The radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Cairo in 1966, may have been a Sunni Muslim but his writings influenced the religious Shia revolutionaries in Iran. His seminal work Milestones had been translated into Farsi and fed into the idea that the answer to the problems in the Muslim world was Islam. Qutb had more influence in Arab countries, where the systems of royalty, nationalism, socialism and secular dictatorship had failed to better people’s lives, but when Khomeini declared that ‘Islam is political, or it is nothing’, he was saying what Qutb’s followers in the
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