamic existence requires and settles into comfortable lives, the claim to change the world may seem too radical, the claim to truth too sharp, the idea of the ummah too idealistic, and jihad too laborious.

Yet what has been surpassed is not the signposts of the road, but perhaps the will to follow them. This will has been manifested today most strikingly in Gaza. The jihad, patience, endurance, praise (hamd) and gratitude (shukr) that the people of Gaza display, living intertwined with the Qur'an, are an embodied example of precisely the life Qutb depicted in In the Shade of the Qur'an. The correctness and truth of this will, which he did not hesitate to display in his own personal life, illuminate the whole world today. While the fact that, with the whole world under occupation or captive, only Gaza in this condition is free enlivens hearts devoted to freedom all over the world today, they also form a living representation of what Qutb wrote.

Thus, sixty years later, a new chapter is opening for reading and understanding Qutb in his own truth, away also from slogans and superficial readings.