Turkish media has reported on the death of Muhammad Qutb, the brother of Sayyid Qutb, an influential ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood also deceased. According to a report in Today’s Zaman:
Muhammad Qutb
April 4 2014 Prominent Islamic scholar Muhammad Qutb, the brother of Sayyid Qutb, an influential ideologue of Muslim Brotherhood in 1960s, passed away in a hospital in Mecca at the age of 95 on Friday. Muhammad was born in the Egyptian village of Musha near Asyut in 1919. He was arrested alongside his elder brother Sayyid in 1965 when they were accused of plotting to overthrow the secular regime. Although his brother was executed a year later, Muhammad’s life was spared.
After his release in 1972, he sought refuge among Muslim Brotherhood members in Saudi Arabia, where he published his brother Sayyid’s books and became a professor of Islamic studies.
His writings are well-known in the Arab world. His best known books are ‘Jahiliyya of the Twentieth Century’ and ‘Islam: The Misunderstood Religion.’”
Muhammad Qutb is probably best known in the West for the claim that Osama bin Laden “usually attended” his weekly public lectures at King Abdel-Aziz University. Despite this claim, French scholar Gilles Kepel has written that while Muhammad Qutb advanced the thinking of his more radical brother Sayyid, he:
…attempted to preserve its place within the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood and distance it from the most violent interpretations by zealous, young self-proclaimed Qutbists. a
