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 passages, 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.

• 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.