Sayyid Qutb's Radical Islamism and the Comparative Political Theology

Dragos Stoica

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781666966848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Two Traditions of Political Theology and a Rogue Islamist Thinker in Search of His Family
• 1 From Literary Critic to Islamist Martyr: The Intellectual Evolution of Sayyid Qutb
• 2 Wrestling the Juggernaut: The Islamist Political Theologies of Sayyid Qutb and A. A. Mawdudi as Critiques of Modern Ideologies
• 3 Sayyid Qutb’s and Juan Donoso Cortés’s Political Theology of the Clash of Civilizations
• 4 Abraham Kuyper and Sayyid Qutb as Political Theologians of God’s Sovereignty
• 5 Rousas J. Rushdoony and Sayyid Qutb: The Apotheosis of God’s Sovereignty in Anti-Modern Political Theology
• Conclusion: Sayyid Qutb as a Political Theologian: A View from the Other Side
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author