Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary and a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Raised in the village of Musha in Upper Egypt, he worked as a teacher and literary critic and spent 1948 to 1950 in the United States, whose society he came to see as materialistic. He joined the Brotherhood in the early 1950s and was jailed after an alleged plot to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954; in prison, where he was tortured, he wrote the 30-volume Quran commentary In the Shade of the Qur'an and the manifesto Milestones. He was executed by hanging on 29 August 1966. His ideas on Jahiliyya have highly influenced Islamist and jihadist movements.