Sayyid Qutb's Radical Islamism and the Comparative Political Theology

Sayyid Qutbs Radical Islamism and The Comparative Political Theology argues that Sayyid Qutbs 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 Qutbs political theology of Hakimiyyah (Gods Sovereignty) is better understood by integrating it in a wider context of the antimodern political theology. Thus, throughout this book he compares Qutbs critique of modernity with the Pakistani Islamist thinker Abu al-Ala Mawdudi (19031979), the Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionary political theologian Juan Donoso Cortes (18091853), as well as the Protestant political theologians: Abraham Kuyper (18371920) and Rousas J. Rushdoony (19162001). 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 theologymore precisely, through a set of shared antitheses organized around the master concept of Gods 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 Gods Sovereignty placed within a larger, cross-cultural paradigm, this book contributes as well to the necessary process of decolonization of political theology.