and 20th-century Muslim authors Maulana Maududi and Sayyid Qutb have referred to Ibn Taymiyyah when condemning self-proclaimed Muslims as not being real Muslims. ibn Abd al-Wahhab condemned the practices of Shia, Sufi and other Muslims as bid'a (innovation of the religion), and ibn Abd al-Wahhab's followers slew many Muslims for allegedly pagan (kufr) practices. (In his books Risālah Aslu Dīn Al-Islām wa Qā’idatuhu and Kashf ush-Shubuhaat (Clarification of the Doubts), ibn Abdul-Wahhāb makes an explicit takfir of people who invoke or implore for help from dead people (such as the prophet and his family) or, in other words, intercede for themselves with God by seeking intercession from the prophet and his family.) Colonial era and after In the colonial and post-colonial Muslim world the influence and pressure of Western powers meant that not only was apostasy rare in practice, but that it was (contrary to sharia) abolished as a crime punishable by death in state statutes of law (the West also encouraged establishing laws giving equal rights to women and non-Muslims in violation of sharia). Some Muslims (such as the cleric 'Adb al-Qadir 'Awdah) responded by preaching that if the state would not kill apostates then it had "become a duty of individual Moslems" to do so, and gave advice on how to plead in court to avoid punishment after being arrested for such a murder. Sayyid Qutb Sayyid Qutb could be said to have founded the actual movement of radical Islam. Unlike the other Islamic thinkers that have been mentioned above, Qutb was not an apologist. He was a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a highly influential Islamist ideologue, and the first to articulate these anathemizing principles in his magnum opus Fī ẓilāl al-Qurʾān (In the shade of the Qurʾān) and his 1966 manifesto Maʿālim fīl-ṭarīq (Milestones), which lead to his execution by the Egyptian government. Other Salafi movements in the Middle East and North Africa and across the Muslim world adopted many of his Islamist principles. According to Qutb, the Muslim community has been extinct for several centuries and reverted to jahiliyah (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance) because those who call themselves Muslims have failed to follow the sharia law. In order to restore Islam, bring back its days of glory, and free the Muslims from the clasps of ignorance, Qutb proposed the shunning of modern society, establishing a vanguard modeled after the early Muslims, preaching,