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From Anonymous
The Egyptian government banned this book and all others by Qutb. He was a literary critic and worked for the Egyptian Ministry of Education. He was sent by the Egyptian government in the 1950s to study in the United States. Evidently, he was deeply affected by the racism he observed in his travels in the U.S. By the late 1950s he'd become an anti-government Islamic activist and theoretician. He was executed by the Egyptian government in the early 1960s. He is well-known for declaring that the Muslim world in its entirety had fallen back into the state of Jahaliyya or Ignorance. The Qur'an refers to Jahaliyya when discussing the pre-Islamic period. Many people view Qutb as the progenitor of, or at least the inspiration for, all varieties of contemporary Muslim political activism.