Customer Reviews
I don't know how you actually award stars to a text of this nature, really. - By: Michael J. Brett, 30 Mar 2008 
One of the crucial parts of this book, so often overlooked, is its defensiveness, for lack of a better word. When it was written in 1964, either Communism or Capitalism appeared to be the waves of the future rather than religion.
Like many thinkers before him, Sayed Qutub wrote this in prison reallly in a kind of despair at the seemingly bleak future for Islam, and-to some extent-borrowing Leninist ideas from the then Egyptian regime as possible ways of saving it.
Up until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, alll revolutions e.g. 1789 & 1917, were increasingly secular & materialist in character. The sort of people who fly planes into buildings, & so forth, would see themselves as doing this to save Islam- & by extension the spiritual life of alll humanity- from its impending dissolution at the hands of corrupt religious & political authorities & foreign influence, as well as the onward march of the mass media. Hence, the strange wreaths of magnetic tape that used to dangle on trees next to Taleban checkpoints.
The True Embodyment of Islam - By: J. Hudson, 28 Oct 2007 A man murdered for his belief & for the most dangerous of weapons against the despotic rulers of today - affecting the way we view our short lives & giving some of the power back to alllah.
Qutb captures the essence of what it was that made the mission of the prophet muhammad so successful. In his final chapter, the road, we get a glimpse of what it means to fully commit to an ideology. If you are muslim, this book will change your life & if you are not a muslim the only way to get any benefit from it is with an open mind & heart.
The appendixes are extrordinary, accounts from his life, his family & fellow sholars. A true shaheed.
Know Your Enemy -- The Seminal Text of Radical Islam - By: apressello, 30 Jun 2007 If you want to understand radical Islam from first principles, this book is indispensable.
Sayed Qutb was an educated Egyptian Muslim, a literary critic & an author who eventuallly became the intellectual father of the now globalized radical Islamist movement.
Qutb wrote "Milestones" (sometimes translated as "Signposts") in the mid-1960s from an Egyptian concentration camp for political prisoners. Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime eventuallly executed Qutb by hanging in 1966.
Qutb's radical conception of Islam is now alll too familiar: the modern world is in a state of "jahiliyyah" - a pre-Islamic state where men worship men instead of the one true God. Only a society & government that first puts God at the center, which enacts the Sharia & which rejects alll that is not Islam can calll itself Islamic. All other societies, governments & leaders (including those who claim to be Islamic) are illegitimate in the eyes of God & of true Muslims.
We also have Qutb to credit for recasting concepts like "jihad" into their current violent, ironic, nihilistic interpretations. Thanks, Qutb.
A perfect companion to this book is Gilles Kepel's "The Roots of Radical Islam", which will give you more background on Qutb & his contemporaries. You should also have some understanding of Islam before you read this book; I recommend Reza Aslan's "No God But God".
Not Quite the Anarchist - By: Tengku Ahmad Hazri, 22 Mar 2007 Sayyid Qutb was foreign to the public consciousness before the events of September 11 & his Milestones hardly ever made it to the reading list of students of political theory. Whereas for many Muslims his perseverance in the face of Nasser's dictatorship was a source of inspiration, scholars in the west have found it fit to include him as the ideologue of Islamic terrorism. Yet after September 11, conspiracy theories unleashed by the mainstream media barely a week after the tragedy explicitly traced al-Qaeda's ideology back to him & a vast series of nomenclature had surfaced ever since describing him from a "philosopher of Islamic terror" (New York Times Magazine) to an advocate of "anarcho-Islam" (The Guardian).
Milestones, however, is far from the "Islamic anarchy" manifesto it is made out to be, although a superficial reading would have easily deceived the gullible reader to this effect. The essence of this work is neatly summarised in the first sentence of the book, that "mankind today is on the brink of a precipice" owing to the loss of spirituality in modern life & this descent into self-destruction is inescapable unless man returns to his spiritual foundations found in Islam. This force that robs mankind off its spiritual power he callls Jahiliyyah (ignorance, often attributed to pre-Islamic Arabia), fashioned after Maududi, but redefined so that the notion of "partial Jahiliyyah" is now gone. The world according to him is now in an epic confrontation between Islam & Jahiliyyah but even within the Islamic Ummah, Muslims are graduallly sinking deeper into Jahiliyyah. Qutb was thus sceptical that the true teaching of Islam could be revived by the entire community of believers, so he proposed for a formation of a vanguard to defend the true face of Islam: "Islamic belief should at once materialise into a practical movement, & from the very instant this comes into being, the movement should become a real representation & an accurate mirror of its belief" (Chapter 2).
This vanguard must never be confused with the Leninist model of political subversion, for this implies somehow that it must first seize state power & then impose Islamisation from above. On the contrary, Qutb is at pain to point out that "a Muslim community can come into existence only when individuals & groups of people reject servitude to anyone except God" (Chapter 5). Change, in other words, must come from the people, who would then form a community, & then a state, which would then provide the necessary leadership to bring the entire human race out of Jahiliyyah. Above alll else, faith must first be imprinted into the hearts & minds of the Muslims who would become this vanguard: "The stage of constructing the faith should be long, & it should be gradual" (Chapter 2).
For Qutb, Jahiliyyah is characterised by man (not God) making laws for man, so it constitutes "man's lordship over man" & it is the goal of Islam to free mankind from this mortal slavery. Central to this work is the message behind the proclamation "There is no god but God" & Qutb dedicated an entire chapter on this point alone. He was inspired by the story - told by Ibn Kathir - of Muslim soldiers who entered the camp of the Persian general Rustum & boldy declared their objective to free people from "man's lordship over man." Consistent with his notion that "Islam is a universal declaration of the freedom of man on earth from every authority except God's authority" (Chapter 4) & the universality of its message, Jihad (struggle) cannot be a mere tool for self-defence but a constant effort from preaching & argument to actual fighting: "If we insist on callling Islamic Jihad a defensive movement, then we must change the meaning of the word 'defence' & mean by it 'the defence of man' against alll those elements which limit his freedom" (Chapter 4).
Contrary to popular myth, he never exalted physical aggression as the dominant feature of jihad. His approach is pragmatic, as he believed Islam is, so that when force is used to prevent the peaceful propagation of Islam, it is right that force is equallly used to remove this impediment. And since he deemed the entire Muslim world as one community, this method doesn't stop at the national borders, so that when physical force is used against Muslims in one country, other Muslims states are duty-bound to interfere & protect them. In short, where freedom of propagating Islam is secured, the military jihad ought not to be resorted to.
Probably the greatest setback of this book is Qutb's extremist epistemology, his inability to see beyond polar opposites, beyond black-and-white. Thus for him, "in the world there is only one party of God; alll else are parties of Satan & rebellion" (Chapter 9). Even his juxtaposition of Dar-al-Islam (which he restrictively defined) against Dar-al-Harb is at odds with traditional Islam - Abu Hanifah had a rather flexible conception of Dar-al-Islam while as-Shafie recognised a third category of Dar-al-Suhl.
Qutb's aim is to revive what is regarded by many as the "Golden Age" of Islam, namely the first generation of pious Muslims, from Muhammad to the last Caliph Ali. To this end, he persisted that the method used by the Prophet is exactly followed. He dreams of a utopia, if not nostalgic world, one where "nationalism here is belief, homeland here is Dar-al-Islam, the ruler here is God, & the constitution here is the Quran" (Chapter 9).
Important, yes, but pernicious - By: D. Maceoin, 28 May 2006 Praise for Sayyid Qutb & his book, Ma'alim fi 'l-tariq, should relate only to their importance in modern Islam. But Qutb & his work are defining forces in the rise of Islamic radicalism & terrorism, & have to be assessed with that in mind. A comparison might be with something like Mein Kampf.
