Before we face into the 25th anniversary of the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11th, 2001, it is worth asking where they came from. And answering: from the manosphere. The deep roots of this barbaric assault on Americans lie in the same hatred of women that is now embedded in American reactionary politics.

It is impossible to comprehend 9/11 without recalling the founder of modern jihadism, Sayyid Qutb. The two greatest intellectual influences on Osama bin Laden – the Palestinian preacher Abdallah Azzam and the militant Saudi cleric Safar al-Hawali – were steeped in Qutb’s writings.

Qutb is both the Karl Marx and the Patrick Pearse of violent Islamism, at once its theorist and its exemplary martyr. His punchy book Ma‘alim (Milestones) – written in an Egyptian prison in 1964, before he was hanged in 1966 – is The Communist Manifesto of the movement. Its call for a male vanguard dedicated to the use of violence to establish a universal Islamic State was the blueprint for al-Qaeda.

Qutb was a literary critic, Koranic scholar and official in the Department of Education in Cairo. In 1948, when he began to criticise the Egyptian monarchy, it sent him on a study trip to the United States to get him out of the way. He spent nearly two years in New York, Washington, Colorado and California.

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