ABSTRACT
A leading theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) founded by Hassan Al-Banna (see Al-Banna, Hassan), Sayyid Qutb was born in a village in Upper Egypt and like Al-Banna became a teacher before joining the ministry of education which sent him to the United States for further study from 1948-50. While in America he was stunned by what he saw as the high level of support for the newly established State of Israel which had recently been victorious in the first of a series of Arab-Israeli wars. Qutb interpreted this support as a Jewish engineered attack on Islam in which Christianity was complicit. He was also greatly disturbed by what he described as the degeneracy of the American way of life and in particular its materialism and lust.
