From Austin Cline,
Your Guide to Agnosticism / Atheism.
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An important conerstone of Sayyid Qutb‘s work was his use of the Islamic concept of jahiliyya. This term is used in Islam to characterize the days before Muhammad's revelation, and before him it primarily just meant "ignorance" (of Islam). But after him, it also acquired more explicitily the concept of "barbarism" (due to a lack of Islamic principles):

...jahiliyya... takes the form of claiming the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life that rests with me, without regard to what God has prescribed.

For fundamentalists, one of the primarily religious values is the sovereignty of God: God created everything and has absolute rights to it all. But secular society violates that sovereignty by creating new rules which override the wishes of God. According to Qutb, any non-Muslim society qualifies as jahiliyya because Allah is not sovereign - instead, men and their laws are sovereign, replacing Allah in his rightful place.

By expanding the use of this term to include even his own contemporary society, Qutb neatly gave an Islamic justification to revolution and sedition. For Qutb, this revolution was jihad, but he didn't mean it simply in a violent manner. For him, jihad meant the entire process of first, spiritual maturation of individuals and, later, battle against a repressive regime:

How must the Islamic resurrection begin? A vanguard must resolve to set it in motion in the midst of jahiliyya that now reigns over the entire earth. That vanguard must be able to decide when to withdraw from and when to seek contact with the jahiliyya that surrounds it.

Qutb thus brought about a new way for modern Muslims, dissatisfied with their condition, to look at society. He provided an ideological framework in which they could use principles of Islam, rather than Western categories like capitlaism, socialism, democracy, etc., in order to fight against an unjust government.

This framework later bore fruit when President Sadat was assassinated in 1981. The group responsible was Jama'at al-Jihad ("Society of Struggle"), started and run by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who felt that the organization had become too passive. He wrote a short book called called "The Neglected Obligation" (al-Farida al-Gha'ibah), which relied heavily on Qutb's ideas.

Like Qutb, Faraj argued that acceptance of a government was only possible and legitimate when that government fully implemented shari'a, or Islamic law. Contemporary Egypt had not done that, and was thus characterized as suffering from jahiliyya. Faraj makes his case that jihad is not only the "negelected obligation" of Muslims, but in fact one of their most important duties.

Why? Because the lack of jihad is responsible for the current situation of Muslims in the world. Their social, economic and political woes are due to the fact that they have forgotten what it means to be Muslims, and as well as how to fight against the infidels. Words and preaching won't be enough, because only force and violence can destroy "idols."

A member of this group, 24-year-old artillery lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawki al-Islambuli, and four other members shot Sadat while he was reviewing a military parade. At the time, al-Islambuli shouted "I have killed Pharoh," a reference to the fact that they considered Sadat a non-Muslim leader. During his trial, he said "I am guilty of killing the unbeliever and I am proud of it."

The five men were all executed, but today, Muhammad al-Islambuli, the brother of President Sadat's assassin, has been living in Afghanistan and working with Osama bin Laden. Another member of that group was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is today Osama bin Laden's second-in-command. But al-Zawahiri only spent three years in prison after he was convicted and has only become more radical in his views.

« Qutb‘s Profile and Biography | Islamic Extremism »