Sayyid Qutb wrote Milestones as a manifesto for a vanguard movement, not a systematic treatise. Its twelve chapters—among them “The Unique Qur’anic Generation,” “The Nature of the Qur’anic Method,” “Jihaad in the Cause of God,” “The Universal Law,” and “This Is the Road”—were composed at different times, four of them adapted from Qutb’s Qur’an commentary Fi Jilal al-Qur’an, and the author himself calls the book a first installment of “milestones” rather than a finished whole. It addresses Muslims living in what Qutb calls the modern jahiliyyah, the condition of ignorance of divine guidance, and sets out to mark the road back to a society organized on God’s authority alone.
“It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!”
The book’s central claim is that the Muslim community of the Prophet’s Companions—a generation Qutb treats as unparalleled in history—was formed by one thing only: the Qur’an, approached as a command to be obeyed rather than as material for study or enjoyment. From this premise everything else follows. The Qur’anic method, as Qutb describes it, worked first on belief, drilling “There is no deity except God” into hearts and minds for thirteen Meccan years before a single law of the new society was revealed; only after an autonomous Muslim community existed in Medina, with power to enforce and develop a legal system, did detailed legislation arrive. Qutb reads this sequence as a permanent methodology, not a historical accident, and he turns it against those who would draft an Islamic constitution in the abstract while no society exists that is willing to submit to God’s law.
How the Case for a New Vanguard Unfolds
The Diagnosis of a Sick Civilization
Qutb opens by refusing the easy apocalypse. Mankind does not stand at the edge of a cliff because it might be annihilated; that fear is a symptom, not the disease. The real sickness is the absence of those vital values without which human life cannot grow healthy or make genuine progress. Even the West, he says, concedes as much: its civilization offers nothing to satisfy its own conscience. Western democracy is barren, borrowing its economics from the Eastern bloc under the name of socialism. Marxism once drew believers in both East and West because it presented itself as a creed and a way of life, but it is now defeated in thought—scarcely any nation is truly Marxist—because it wars against human nature and prospers only among the degenerate or the cowed. Russia, its leader, cannot feed itself and must import grain and sell off gold reserves, a failure he lays at the door of collective farming, a system contrary to what man is.
What mankind needs, then, is new leadership. Western leadership declines not through material, economic, or military weakness but because it has no life-giving values left to offer. The coming leadership must preserve Europe’s material achievements while supplying high ideals and a way of life harmonious with human nature—positive, constructive, practicable. Only Islam holds these values. The age of scientific resurgence that began with the sixteenth-century Renaissance and peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has spent itself; nationalism, chauvinism, and every man-made theory have failed. Islam’s turn has come. It does not forbid material invention—it counts it an obligation for God’s representative on earth, and under certain conditions an act of worship—and Qutb cites the Qur’an on man’s vicegerency and the community’s role as witnesses. But Islam must take concrete form in a society and a nation, because modern man will not listen to abstract theory. The Muslim community, he insists, has been extinct for centuries: not a land or a people of forebears, but a group whose manners, ideas, rules, and values derive from the Islamic source. It vanished when God’s laws were suspended on earth. Revival is necessary despite the vast distance to leadership; Europe’s genius in science, culture, law, and production is acknowledged, and the world of Islam is devoid of such beauty. The first step must be taken with insight into the qualities required. The community cannot compete in material invention for centuries; it must offer what modern civilization lacks—faith and a way of life that conserves the benefits of science while fulfilling human needs, embodied in a Muslim society. Material progress remains obligatory for existence.
The Modern Jahiliyyah and the Vanguard
Modern life, Qutb argues, is steeped in jahiliyyah—ignorance of Divine guidance—founded on rebellion against God’s sovereignty, transferring sovereignty to man and making some men lords over others. This is not primitive ignorance; it claims the right to create values, legislate, and choose ways of life without regard to God’s prescription. Its fruit is oppression: humiliation under communist systems, exploitation under capitalist ones. Only Islam frees all men from servitude to others, worshipping God alone. This concept is not of Western or European origin. It must take concrete form, and that requires a revivalist movement begun in some Muslim country, led by a vanguard marching through the all-encompassing jahiliyyah—somewhat aloof yet keeping ties, knowing the landmarks and milestones: when to cooperate and when to separate, what qualities to cultivate, how to address jahiliyyah in Islam’s own language. The milestones derive from the Qur’an and from the concept formed in the minds of the first Muslims. Qutb wrote the book for this vanguard; four chapters come from his commentary Fi Jilal al-Qur’an, slightly changed, and the rest were written at various times—milestones being disconnected by nature, a first installment.
The Unique Generation and Its Single Source
Callers to Islam should ponder how the Message created the generation of the Companions, unparalleled in history. The Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Prophet’s life remain in our hands as they were in theirs; only the Prophet’s person differs—but had his person been essential, Islam would not be universal, last, and valid until the end of time. God preserves the Qur’an because Islam can be established after the Prophet, whom He called back after twenty-three years. The spring from which the first generation drank was the Qur’an alone, the Hadith being its offspring. Aisha, asked about the Prophet’s character, said, “His character was the Qur’an.” They relied solely on God’s Book not from ignorance—Roman, Greek, Persian, Indian, and Chinese cultures existed, with Jews and Christians in Arabia’s heart—but by deliberate plan. The Prophet was displeased when ‘Umar brought pages from the Torah, saying that if Moses were alive he would have no recourse except to follow him. He deliberately limited the first generation to one source, preparing hearts, minds, and understanding pure and purified from other influences. Later generations mixed Greek philosophy and logic, Persian legends, Jewish scriptures, Christian theology, and other fragments with the Qur’anic source.
The Break with Jahiliyyah
When a person embraced Islam in the Prophet’s time, he immediately cut himself off from jahiliyyah. Entering Islam meant starting a new life, completely separated from the past life under ignorance of the Divine Law. He regarded his former deeds with mistrust and fear, feeling them impure and intolerable in Islam. If temptations, old habits, or laxness overcame him, he felt guilt, restlessness, and the need to purify himself, turning to the Qur’an for guidance. Thus a deliberate break separated present Islam from past jahiliyyah: all relationships with it were cut, though some give-and-take with polytheists in commerce and daily business remained—”relationships of understanding are one thing and daily business is something else.”
The Staged Command to Fight
The argument turns first to the sequence in which the Prophet was commanded to act. The first revelation, “Read, in the name of your Sustainer, Who created,” marked the beginning of prophethood, when he was told to recite in his heart and the command to preach had not yet come. With “O you who are enwrapped in your mantle, arise and warn,” he was appointed Messenger. The circle of warning then widened by stages: his near relatives, then his own people, then the Arabs around them, then all of Arabia, and at last the whole world. For thirteen years after his Messengership began he called people to God through preaching alone, with no fighting and no Jizyah, restrained to patience and forbearance. Only later came the command to migrate, then permission to fight, then the command to fight those who fought him while holding back from those who did not, and finally the command to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.
Three Kinds of Unbelievers
Once fighting was commanded, non-believers fell into three categories: those at peace with the Muslims, those at war, and the Dhimmies—non-Muslim peoples living under Muslim protection, for whose rights the government was responsible. Treaty partners were to be honoured while they kept their terms; if they broke them, they were to be notified of the breach, and no war declared until that notice was given. If they persisted, they were to be fought. The chapter “Bratt” then set out the treatment of each kind: war against those among the People of the Book who declared open enmity until they paid Jizyah or accepted Islam, and harsh striving against polytheists and hypocrites—by the sword for the former, by preaching and argument for the latter. Treaties with polytheists were to be ended at expiration. Those who broke their treaties were fought and defeated; those with a fixed term unbroken were granted its full length; those with no treaty, or none with a stated term, received four months’ notice before becoming open enemies. In the end the treaty peoples embraced Islam before their terms expired, and the non-Muslims of the state paid Jizyah. After “Bratt” only two kinds remained: people at war and Dhimmies. The hypocrites were left to God: the Prophet was to accept their outward appearance, carry on argument against them, and neither pray at their funerals nor seek forgiveness for them.
A Practical, Staged Movement
Qutb draws lessons from this summary. The religion, he insists, is intensely practical: it treats people as they are and matches its means to real conditions. Because the Islamic movement collides with a Jahiliyyah upheld by ideas, a practical system of life, and political and material authority, it must produce parallel resources—preaching and persuasion to reform belief, and physical power to dismantle the organizations and authorities that block reform and force people to serve human lords instead of God. Neither compulsion in belief nor mere preaching alone will do. The movement advances stage by stage, supplying at each stage what the moment requires and preparing the ground for the next, never meeting practical problems with abstract theory. Those who quote Qur’anic verses about Jihaad without grasping this staged development, or the relation of each verse to its occasion, mix up the stages and distort the whole.
Jihaad as a Declaration of Freedom
The core thesis follows: Islam’s aim is a decisive declaration of man’s freedom, in thought and in actual life, and for this it must employ Jihaad—whether the Muslim land is at peace or under threat. The peace Islam seeks is not mere security for Muslim-populated territory but that the religion, the law of society, be purified for God, that all obedience be for God alone, and that no people be lords over others. After the Prophet only the final stages apply. Qutb traces the Qur’anic sequence: restraint in Mecca (“Restrain your hands”), then permission (“Permission to fight is given to those against whom war is made”), then the command to fight aggressors, then the command to fight all the polytheists and the People of the Book until they are subdued and pay Jizyah. The struggle is eternal, since truth and falsehood cannot coexist on earth; whenever Islam declared God’s Lordship over the whole earth, usurpers struck back and Islam struck back to release man from them.
Why Mecca Held Back
The Meccan period of restraint had its reasons. Preaching was permitted, the Messenger stood under the protection of the Banu Hashim, and no organized political power blocked the call. Qutb, drawing on In the Shades of the Qur’an, lists the rest: training the Arab believer in patience, self-control and discipline under a leader; the Quraish’s pride in lineage, which made persuasion the most effective weapon, where fighting would have kindled the old wars of revenge; the wish to avoid bloodshed in every household, since the Believer was persecuted by his own patrons; God’s knowledge that many persecutors, ‘Umar among them, would become loyal soldiers; the Arab sense of honour that shielded the persecuted, as when Abu Bakr was restrained by Ibn al-Daghna and the contract confining Banu Hashim was torn up; and the numerical weakness of the Muslims, whose quarrel other tribes saw as a domestic Quraish affair. In the early Medinite period fighting was still prohibited because of the pact with the Jews of Medina and the unbelieving Arabs, because preaching was open and the population accepted the new state, and because no party could make war without the Prophet’s permission. Scouting parties went out—Hamza’s in Ramadan, six months after the Immigration, others at the ninth, thirteenth and sixteenth months—and in the seventeenth month Abdullah bin Jahsh’s party met resistance and shed blood in the sacred month of Rajab, a matter taken up in 2:217. Badr followed that same Ramadan.
Against the Defensive-Only Reading
Qutb rejects the claim that the aim was “defensive” in the narrow sense pressed by scholars defeated by treacherous orientalists.
The Foundation of a Civilisation
A society’s worth turns on what it is built upon. Where the founding concepts, beliefs and way of life come from the One God, man’s dignity is honoured to the highest degree and no person is the slave of another; where those concepts are manufactured by human masters, the reverse holds. The first draws out man’s highest spiritual and mental capacities. The second—societies that organise relationships around colour, race or nation—chains human thought and smothers the noble traits before they can surface. A person remains human whatever his colour, race or nation, but ceases to be human when spirit and reason are absent; beliefs and attitudes can be changed, while colour, race and birthplace cannot. Only a society whose associations rest on free choice therefore deserves the name civilised. Anything else is backward—what Islamic terminology calls a jahili society.
Islam alone makes belief the fundamental binding relationship, drawing black and white, red and yellow, Arabs, Greeks, Persians and Africans into a single community where God alone is worshipped, where the most honourable is the noblest in character, and where all stand equally under a law made by the Creator rather than by man. A society that prizes man’s humanity and honours his noble characteristics is truly civilised; one that gives highest value to materialism—whether as theory, in the Marxist interpretation of history, or as material production, in the United States and Europe—and sacrifices human values to it is backward, jahili regardless of its factories. Islamic society does not downgrade matter: it treats the universe as material and material production as the backbone of God’s vicegerency on earth, but it refuses to make material comfort the highest value at the expense of freedom, honour, family and morals.
Human values and morals, the argument continues, are neither mysterious nor endlessly “progressive” and changeable as the exponents of the materialistic interpretation of history or of “scientific socialism” claim; they are the characteristics that distinguish man from the animals. Hence a fixed line of separation: moral standards are not set by environment, and one cannot speak of “agricultural” or “industrial,” “capitalistic” or “socialistic,” “bourgeois” or “proletarian” values. The true division is human versus animalistic—Islamic versus jahili. Islam plants human values in any society, agricultural or industrial, nomadic or urban, poor or rich, nurturing them and guarding against degeneration toward animalism; the line points upward, and reversed it means a civilisation is backward and degenerative however much material progress it boasts.
The Family and the Test of Civilisation
If the family is society’s basis, with its division of labour between husband and wife and the upbringing of children as its most important function, that society is civilised; the Islamic family is the environment where human values grow in the new generation. If free sexual relationships and illegitimate children become society’s basis, with relationships resting on lust, woman’s role reduced to attraction and flirtation, and her child-rearing duties shed in preference for being a hostess or stewardess in the machinery of material productivity—then civilisation is backward, jahili. The family system and the relationship between the sexes determine a society’s whole character, and societies that give physical desire the ascendant cannot be counted civilised whatever their industrial or scientific progress.
In modern jahili societies, morality is drawn so narrowly that the distinctly human aspects fall outside it. Illegitimate sexual relationships, even homosexuality, are not considered immoral; ethics is confined to economic or political affairs, to “government interests.” The Christine Keeler and Profumo scandal was not serious for its sexual aspect but because Keeler was involved with a naval attaché of the Russian Embassy, so that her association with a cabinet minister meant lying before Parliament; similar scandals surface in the American Senate, and Englishmen and Americans caught in spying scandals take refuge in Russia—condemned for endangering state secrets, not for sexual deviation. Writers, journalists and editors advise that free sexual relationships are not immoral; what is immoral, they say, is a boy or girl using a partner for sex while feeling no love, bad is a wife who guards chastity after love for her husband has vanished, admirable is the wife who finds another lover. Dozens of stories and columns invite this way of life. From the standpoint of human progress such societies are backward: progress moves upward from animal desire toward higher values, and a progressive society founds a family system that satisfies human desire while raising the coming generation, requiring strong safeguards for family peace and stability against impulsive passion. Where immoral teachings run rampant and sexual activity sits outside morality’s sphere, man’s humanity can hardly develop. Only Islamic values, teachings and safeguards are worthy of mankind; Islam is the real civilisation and Islamic society truly civilised.
God’s Representative on Earth
Man becomes completely civilised when he establishes God’s representation on earth in all respects: dedicating himself to God’s service, freeing himself from servitude to others, establishing God’s prescribed system and rejecting all others, arranging life according to God’s Shari’ah, adopting values pleasing to God, investigating the universe’s laws and turning them to mankind’s benefit, applying them to the resources hidden in the earth as God’s vicegerent, unearthing food and raw materials, using technical knowledge for industry—all as a God-fearing representative of God. Mere material inventions are not civilisation, since jahili societies can have material prosperity; the Qur’an describes such societies. Hud’s words against memorials, palaces as though immortal, and tyranny; Salih’s words against secure gardens, fountains, farmland, palm trees, mountain houses and the wasteful corrupters; the verses on forgetting reminders, on the gates of everything being opened before a sudden seizure, on the earth’s glitter and the command that makes it stubble; Noah promising rain, wealth, children, gardens and streams to those who seek forgiveness; the blessings from sky and earth for belief and God-fearing—all are marshalled to show that Islam does not despise material progress.
The Reach of Divine Sovereignty
Divine sovereignty, the text insists, extends far beyond law.
Loyalty Stripped of Blood and Soil
Qutb turns to the Qur’an to show that the new faith cuts every older tie. The bond between the Emigrants and the Helpers of Medina is presented as a sacred, lasting covenant of love and kindness linking generations. Earlier prophets set the pattern: Noah’s son falls outside the family because his conduct is unrighteous; God’s promise of leadership to Abraham excludes evildoers; Abraham turns from his father and people once they persist in error, and he and his companions are held up as models for declaring enmity toward idolatry. The youths of the Cave leave family and tribe for the sake of belief; the wives of Noah and Lot are severed from their husbands purely because their beliefs differ, while Pharaoh’s wife stands as a believer’s example. Paternal, filial, national, and marital bonds all give way before faith.
When that common bond broke in the early community, families and tribes split. God praises those who do not love those who fight Him and His Messenger, even fathers, sons, brothers, or kin. Muhammad’s blood ties to Abu Lahab and Abu Jahl counted for nothing; the Emigrants fought their own families at Badr, while their bond with the Helpers grew stronger than blood. This brotherhood gathered Suhaib from Rome, Bilal from Abyssinia, and Selman from Persia, dissolving lineage pride and nationalism. The Messenger called partisanship foul and declared that whoever calls to it, fights for it, and dies for it is not of him.
The Muslim’s homeland, then, is not land but Dar-ul-Islam, where faith rules and God’s Shari’ah holds sway. Any place where the Shari’ah is not enforced is Dar-ul-Harb, to be fought even if it is one’s birthplace or the site of one’s property. Mecca became Dar-ul-Islam only when it surrendered and the Shari’ah took effect. Islam is not words, birth in a Muslim country, or inheritance from a Muslim father; citing 4:65, Qutb insists believers must make the Prophet arbiter and submit fully. Family, tribal, racial, and national groupings are residues of man’s primitive state—jahili groupings the Prophet called “dead things.” God rejected the Jews’ claim to chosenness by race; the truly chosen are the Muslims gathered without regard to race, nation, color, or country, and in the first generation stood Abu Bakr from Arabia beside Bilal, Suhaib, and Selman. Callers must imprint this conception and purge hidden shirk regarding homeland, race, nation, lineage, or material interest, as warned in 9:24. Beyond faith is unbelief, beyond Islam Jahiliyyah, beyond truth falsehood.
Far-Reaching Changes
Islam, Qutb argues, is a comprehensive concept of life and the universe with a complete system, fundamentally opposed to every jahili concept even where details resemble them. Its first function is to mold life practically and establish God’s prescribed system, raising the Muslim nation as a living example. It does not compromise or coexist with jahili systems. Jahiliyyah in any age is deviation from the worship of One God—some people worshipping others, some dominating and making laws regardless of God’s injunctions. Islam cannot mix with it: either Islam remains or Jahiliyyah; no half-and-half situation is acceptable, since truth is one and cannot be divided. Command belongs to God or to Jahiliyyah; God’s Shari’ah prevails or people’s desires. Only two ways exist: submit to God and His Messenger, or follow Jahiliyyah. Islam’s foremost duty is to depose Jahiliyyah.
The caller must present this with confidence, compassion, and sympathy—not rationalize or appease distorted concepts—proclaiming openly that the audience’s ignorance and customs defile them and that God wishes to purify, cleanse, and uplift them. Islam will change their concepts, modes of living, and values, raising them to a life that makes their present one seem disgusting and all Eastern or Western modes contemptible. This was how Islam first addressed the Arabian peninsula, Persia, and the Roman provinces: from a height, with love and kindness, with complete clarity. It never proposed slight adjustments, nor offered similarities under names like “Islamic Democracy” or “Islamic Socialism.” The change from the Jahiliyyah encompassing the earth to Islam is vast: from the ways of the created to the way of the Creator, from systems of men to the system of the Lord of men.
People may dislike, flee, and fear this method, as they did when Muhammad criticized their concepts and derided their deities—yet they came to love the truth they once fled “as if they were startled donkeys fleeing before a lion,” fighting it in Mecca and Medina. The first-period conditions were no better than today’s: Islam was unknown, confined to the valley of Mecca, hounded by authorities, surrounded by proud empires. Its power lies in the nature of the belief, the simple clear truth, balanced teachings suited to human nature, and its challenge to Jahiliyyah without changing a single letter of its principles. Human nature can change completely from one way of life to another more easily than through partial changes; a complete change to a higher, purer system is agreeable to psychology, whereas changing from Jahiliyyah to an Islam barely different is illogical. Qutb condemns defenses presenting Islam as accused—”It did all this fourteen hundred years before modern civilization!”—and cries, “Woe to such a defense!” Islam takes no justification from the jahili system; the civilizations dazzling many are jahili at heart, hollow, worthless compared to Islam. The claim that people under such systems fare better than those in a so-called Islamic country has no weight: they reached wretchedness by abandoning Islam, not because they are Muslims.
We should not seek similarities with Islam in current systems, religions, or ideas; Eastern and Western systems are retrogressive and opposed to Islam’s direction. The ineffective argument—come to an unapplied system making only slight changes, preserving habits—seems easy but has no attraction and is not based on truth.
The argument’s spine is a contrast between two kinds of society, and Qutb draws the line with unusual sharpness. A society is civilized, in his terms, when its binding relationships rest on freely chosen belief rather than on color, race, tribe, or nation—when black and white, Arab and Persian, are joined by worship of God alone and measured by character. Material achievement does not enter the verdict. A nation may industrialize, build, and produce while remaining, in this vocabulary, backward and jahili, because it has subordinated human values—freedom, honor, family, morals—to comfort or to production. He applies the test to sexual morality with particular force: a society that treats free sexual relationships as harmless while punishing only their political embarrassments has, on his account, inverted the direction of human progress, which he understands as movement upward from animal desire toward higher values, safeguarded above all by the family.
Running alongside this is a sustained argument about knowledge. Qutb divides the sciences into two kinds. Chemistry, physics, astronomy, medicine, technology, and the technical side of administration may be learned from anyone, Muslim or not; the community sins as a whole if it fails to produce experts in them. But whatever touches belief, the interpretation of history, the nature of man, morals, values, or the meaning of art must be taken only from a God-fearing Muslim, because such matters rest on a concept of existence and cannot be separated from it. He is candid that this will sound strange even to Muslims who accept God’s sovereignty in law, and he presses the point: the experimental method itself, he claims, was an offshoot of the Islamic concept, born in the universities of Andalusia and the East, later adopted by Europe after it severed science from belief. His treatment of “culture as the human heritage” follows the same logic—true for technology, false the moment it claims authority over man’s purpose.
The chapters on jihaad carry the most weight, and Qutb is explicit that he is correcting a misreading. Against scholars he says have been defeated by orientalist polemics, he denies that Islam’s fighting was essentially defensive. The aim, as he states it, is to establish God’s authority on earth, arrange human affairs by God’s guidance, and end the lordship of one man over another; the famous exchange before Qadisiyyah, in which a Muslim envoy tells the Persian general that his people were sent to bring men from servitude to other men into the service of God alone, serves as his model of motive. Force, on this account, removes institutions and systems, never beliefs—there is no compulsion in religion, and once the obstacles fall, each person chooses freely. He reads the Qur’an’s shifting commands on fighting as stages of a movement, and warns that confusing the stage-specific verses with the eternal message produces exactly the muddle he is attacking.
What gives the book its edge is the claim that the Muslim community itself has been extinct for centuries. Not a land, not a people, not a heritage of forebears, but a group whose manners, ideas, rules, and values derive from the Islamic source—this, Qutb says, vanished when God’s laws were suspended on earth, and it must be rebuilt from the ground up. The vanguard he writes for is asked to separate itself from the surrounding jahiliyyah while keeping ties of daily business, to expect torture and sacrifice as the first generation did, and to refuse every compromise of values, since “we and it are on different roads.” The book ends where such a manifesto must: on the road itself, with the faith triumphant and the demand for steadfastness, not on a program completed.
Milestones has been read ever since as one of the founding documents of modern Islamist thought, and its influence owes much to the very qualities that make it uncomfortable reading: the refusal to separate belief from law, the insistence that a creed must become a living movement, and the willingness to name existing Muslim societies as part of the ignorance they claim to oppose. Whether one finds in it a coherent call for freedom of conscience or a blueprint for uncompromising activism, its argument is built to be acted on, and it is written in the voice of a man who believed the hour had come.
