"Islam chose to unite earth and heaven in a single system, present both in the heart of the individual and the actuality of society, recognizing no separation of practical exertion from religious impulse... its adherents cannot be true Muslims unless they practice their faith in their social, legal and economic relationships."
"Islam knows only two kinds of societies, the Islamic and the Jahili. The Islamic society is that which follows Islam in belief and ways of worship, in law and organization, in morals and manners. The Jahili society is that which does not follow Islam and in which neither the Islamic belief and concepts, nor Islamic values and standards, Islamic laws and regulations, or Islamic morals and manners are cared for."
"It was Sayyid Qutb who fused together the core elements of modern Islamism" — two former NSC counterterrorism directors
One of the claimants to being the "founder of modern Islamism" and a leading Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) is very close to being an intermediate type between two Beta rationals, although EIE barely wins here. The usual story about his life is that he was a mild Egyptian poet-intellectual of forty-two, sent to Colorado to study American education, who watched the horror of a pastor dimming the lights for a church dance between young men and women and sailed home a revolutionary. The chronology doesn't confirm it: Qutb had been writing about the materialism of the West since the mid-1940s and had finished Social Justice in Islam before he boarded the ship. The dance, most likely, confirmed a verdict already entered. A man who first apprehended God as beauty spent the next twenty years converting this feeling into a severe code that admitted no exceptions. Security analysts and global counter-terrorism bodies view his text Milestones as the foundational manifesto that inspired radical militant organizations.
His youth is part of what makes me type him EIE over LSI. He was a precocious child, and often played the role of "mentor" to his village (definitely EIE-style emotional inspiration mentorship here), was a bit of a "sensitive young man," an literary critic, and a poet. Even then, despite his interest in Western culture, he became more and more conservative as he aged, and one of Western thinkers he liked was the French social-darwinist Alexis Carrel, who wanted society to be directed by a hereditary aristocracy and whose arguments Qutb used to support his own claims that Western civilization neglected the human spirit in favor of machines and materialism. His unified theory that the Quran's authority is aesthetic, working through colour and motion, also relies on emotional affect instead of a legalistic argument.
In 1951 he returned from USA to Egypt and published a denunciation titled "The America That I Have Seen," denouncing Americans as "numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether," with attacks on sexual licentiousness (yes, even the Fifties' USA was too much for him, which is in itself telling) and bodily display. Soon he became a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This organization, initially welcoming Nasser's coup, turned against him once it was clear that Nasser would rule as a secular statesman and likely plotted his assassination, which resulted in Qutb being jailed. Initially, Qutb was kept in horrible conditions and was tortured, but later allowed the opportunity to write, which he used to write his most important religious-political (for Qutb, there was no difference) works, including his famous manifesto, Milestones. Briefly released, he was arrested again in 1965, and executed.
His doctrine's architecture is more LSI-style: it is legal and hierarchical, and admits no gradations: the world is divided into the camp of righteousness and the camp of sin (hakimiyya versus jahiliyya), with nothing permitted in-between. By the time he wrote Milestones the binary had eaten most of the Muslim world, since partial belief wasn't a thing the system could represent — his philosophy refuses compromise and denies grey areas. Even the sexual disgust is a combination of EIE and LSI traits in being not really a Fi-style personal offence, but Qe+Ti+Se — boundary-policing with impurity as a breach of code, combined with physical revulsion (your canonical Talanovite LSI, in fact, while attentive to rule violations, has a relatively weak instinctive disgust reaction, this trait needs an increase of Qe strength).
On this blog, he represents the best the common dual traits of Beta rationals: the strict attention to terminology (a society that claims to be Muslim, but is not 100% ruled by Sharia, does not get the name!), he refused a "bad peace" (Nasser offered him life for a written apology; he refused), his politics runs on prohibitions. Conservative Muslim opponents of Qutbism accused (and still accuse) him of undesirable innovations, born out of his lack of formal training (like applying the definition of apostasy to contemporary Muslim societies), but he certainly didn't understand is as introduction: just a badly needed correction in terminology. This is what makes this type combination dangerous in a religious setting: the same conviction that licenses the innovation guarantees it will never be recognised as one.
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