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Milestones, Vol. 4: Sayyid Qutb's Islamic Bolshevist Vanguard

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Show Notes

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 213

In the 1960s, a radical Islamic Salafist named Sayyid Qutb wrote a short little radical book called Milestones (https://amzn.to/4bn9hMX) in which he laid out a new vision for what the world usually calls "Islamism" today. That model wasn't just rooted in a backwards-looking radical fundamentalist vision of Islam called Jihadist Salafism as taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood; it was also based directly on Vladimir Lenin's radical model for creating and installing Communism through Bolshevism, particularly Lenin's 1902 booklet called What Is To Be Done? (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/) The prescription is for an ideologically pure radical vanguard to take control and pull the ideology into global dominance, even against its own moderates. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay continues his reading of Milestones in a fourth volume, outlining the nature of this vanguard approach as Qutb explains it in his third chapter and tying it definitively to other radical ideological movements, especially Lenin's Communism. Join him for a very enlightening reading.

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