For every attempt to impose hegemony there is always an attempt at counter-hegemony. As part two will attest, ideologies of control gave way to ideologies of revolt as counter-intellectuals formed their own version of acceptable wisdom in order to challenge the dominant ideology. In the case of the Middle East that would mainly be in the form of Islam since it was the ideological current pushed by the ruling class, for the counter-intellectual class, they used Islam to claim that the ruling class has betrayed its principles as similar to other activists around the world who would point to the rhetoric of the current class and amplify the contradictory nature of their said rhetoric in order to build opposition (Nilsen and Cox 2014: 71). In the
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His ideology was formulated in two major works such as In the Shadow of the Qur’an and his shorter Signposts along the Road which many compared to the pamphlet by the Russian Revolutionary and first Soviet ruler Vladimir Lenin titled, What is to be Done? (1969). I won’t go into too much detail on Qutb here since it would be covered in the chapter, but in essence, his ideology can be summed up as being a conflict between hakimiyya (wisdom) and jahhiliyya (ignorance) in which much of the Muslim World is in the latter at the expense of the former, in his formulation, jahhiliyya is the state in which the ruling regime does much to contravene the sharia and reduce the space for the possibility of preaching, as a result the state loses its legitimacy and must be overthrown. However, the state still has powerful links in society making them hard to dislodge, so he suggests that they form a vanguard in order to strike at the non-believers and to mobilize the masses to the cause which at times include terrorism which was used by many of the modern militants today. Though in the theological sense, his formula for jihad would be at odds with mainstream Islamic thought which contends that only the ruler can legitimately call for jihad, a notion pushed by clerics like bin-Baz, but Sayyid Qutb would look to alternative theologians that would have a different view, which would be the
His ideology was formulated in two major works such as In the Shadow of the Qur’an and his shorter Signposts along the Road which many compared to the pamphlet by the Russian Revolutionary and first Soviet ruler Vladimir Lenin titled, What is to be Done? (1969). I won’t go into too much detail on Qutb here since it would be covered in the chapter, but in essence, his ideology can be summed up as being a conflict between hakimiyya (wisdom) and jahhiliyya (ignorance) in which much of the Muslim World is in the latter at the expense of the former, in his formulation, jahhiliyya is the state in which the ruling regime does much to contravene the sharia and reduce the space for the possibility of preaching, as a result the state loses its legitimacy and must be overthrown. However, the state still has powerful links in society making them hard to dislodge, so he suggests that they form a vanguard in order to strike at the non-believers and to mobilize the masses to the cause which at times include terrorism which was used by many of the modern militants today. Though in the theological sense, his formula for jihad would be at odds with mainstream Islamic thought which contends that only the ruler can legitimately call for jihad, a notion pushed by clerics like bin-Baz, but Sayyid Qutb would look to alternative theologians that would have a different view, which would be the