The "Brains" Behind Today's Jihad

"Jihad is the way and sharia is the goal" can hibernate in the core of Islam for decades, centuries even. It takes someone like Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of modern jihad (and the subject of this lucid and informative essay by Robert Spencer) to reanimate the concept, and get the faithful moving in that direction again. A question that might be asked: would there be a modern jihad--and if there was, would it have the same intensity--had there never been a Qutb?

Update: From History Upside Down (2007) by David Meir-Levi:

But however depraved America was, Qutb would declare in his seminal essay, "Our Struggle Against the Jews," that it was the Jew who was the root of all the world's evil. Piching up on the Nazi ideology he ingested as a member of the [Muslim] Brotherhood, Qutb wrote that Jews were responsible for the world's moral decay and for the West's animalistic sexual depravity. It was the Jews who had created the anti-Islamic doctrines of atheistic materialism, godless socialism, and democratic individualism. The Jews, therefore, were the perpetual enemies of Islam. This essay, arguably the single most important manifesto of Islamic fascist anti-Semitism in the modern world, was distributed in millions of copies throughout the Islamic world with the help of the Wahhabi Islamic sect in Saudi Arabia.