Social Justice In Islam (Sayyed Qutb)

Sayyid Qutb was an intellectual who approached Islam as a set of beliefs and policies that are the basis of social and political configurations. In modern Islamist thought, Qutb’s thought, which is outside the conservative-traditionalist discourse line that discursively refers to the good old days and the strong past with concepts such as Islamic civilization, questions the possibilities of an emancipatory Islam with its holistic structure that connects politics, economy, and society. It is possible to say that Qutb’s influence can be seen not only in Egypt’s unique historical-social context or in the unique debates of the Cold War period, but also in the continuity and rupture line of Islamist thought production. His book Social Justice in Islam, in which he took the first systematic step from the literary period to Islamist intellectualism, is a crossroads text in the Qutb corpus because it is one of the first examples of Qutb’s holistic logic in dealing with the concrete economic and social conditions of the utopia of Islamic society. The centrality of economic issues in this work and the systemic reinterpretation of Islam with an emancipatory and social justice theme provide a framework worth discussing today as well as in the context of the debates of his time.