Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay.

You're listening to the New Discourses podcast.

And maybe against my better judgment, I don't know.

I want to present to you another kind of, I think it'll be a mini-series.

I don't know how many of these will do.

But I want to present to you some of the ideas out of a book called Milestones,

which is written by a man who has been dead since the 1960s named Saeed Kutpa.

That for the folks at home keeping score, Saeed is spelled S-A-Y-Y-I-D, and Kut-B is spelled Q-U-T-B, which you will recognize immediately as an Arabic name.

So this book, Milestones, is actually considered in some sense the intellectual engine of the Muslim Brotherhood. And so if we were going to use the word

Islamism, and I'm going to use that word, and I'm going to talk about that word in a moment,

if we were to use the word Islamism, this book is a modern work that's kind of at the foundation of Islamism that we deal with in the world today.

Just a little bit about him. I don't know actually a ton of Kutpa's biography. I'll just read the back cover of this book.

It says Sayyid Kutha, 1906 to 1966, was an Egyptian government

bureaucrat, author, literary critic, and finally an Islamic political leader. But is most famous as

an Islamist theoretician. So notice the word Islamist, aka Islamism.

So I'm going to use that word,

and we're going to discuss that momentarily.

It says he grew up in British occupied Egypt

and was imprisoned and executed in Nassar's independent Egypt.

Again in 1966. I think he was hanged, if I'm not mistaken.

Though he came from a pious rural background, he studied Western literature extensively and wrote

literary criticism as well as poetry, short stories, and articles. Kutpa spent two years in America,

...