Sayyid Qutb's Radical Islamism and the Comparative Political Theology

This book provides a new reading of the famous Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) beyond the traditional paradigm of Islamic fundamentalism. Dragos Stoica opens a fresh analytical and comparative path by approaching Sayyid Qutb’s work as the first anti-modern political theology developed in the modern Muslim space.

Sayyid Qutb’s Radical Islamism and The Comparative Political Theology argues that Sayyid Qutb’s radical critique of secular modernity, seen as a product of a great theft of sovereignty that usurps the monopoly of God over the entire world of creation, is not idiosyncratic or incoherent but a quintessential expression and an extreme type of a specific tradition of political theology that until now has been exclusively the province of the Western thought. Dragos Stoica claims that Sayyid Qutb’s political theology of Hakimiyyah (God’s Sovereignty) is better understood by integrating it in a wider context of the antimodern political theology. Thus, throughout this book he compares Qutb’s critique of modernity with the Pakistani Islamist thinker Abu al-A?la Mawdudi (1903–1979), the Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionary political theologian Juan Donoso Corte´s (1809–1853), as well as the Protestant political theologians: Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and Rousas J. Rushdoony (1916-2001). This book employs a family resemblance, cross-cultural comparative method and applies a cross-disciplinary analytical model that combines comparative political theology with critical discourse analysis. Employing these analytical instruments this book compares Qutb and his counterparts via the category of anti-modern political theology—more precisely, through a set of shared antitheses organized around the master concept of God’s Sovereignty. The ultimate objective is to augment the understanding of the Qutbian critique of secular modernity as an essential dimension of anti-modern political theology. Thus, by recasting Sayyid Qutb as an essential Muslim political theologian of God’s Sovereignty placed within a larger, cross-cultural paradigm, this book contributes as well to the necessary process of decolonization of political theology.