ABSTRACT
Qutb (1906-1966) had a noted writing career as a litterateur in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s and a very promising future ahead of him in this field. It was only in the late 1940s that he changed course and in the 1950s produced works, latterly in prison, projecting his vision of a reinvigorated Islamic society based on what he viewed as the perennial tenets of original Islam found in the Qur'an, and aiming to replace the secularized modern society he impugned as jahilf, that is, ignorant of God and His prescriptions for a morally good life. l
However, literary appreciation of the Qur'an was a constant factor throughout his adult life, even before he became an Islamic activist in the 1950s. As a literary critic, in his early writing career, he wrote two important and ground-breaking books expressing his literary appreciation of the Holy Book of Islam. The first was al-Ta!jwzr al-Fannf if al-Qur'an (1945) 2 and the second, Mashahid al-Qjyama fi al-Qyr'an (1947).3 These were two books in what he planned to be a literary series on the Qur'an by him, which was to contain titles like "al-Qi~~a bayn al-Tawrah wa al-Qur'an", "al-Namadhij al-Insaniyya fi al-Qur'an", "al-Mantiq al-Wijdanl fi al-Qur'an", and "AsaHb al-'ArQ al-Fannl fi al-Qur'an".4 But he never wrote the remaining books in the series, mostly because Egyptian political life after the 1952 Revolution carried him away to other intellectual concerns related to political activism and religious radicalism. Yet he wrote a commentary on the whole Qur'an in thirty volumes entitled Fi ?,ilal al-Qyr'an (1952-1959),5 in which he made reference to these earlier two books and in which his literary appreciation of the Qur'an continued unabated and was even developed.
