environment." Force is necessary, Qutb explains, because it is naive to expect "those who have usurped the authority of God" to give up their power without a fight. Remaining aloof from Jahiliyyah and its values and culture, but preaching and forcibly abolishing authority within it, the vanguard will travel the road, gradually growing from a cell of "three individuals" to ten, from ten to a hundred, until there are thousands, and blossom into a truly Islamic community. The community may start in the homeland of Islam but this is by no means "the ultimate objective of the Islamic movement of Jihad." Jihad can not merely be defensive, it must be offensive, and its objective must be to carry Islam "throughout the earth to the whole of mankind". This is not aggression, as Orientalists would lead you to believe, but necessary because "truth and falsehood cannot coexist on this Earth". True Muslims should maintain a "sense of supremacy" and "superiority," on the road of renewal, and to remember their enemies are angered by them, hate them "only because of their faith", "only because they believe in God". And so it is important that they prepare themselves for a "life until death in poverty, difficulty, frustration, torment and sacrifice", and even to brace themselves for possibility of death by torture at the hands of Jahiliyyah's sadistic, arrogant, mischievous, criminal and degraded people. Qutb ends his book with quotes from "surat Al-Burooj" from the Quran, an example of persecution against Muslims and enjoining modern-day Muslims to endure the same or worse tortures for the sake of carrying out God's will. After all, "this world is not a place of reward"; the believer's reward is in heaven. Influences Islamic Two of Qutb's major influences were the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiya, and contemporary British Indian (later Pakistani) Islamist writer Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi. Both used the historical term jahiliyya to describe contemporary events in the Muslim world. Two other concepts popularized by Qutb in Milestones also came from Maududi: al-'ubudiyya, or worship, (which is performed not only by praying and adoring but by obeying); and al-hakimiyya, or sovereignty, (which is God's over all the earth and violated when His law, the sharia, is not obeyed). Qutb's premise—that sharia law is essential to Islam. and that any self-described "Muslim" ruler who ignores it in favor of man-made laws is actually a non-Muslim who should be