Was the encounter with America, as some have argued, the turning-point in Qutb's radicalisation?
Qutb was not the first Muslim intellectual to look at the world this way.
Qutb and the Brotherhood initially welcomed the coup and worked enthusiastically with its leaders.
In the 1950s, the famous Muslim Brotherhood philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, began to write about the concept of Islamic economics.
Qutb lost faith in the pan-Arab nationalism that was the prevailing ideology of the Arab world in his own time.
Mr Calvert does not disguise the crudely Manichean character of Qutb's worldview.
Shortly after finishing the manuscript, Qutb set off for the United States on a visit that was to last almost two years.
On his return home, Qutb openly identified with Egypt's main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, although he did not formally join it until 1953.
Only a small fraction of these 1.5 billion Muslims will have heard of, let alone subscribe to, the ideas of theorists such as Qutb.
Qutb opposed the killing of innocents and would have been appalled by what his followers, from the Egyptian radicals of the 1970s and 1980s to the current jihadist groups, have carried out in his name.
On returning to Egypt, Qutb wrote a series of books, many from prison, denouncing jahiliyya (ignorance), a state of affairs he categorised as the domination of man over man, or rather subservience to man rather than to Allah.
In this early phase Qutb, a Muslim who had come under the spell of Sufism, subscribed to the essentially secular nationalism of the day, the focus of which was opposition to British rule in Egypt and to Zionist colonisation in Palestine.
Beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood of Hassan el-Banna in 1928, followed by the movements founded by Islamist ideologues like Abul ala Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and the extremist Deobandi creed in South Asia, radical Islam established a strong presence in the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century.
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