been challenged, together with my reading of “Milestones” by Sayyid Qutb and the Qur’an. Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) 294. Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He established the organisation in 1928 on avowedly armed jihadist principles. It engaged in violence against Jews and British forces in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s ostensibly in reaction to the Jewish presence in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi anNukrashi Pasha in 1948 and the attempted assassination of the Egyptian President of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954. In his philosophical work ‘The Art of Death’ (fann almawf) or ‘Death is Art’ (al-mawf fann), a phrase which came to be a famous part of his legacy, Hassan al-Banna extolled death and martyrdom as an important end of jihad and reminded members of the Brotherhood of the Prophetic observation: “He who dies and has not fought [ghaza, meaning literally ‘raided’] and was not resolved to fight, has died a jahiliya [i.e. pagan, nor non-Muslim] death.” Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979) 295. Abul ‘Ala Maududi (1903–1979) was founder of the Jamaat e-Islami political party whose manifesto is the establishment of an Islamic State in order to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. Maulana14 Maududi advocated that the supreme purpose of armed jihad was the eradication of all so-called 'non-Muslim' forms of governance. He was highly influential on the development of Extreme Salafist Islamism and a whole generation of Arab political Islamists, including the Egyptian Islamist ideologue, Sayyid Qutb (see below). Abul Ala Maududi wrote: “Islam wishes to press into service all forces which can bring about a revolution and a composite term for the use of all these forces is ‘Jihad’. ...[T]he objective of the Islamic ‘ jihād’ is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of State rule.” (Maududi 1980:6). Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) 296. Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was a seminal figure behind the continued development of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He drew on Abul Ala Maududi’s work and expanded the concept of pre-Islamic ignorance (jahiliyya) to characterise the entire modern world as jahil and unfit for coexistence with Islam and Muslims.15 “Milestones” 297. Sayyid Outb’s 160-page radical Islamist manifesto “Milestones” (Ma'alim fiy tariq) became the blueprint for subsequent extreme Islamist worldviews and has influenced generations of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden (1957-2011) and 14 Maulana is an honorific title meaning ‘Our Master’. 15 The term jahiliyya is normally used to describe ‘pre-Islamic ignorance’, i.e. when Arabs living in the Arabian peninsular were ‘ignorant’ of the message of Islam. But Sayyid Outb broadened this definition so that any society which was not run in line with his conception of political Islam was, in this sense, ‘ignorant’ (jahili). 67