Sayyid Qutb in Prison

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian writer and literary critic who, from the early 1950s, became a leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the movement's break with Nasser's government, he was arrested, tortured and imprisoned for most of his last decade, and it was in prison that he wrote the works for which he is known: a long commentary on the Qur'an, In the Shade of the Qur'an, and, above all, the short and radical book Ma'alim fi al-Tariq, Milestones, which argued that modern societies, including those calling themselves Muslim, had fallen into a new jahiliyya, a state of ignorance like that before Islam, and called for a committed vanguard to restore the sovereignty of God in human affairs. Briefly released and then re-arrested, he was tried by the regime and executed by hanging in 1966. After his death Qutb became one of the most influential and most fiercely contested figures in modern Islamic thought: regarded by some as a martyr and a reviver of the faith, and held by others, including many Sunni scholars who wrote against his ideas, as responsible for concepts later taken up by violent radical movements. The assessment of his thought is deeply divisive and is not the work of this scene, which records only the setting of his last years. This scene depicts a bare prison cell in Cairo in 1966, with the notebook, the barred window and the warder's keys, the prison in which a condemned writer composed words that would long outlive him.