by returning to the Book and the Sunnah, as the Prophet ﷺ indicated when he said: “I have left among you two matters; as long as you hold fast to them you will never go astray: the Book of Allah and my Sunnah, and they will never separate until they return to me at the Basin.” If they do that, they will have laid the foundation for the rise of an Islamic society; without it they can never stand, nor can an armed state come into being.
I am, indeed, profoundly astonished at some writers and academics who compose works on treating certain inner maladies—such as the author of the tract The Hidden Sin: The Greatest Danger in the Life of Muslims—and yet go on to reveal a striking ignorance of the real peril surrounding the Muslims, the very peril to which Ustadh Sayyid Qutb, may Allah have mercy on him, referred in the passage cited above.
The doctor in question found that reality unpalatable, so he began to cast aspersions on it and on those who remind people of it, under a heading in the same tract (p. 85) entitled, “Our Problem Is Moral, Not Intellectual.” He writes: “What all of this means is that we suffer from an issue that pertains to character and conscience and has nothing whatsoever to do with conviction or thought.”
Such were his words! He then expressed amazement at people who recognize his “problem” and become alert to what he calls the greatest danger in the life of Muslims, yet instead of addressing it by the means he prescribes in his tract, they tackle it with even more intellectual studies… Next he said, referring to the words of Sayyid Qutb, may Allah have mercy on him:
“So what benefit is there in our going on at length about the ‘jāhili society,’ or in displaying ingenuity in exposing the aggressive schemes pursued by the enemies of Islam and the masterminds of ideological invasion, or in presenting yet more of the methodology of Islamic thought and Islamic daʿwah, when the calamity from which the Muslims suffer is not ignorance of any of that ⦗1⦘ but rather the malignant disease that has taken hold of their souls?!”