Two journeys to America and the end of radicalism

Seventy-seven years and seven days separate the journeys of Sayyid Qutb and Ahmad al-Sharaa to America.

On 3 November 1948, Egypt’s Ministry of Education dispatched Sayyid Qutb to the United States on a “field mission” to study “curricula and educational principles”. His tour took him through several American cities, including New York and San Francisco.

At the time, Qutb was already a well-known writer, famous for his biting criticism of the Egyptian government and the royal court. He was in the midst of a personal transition, moving away from his earlier secular-liberal outlook toward an emerging critique of Western tutelage and its grip on Egypt and the Arab world. Though not yet affiliated with any Islamist movement, he had begun articulating the idea of building an Islamic society.

Upon his return, Qutb published a series of articles in the magazine Al-Risala in November 1951 — later collected under the title The America That I Have Seen — and referred to his journey again in his magnum opus In the Shade of the Qur’an. In these writings, Qutb displayed a deep sense of shock and moral rejection, particularly of American social habits surrounding religion, women, and sex. Even in the few lines where he grudgingly acknowledged America’s “virtues”, he did so in contrastive terms: the country, he wrote, possessed “the virtues of production and order, not those of human and social leadership — the virtues of the mind and the hand, not those of taste and feeling”.

That journey marked, in other words, a decisive break. Qutb moved out of a phase in which he had spent two decades as a prominent activist within the secular-liberal literary élite that dominated Egyptian cultural life — writing novels, poetry, criticism and essays, lambasting writers of an “Islamist” bent, sceptical of any “mixing of religion with politics”, and even asserting that Islam and the Arabic language were in many respects alien to the Egyptian nation. After the 1952 coup he reinvented himself as an official ideologue of the revolution: the Free Officers visited him at his home in Helwan, he was present at their command centre, and on occasion maintained an office there.

Qutb felt betrayed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and by the leading lights of the “New Egypt” when they declined to give him a leadership role, particularly the post of Minister of Education that he coveted. He discovered in the Muslim Brotherhood the mass, activist current that could realise the counter-revolutionary dreams he had nursed: a movement that might lead another coup and put his ideas into practice. The dynamic conflict between the military and the Brotherhood, the repression the Brotherhood endured, and Qutb’s own imprisonment all helped to entrench his doctrines and to seed within the Brotherhood a current that became the mother, mentor and ideological wellspring for the armed jihadi movements whose apogees — al-Qaeda and the Islamic State — convulsed the Arab world and beyond.

In that sense, the life of Ahmad al-Sharaa stands as one of the many tangled offshoots of the intellectual and ideological trajectories shaped by Sayyid Qutb’s dramatic turns, his theorising, and the far-reaching influence he exerted over Islamist movements both Arab and global.

In the Arab context, the picture becomes clearer if we plot these two journeys — Qutb’s and Sharaa’s — against the broader arc of post-independence military regimes, their ideological pretensions, and their eventual decay. The collapse of the Assad family’s rule in Syria, in particular, marks the spectacular disintegration of that long historical course already visible in the unravelling and degradation of similar regimes in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya, and in the death throes of these regimes in Algeria and Egypt.

Sharaa was nineteen when al-Qaeda struck New York on 11 September 2001. Along with hundreds of young Syrians at the time, he rushed to Iraq to fight the American forces that had invaded the country. There he joined al-Qaeda and took part in the armed insurgency against the Americans until his capture in 2006.

Al-Sharaa’s release from prison in 2011 coincided with a foundational event that would entangle and transform both trajectories described above: the outbreak of the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime. That moment — and the dynamics it unleashed — became the cornerstone of all that followed: the creation of Jabhat al-Nusra (as al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch), its subsequent break from al-Qaeda in 2016, and its renunciation of the doctrine of “borderless jihad”.

From there came a brutal struggle with Islamic State, culminating in Al-Sharaa’s effort, alongside other factions, to establish Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — a force that reshaped its ideology and operations to act as a local governing authority in territories outside regime control. This trajectory reached its dramatic climax with Sharaa leading Operation Deterrence of Aggression, which drove Bashar Assad to flee Damascus and brought down his regime.

On the global stage too, Sharaa’s trajectory represents the closing of the circle first opened by Qutb. Its violent aftershocks exploded with 9/11, America’s declaration of a “War on Terror", and the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. From there came al-Qaeda’s worldwide proliferation, and the movement’s mutation into its most extreme ideological and operational form: Islamic State. In 2014 its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared himself “Caliph of the Muslims”; three years later, the group’s twin strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa fell beneath the American-led banner of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

Qutb’s visit to America marked the beginning of his intellectual metamorphosis. It was a journey that ended with his execution in 1966, and with Egypt, and the wider Arab world, tumbling into a black hole where military and civilian elites alike tore at each other until they became grotesque caricatures of themselves, capable of expressing their existence only through unspeakable acts of violence. With the fall of the Islamic State and the collapse of the Assad regime, the circle that began with Qutb’s fateful journey has finally closed on both projects (military dictatorships and jihadi radicalism), and perhaps on an entire era of Arab history.

Accordingly, al-Sharaa’s visit to America, and his meeting with President Donald Trump - the third in less than a year - together with his highly symbolic decision to join the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, suggests that a new circle might be opening: a decisive retreat of radical ideology in the Arab sphere in favour of political pragmatism, economic growth, and human development.