Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay and you are listening to the New Discourses podcast,

and we are going back into the book Milestones by Saeed Kutpa, who is the intellectual engine

of the Muslim Brotherhood. So when we talk about this concept of Islamism as a political agenda to install

Islam as Sharia law as the law of the land, using that as a definition, Saeed Kutpa comes out

in the 1960s as a radical proponent of this new way of thinking becomes the intellectual engine for the Muslim Brotherhoods program.

And as it turns out, he writes his book, Milestones.

And, you know, in the last episode, kind of in the series, which was the first one, this is just the second one,

I went into this book and kind of really spent a minute or two, ten, probably explaining

who Said Kutpa was, why he was executed by the Nasser regime in Egypt in 1966.

This book came out in 1964, by the way, how he had come to America and become frustrated with the decadence of Western life

and all that. But I'm not going to go into all that. The only piece that I'm going to kind of recover

for kind of biographical reasons, and you're going to hear that it's very relevant in this,

is that Saeed Kutpa, before he became the intellectual engine of the Muslim Brotherhood, while he was Muslim,

had studied the so-called Western theorists. And in particular, he had studied

communists, not only communists, I mean philosophy in general from the West, but also a lot of

communism. The guy was a Leninist for about 15 years,

and he was very invested in the concepts of Leninism. He also studied Nazism, for the reasons

you might suspect. And he comes, goes to America, comes back from America, radicalizes back in Egypt,

and comes up with this formulation that my claim, and this is a pretty historically grounded

claim, he came up with this formulation in milestones that is basically Lenin's 1902 tracked or a short book that he wrote called

What is to be done but for the Islamist program?

So he, of course, believes in Islam.

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