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to emerge from the Ikhwan, but he wasn’t of its making. He joined the group in 1953, by which time he was already in his late forties and a recognised Islamic scholar. He entered the fold only because he decided he had to pick a side as the relationship between the army and the Brotherhood slid into open warfare. 45
    It has been argued that his loathing of Western society was driven by the two years he had previously spent in the United States on a scholarship sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education, where he worked. In his own writings he detailed his disgust with Western morality, which was undoubtedly shaped by incidents such as a ‘beautiful, tall, semi-naked’ woman trying to get into bed with him on the boat going over. 46 Matters weren’t helped by the fact that she was drunk and collapsed on the floor outside when he kicked her out of his cabin. What he found when he got off the boat also greatly offended his sensibilities.
    But what really radicalised Qutb was not the thought of being confined in a small space with a beautiful woman but actually being confined in a small space with a bunch of sadistic Egyptian prison guards. He was arrested four years after his return from the US during the crackdown on the Ikhwan after the failed assassination attempt on Nasser in 1954.
    The world wasn’t changed by what Sayyid Qutb said, it was changed by what the people who listened to him did. Some scholars have reacted to his demonisation by asserting that the ‘ambiguity in his thought was partly to blame’ 47 and that ‘it is unwise to assume a direct link between Sayyid Qutb and Usama bin Laden’. 48 There is some evidence for that argument in the sense that his insistence that modern Muslim societies had been polluted by Western thought and needed to return to the pure model of the Prophet’s era resonated with an entire generation of young Egyptian Islamists who did not turn to violence. Qutb’s thoughts also inspired the thinking of men like the Tunisian Rashid Ghannoushi and many of the modern and moderate leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
    But while the argument can be made that Qutb would not have approved of the mass murder of civilians, it is clear that his ideas were both the loaded gun and the justification for pulling the trigger of those that did. While he was locked up and being tortured he rewrote and expanded much of his earlier more moderate thinking to produce his seminal work Milestones , which reflected his new radicalised outlook. His were the words of an angry, tortured man. These words would inspire the men who brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the man who sent them and hundreds of other Islamic extremists around the world to carry out other appalling acts of violence.
    ‘Qutb’s writings represented an exceptional state of mind because it represents the suffering of torture and abuse in prison. There is no doubt that I respect Qutb’s bravery, although I disagree with his thoughts, which never represented the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood’s way of thinking,’ said Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, who was a member of the Brotherhood’s highest governing body, the Guidance Bureau, for more than twenty years. He was also imprisoned for long periods by the Egyptian military. The shared experience of jail and, for many in the leadership, torture bound the group together throughout the years of the dictatorship. It only began to unravel after the revolution. Aboul-Fotouh told me he was also once a ‘fundamentalist’ in his youth, but over time he helped shape and rebuild the Ikhwan into a more moderate organisation after the Nasser years. ‘I consider Qutb’s ideas a danger to the Islamic movement worldwide much more than it is for the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter by nature not only read Qutb, they also read al-Banna and others. The other foreign Islamic movements were negatively affected by Qutb’s thought because he is all they