How should political theorists read someone like Sayyid Qutb, often identified with Islamism and terrorism, in relation to the history of critical thought about colonialism, capitalism, orientalism, anticolonial subjectivity, and race? How do we read his writings on these topics in relation to the recent impulse to canonize (and lionize) “anticolonial thought”? This project moves beyond moralizing strands of analysis by turning to Sayyid Qutb’s writings from the late 1940s and early 1950s to recover some of the alternative trajectories of his thought. Rather than seeing Qutb’s use of a leftist, critical, or materialist lexicon as a strategic and insincere misappropriation, as a necessarily discordant mixing, as directly leading to his later writings, or as their foil in a tale of “radicalization,” I argue for more closely reading how these ideas fit into his writings as well as the challenges that they raise for contemporary debates and canons in the humanities. In Qutb’s thought, the idioms of political Islam and Muslim piety are compatible with and even productively conjoined to the vocabulary and analytics of critical theory. This project inserts Qutb into conversations about colonialism, dependency, consciousness, and race, both to enrich them and to question their contours.
Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2025/26). His book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), examines how philosophers across the history of political thought fantasize about peace in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. War for Peace won book awards in political theory, international ethics, and interdisciplinary studies. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020) and co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025). He is completing projects about Sayyid Qutb’s critical thought, the genealogies of racializing Islam, and hate as a political idea.
Yasmeen Daher is a Palestinian writer and researcher. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Montreal. Yasmeen’s research sits at the intersection of political theory, ethics, and direct political action, all of which are deeply rooted in a commitment to feminist, social, and anti-colonial movements. She taught previously in different institutions including Bir-Zeit university in Palestine and Simone de Beavour institute in Canada. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Potsdam.
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