There is an insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine about the philosophical roots of Al Qaeda's global terrorist agenda. Sayyid Qutb wrote 'In the Shade of the Koran', a voluminous work that is to militant Islam what Karl Marx's Manifesto was to Communism, what Vladimir Lenin's writings were to Bolshevism, what Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was to Nazism. (Qutb, who was a contemporary of Hitler and Lenin, also wrote from prison.) His first book, Milestones, was an early inspiration for terrorism, but was dismissed as shallow in the West. The author of the Magazine article, Paul Berman, argues that dismissing Qutb is foolhardy.
According to Berman, "Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things."