1919–2014 · Egypt, Saudi Arabia · Writer on Islamic thought and education, university teacher in Makkah, editor of Sayyid Quṭb's works
Muḥammad Quṭb was born on 26 April 1919 in Mūshā, a village in Asyut province in Upper Egypt, the younger brother of Sayyid Quṭb. After their father died in 1933 the family moved to Helwan, near Cairo. He studied English language and literature at Fuad I (now Cairo) University, graduating in 1940, and took a diploma in education and psychology the following year. He taught English for about four years, then worked at the Egyptian National Library and as a translator for the Ministry of Education, later running a large translation and publishing programme for the Ministry of Higher Education.
He came to know the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1940s, though unlike his brother he did not then join it. He was arrested with Sayyid and many Brotherhood members in October 1954 and held for a few months, and while Sayyid was in prison he prepared the revised volumes of Fī ẓilāl al-Qurʾān for the press. Arrested again on 30 July 1965, a month before Sayyid’s trial and execution in August 1966, he stayed in prison until late 1971 or early 1972.
In 1972 he moved to Saudi Arabia to teach at the Faculty of Sharia in Makkah, then part of King Abdulaziz University and later Umm al-Qura University, where he taught until 1996. He supervised many theses in creed and contemporary thought; his students included Safar al-Ḥawālī and Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Qaḥṭānī, and he is often described as a formative influence on Saudi Arabia’s Ṣaḥwa (Islamic awakening) movement. He also edited and republished his brother’s writings.
He wrote about 35 books. His first, al-Insān bayna al-māddiyya wa-l-Islām, together with Jāhiliyyat al-qarn al-ʿishrīn and Dirāsāt Qurʾāniyya, he regarded as the foundation of his later work. Shubuhāt ḥawla al-Islām (translated as Islam: The Misunderstood Religion) answered common objections to Islam, and his two-volume Manhaj al-tarbiya al-Islāmiyya won the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies in 1988. His books, many translated into Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Kurdish and other languages, were widely read in the Islamic revival of the 1970s and 1980s. He died in Jeddah on 4 April 2014, aged 94, and was buried in Makkah.