What is Your opinion on Sayyid Qutb

Abu Mohammed al Maqdisi Peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and His blessings. We ask Allah to strengthen you. My dear Sheikh, my question concerns Sayyid Qutb – may Allah have mercy on him. And truth, I tried very hard to find your opinion on Sayyid Qutb, but I did not find it.
Perhaps you mentioned something about this matter, but I did not find it. It is well known that the advocates of salafiyyah – especially – wage blistering attacks against this man.

Most of what is in their attacks is void and fabrication and twisting his words. Or they do tafseer and decide that he has bad intentions. There is no doubt that Sayyid Qutb is a wronged and injured man. Much of what he wrote by virtue of hi literary manner of writing, has constituted reason for some people to misunderstand him or take his words in a way that he does not mean. My question is this – I want your opinion on this man and I trust you. May Allah reward you …


The response:
 

My dear brother (…) May Allah preserve him and make him one of the supporters of the deen Peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and His blessings With regards to the Mujahid Sheikh and dear writer and out esteemed teacher Sayyid Qutb – Allah have mercy on him, one of the wonders of this age who wonders do not cease is that he asks about an ideal Sayyid and speaks of him injuriously.

This is what sets apart this house of the heights of embellishment and its rings and its debris which are died for and are immortalized as the greatest of creation. The Taghout exert themselves for its greedy people who are subject to them. My father, may Allah have mercy on him. Drew with his fingertips – the same fingertips with which he traced the shadows of the Quran and the tawheed – words that redeemed his neck from death, words with which he dressed the truth with falsehood and with which he recognized the rule of the tyrants.

In this time many of the people of this age are redrawing their faces and features. Among them are many obedient, faithful people who have lengthened their tongues therein. What is the lowest of these words that they are raising – May Allah have mercy on it. And they volunteer their religion day and night for the tyrants and they sell their religion for the price of filth and on the way to that they hate and threaten with death and execution. Yet they rush to that as if they are hurrying towards an idol.

They slaughter for their rebukes of the tawheed and they exert their religion for them as a scapegoat and a sacrifice to the wreckage of the transient material world. By Allah, if these words are not true and faithful to the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger as an obligation and a duty from among duties, like what is written in the master of the word. For there are few men like him in this age, and each walked in the path preferred by the Sayyid – willy-nilly, admitted or denied. Neither this praise of his praise nor this shame of his shame injures the Sayyid.

In him and in those like him, the following words are true:

How the dear Sayyid was insulted
By one who is not equal to even a stitch on the sole of his shoe?
For over the sea comes the stench of the waterless desert
And the milk buried in its deepest recesses.

With all of the above – The Sayyid was like a leader of men and he is injured and mistaken in his writing, he has known stumbling, and they are clear to one who follows his writing, and the oldest of them are more distinguished than the new.

They are in the process of being corrected and amended. It is necessary for the sincere people who are near him – and at the head of them is Mohammed Qutb – to complete this for him, and not to insist on leaving them as they are. There is a gap in the argument confronted by every bump and criticism and apostasy and what the Seven and the Sultan ate. It is a pretext to challenge Sayyid and accuse him of innovation and accuse him of things of which he might be innocent, or things of which he is fundamentally innocent. But the literary pen slipped and said what its owner did not mean and could not have imagined.

An example of this is the speech attributed to him about the unity of existence: Sayyid finds it necessary – in everything he writes – to differentiate between the Creator and the created. He magnifies the Creator and recognizes Him as unique and declares as an infidel anyone who claims characteristics of divinity for himself or for others, aside from He who made all of existence. He is the first and the only One.

Anyone who claims that there is argument in this does not know Sayyid and does not know his books or what he composed. In some of the topics there are shadows of literary words. This argument is what those keenly intent on Sayyid and those who stand on his books must curtail, especially since they are studying and deciding that Sayyid does not mean the truth of these words and that he clarified this and other things in his other books like “ Characteristics of Islamic Visualization ” which is one of the last of his books – May Allah have mercy on him.

In any case, people have cast Sayyid as a figure between the master and the excessiveness, and some people malign him and other people adore him. We – Praise be to Allah- are not from those or from the others. But rather, we walk with the right as it proceeds. We do not think that the foundation is with one of the people who came after the Prophet(PBUH).

We preserve for Sayyid and the supporters of the deen who came after them their right and we do not diminish what they presented. We love them in their steadfastness in following the right and their support for the deen and its laws and their innocence from the Taghout and their shirk. We do not say this randomly or from nationalism or ignorance for we are among those who have read most of his writings at the very beginning, and of those who knew him – Praise be to Allah – and know his minhaj and his stances from close up. We heard his dissertations supported with high chains of narration from among the closest of those closest to him.

By that I mean Sheikh Sayyid Yusif Ayd, one of the members who does not infringe on the fingers of the hand of unity extended by the Sayyid – May Allah have mercy on him – in understanding his dissertations and absorbing his writings in the words that he wrote before his execution which were distributed under the title “Why they are executing me” This, and some of the elders have already written their remarks and notes on the things that slipped from the pen of the Sayyid, and that is an affair for the people of knowledge.

The right and its triumph – I wish these for all people. And this is what the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdullah Al Darweesh – Allah have mercy on him – wrote in his book “ The slippery source in the errors of the shadows ” He struck at some things and did not agree with some things. I started reading this book in the year when the first edition was published. At that time, I wrote for him an assessment in a letter that I called “ The scales of moderation in assessing the book the slippery source ” I supported some of the things he wrote and said others were errors and I pointed out some things that were omitted. I sent a copy of it to the Professor Mohammed Qutb and another to Sheikh Darweesh – Allah preserve him – and he wrote some comments on it before he died. I still have the picture of it in his handwriting. Maybe we will distribute it soon with his comments – inshallah This is what I have to answer your question

Sheikh Abu Muhammad Al Maqdasi