Romantic Aesthetics and the General Will in the Islamism of Sayyid Qutb

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178287
• Author: Yaseen Noorani
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231178287

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(6) 874 –896

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231178287

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Article

Romantic Aesthetics and

the General Will in the

Islamism of Sayyid Qutb

Yaseen Noorani1

Abstract

Recent research has pointed to the modern nature of the state that Islamists

posit in contrast to medieval Islamic notions of political authority. This

paper argues that a conceptual framework derived from romantic aesthetics

underpinned the Islamist thought of Sayyid Qutb, who was for many years a

secular literary writer. The aesthetic framework made possible the notion of

human freedom and progress as the enactment of the general or collective

will, which is the source of the state. Classical formulations of the general

will in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel are closely related to contemporaneous

aesthetic notions of freedom as creative expression of interiority. Qutb

participated in this line of thinking. The vitalist metaphysics and expressivist

aesthetic theory of his literary period led him to later formulate an account

of the general will that is embodied in Islamic law, the sharīʿa, which he

identified with the state. He presented the Islamic state on this basis as

resolving the fundamental contradiction of western modernity that romantic

aesthetics had identified in the context of establishing the redemptive value

of art. This contradiction, the disunity of the spiritual and the material, was

equated by Qutb with the separation of church and state. Islamic law as the

state is thus justified on aesthetic grounds as the reconciliation of humanity

and nature now divided by Western materialism. Qutb’s thought in the

context of its aesthetic genesis provides valuable insight into the nature of

modern notions of individual and collective will.

1Associate Professor, School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of

Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Yaseen Noorani, Associate Professor, School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies,

University of Arizona, Marshall Bldg. 449, 845 N. Park Ave, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.

Email: ynoorani@arizona.edu

1178287PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231178287Political TheoryNoorani

research-article2023

Noorani 875

Keywords

general will, aesthetic politics, Islamism, disenchantment, Islamic state, divine

sovereignty

Addressing the perceived social malaise widely lamented by Egyptian intel-

lectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, the prominent literary critic Muhammad

Mandur suggested that what Egyptians needed was exposure to “classical”

European styles of dance, particularly ballet. In contrast to the concupiscent

posturings of Eastern dance, ballet reproduces the underlying rhythms of

nature. It thus trains the body and spirit in receptivity to the vitality of natural

beauty, resulting in joyfulness and virtue on personal and national levels

(Mandur 1945). Another prominent literary critic, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966),

concurred that classical dance embodies “the beauty that is the basis of moral

action,” as well as with Mandur’s assessment of the maladies of the Egyptian

spirit. Qutb diverged only in his diagnosis, regarding the absence of ballet in

Egypt to be the symptom of a deeper problem. “We lack the interior vitality, in

my view, that is released in dance, or in joyfulness, which are both outlets for

the welling spring when it overflows. When will the empty vessel fill, so that it

can gush and overflow?” (Qutb 1945, 169) Qutb’s outlook was based on the

conceptual framework of Romantic aesthetics and vitalism that he shared with

his fellow critic. In this outlook, the beauty of art expresses emotions that are

connected directly with nature and thus contain truth inaccessible to rational

reflection. This emotive truth is an experience of a universal life principle that

unfolds in nature and history in an evolutionary manner.1 For both writers, the

beauty of dance and other fine arts reflects a unity of the human mind with

nature that was inaccessible in contemporary society, resulting in the absence

of freedom and moral agency. Qutb eventually emerged as a leading figure in

the Muslim Brotherhood and seminal Islamist intellectual, but only after he had

superseded art with “the Islamic representation of life” as the means achieving

the reconciliation of humanity and nature on a collective social level.

A significant body of scholarship on Qutb’s Islamist thought has pointed

to affinities found therein with concepts and orientations widely evidenced in

modern political and social thought.2 Euben (1999), for example, has shown

1. See Abrams (1971) for a classic exposition of the expressive theory of art in

Romanticism and associated epistemological notions. In the first half of the

twentieth century the vitalist notion of a universal teleological evolutionary life

force had wide currency. On British vitalism, see Rose (1986, 74–116).

2. For biographies of Qutb, see Musallam (2005), Toth (2013), and Sabaseviciute

(2022).