John Calvert is professor of history at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of numerous books, including Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism.William Shepard was professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is the author of The Faith of a Modern Muslim Intellectual: The Religious Aspects and Implications of the Writings of Ahmad Amin and Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of ""Social Justice in Islam.""

“The child’s eye, feelings, emotions, as well as the comments of a grown-up writer present valuable information for students who are interested in the modern history of Egypt as well as those who are interested in the history of Egyptian culture. In addition, thebook provides scholars of Qutb’s ideology with the texture of life that produced, and still produces, such an ideology, in which the cry for social and political justice is mixed with a utopian adherence to a divine law.”—Nasr Abu-Zayd, author of Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics.