Sayyid Qutb: A Child From The Village 366544

Sayyid Qutb. A Child From the Village. American University in Cairo Press. 2005. Pp. 150. 70 £E. Dar el Kutub No. 8652/05. ISBN 977 424 954 2. Translation by John Calvert and William Sheppard. Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) was hanged by the Egyptian government for his radical Islamic writings, and influence as a theoretician in the Muslim Brotherhood. Following the assassination attempt on president Gamal Abdel Nasser in October of 1954, several leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were rounded-up. Nasser rent the organization illegal. Some were summarily executed. Others, like Qutb, jailed. Qutb, after having been incarcerated for a decade, published his best known work, Milestones, in 1964 (Ma'alim fi'l Tariq: an alternate translation is Signposts). His Islamist writings still today inspire some of the more visible and nefarious leaders in militant Islamic movements – putatively including Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Qutb did not start out an Islamic extremist. He was, until later in life, a man of letters, an educator, poet and literary critic. He was a contemporary of Egyptian literary greats Taha Hussein and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. As a functionary in the Ministry of Education, Qutb pursued graduate studies in the United States (1948-50). But emersion in Western culture did little other than offend Qutb, and it was this unpleasant cross-cultural experience that permanently soured him on Western values and lifestyles. Qutb was shocked by the overt racism he both saw and experienced. And the openness between genders was simply too much for him – a church-sponsored Sunday night sock hop, to which he was invited, involved short-skirted single women dancing with bachelors to decadent jazz music.

2 A Child From the Village was written previous to Qutb’s studies in America – a few years before he turned his energies exclusively to Islamist ideology. But this book is no preamble to such. Instead, the reader finds gentle and often saccharine reflections of a boy’s village life in the Asyut Province of Upper Egypt. The book is Qutb’s coming of age memoir. Qutb describes, in fluid prose, rural Egyptian life around the time of the 1919 revolution. He leaves behind, by way of enlightenment, an intense trepidation of the supernatural, which haunts the villagers to the point of blaming sickness and unexplained phenomena on the deeds of disgruntled jinns and ‘arafit (demons or sprites). Stillborn children, sudden deaths, abrupt madness, impotence and the likes thereof, are all attributed to the mischievous and malevolent little demons of the night. We learn of Qutb’s keen childhood interest in reading. Qutb describes the avuncular bookseller who comes to the village once a year; and how the young Qutb spends all his pocket money on books normally unavailable in rural communities – books on numerology, enchantment, history, Sherlock Holmes, explorations of rhetoric in the Qur’an, The One Thousand and One Nights and medicine… books that at that time were only available to the venerable scholars at the far-off al-Azhar in Cairo. The boy Qutb is acknowledged by the villagers as a nascent effendi (a well-educated, and respected man who moves upward in society). And too, Qutb’s father spends money he doesn’t have, in order to provide education and amenities for his intellectually gifted son. Their congé at the end is rather moving. Qutb leaves his village a proud young man, ready to pursue higher education in the far away and revered Cairo.

3 Qutb’s literary technique deserves mention. He writes in an unusual autobiographical narrative, referring to himself in third person, “he”, or, “the child”. Qutb also speaks to his reader in an inclusive tambour – this quote, from his chapter on weapons confiscation by the new 1919 government, “… we have to understand that two groups owned weapons in the village.” And he takes this inclusiveness further in other ages, referring to his young self as “our friend”, or, “our child.” This style works, engendering a less formal, or fireside narrative. Irrespective of an interest in the childhood of Sayyid Qutb, this book will hold the attention of anyone curious about rural life in Upper Egypt one hundred years ago. These are the reflections of an intellectual, which are touching without melancholy digression. Qutb looks back kindly and curiously at his rural youth, naïveté and romantic yearnings (even though he remained a life-long bachelor – something uncommon in Islam). Qutb discusses several elements of his childhood, including religion, education, cuisine, folklore, crime and linguistics – all making this book a sincerely engaging read. And it’s a quick read, at 150 pages including notes and gloss.

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Willows is a contributing writer to The Egyptian Gazette and its weekly edition, The Egyptian Mail. He studied at the American University in Cairo, and now lives in Toronto.