Muslim Brotherhood and Nasser: The Prison Years | Part 2

History Onion · 2:59

On 29 August 1966 Egypt hanged Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood's leading writer, convicted of plotting against the state. His prison book, Milestones, was banned, and Egyptian militants of the next generation would cite it. Part 2 goes back to how he got there: the 1952 alliance with Nasser's officers, the eight shots in Alexandria, the hangings and prison camps — and a second book from the same prisons, which historians read as the Brotherhood leadership's answer. Context & numbers: • The alliance: after the July 1952 coup the officers dissolved every political party in January 1953 and exempted the Brotherhood as a religious association. They dissolved it on 14 January 1954 after clashes at Cairo University. • The treaty: Nasser signed the Anglo-Egyptian evacuation agreement on 19 October 1954. It ended the 72-year British troop presence and allowed British forces to return to the Suez base in specified war scenarios. The Brotherhood denounced it as a sellout. The shots came seven days later. • Was it staged? Egypt's deposed first president, Muhammad Naguib, wrote in his memoirs that it was, and the Brotherhood has long said so. Historians including Richard Mitchell, Joel Gordon, Gilles Kepel and John Calvert treat it as a real attempt by members of the Brotherhood's armed wing, the Special Apparatus. • The six hanged (December 1954): the gunman Mahmoud Abdel-Latif; Yusuf Tal'at, head of the armed wing; Ibrahim al-Tayyib; Hindawi Duwayr; Muhammad Farghali; and Abdel Qader Audah, a former judge whose role is disputed. The Brotherhood's leader, Hasan al-Hudaybi, was condemned and his sentence commuted to life. • Prisoners: estimates for 1954 run from over 1,000 tried to about 4,000 imprisoned, with Brotherhood-side accounts far higher. Torture is documented by historians (Mitchell, Kandil, Willi) and in prisoners' memoirs such as that of Zaynab al-Ghazali, who was arrested in 1965; the government denied it.