MAB’s attempt to mitigate Qutb’s diatribe because he wrote it during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence with the Arabs doesn’t wash. He said Islam’s struggle with Jews had raged for 1400 years and described them as “ungrateful” by nature, “narrowly selfish” and “fanatical”. Their disposition prevented them from feeling “the larger human connection which binds humanity together”.

This is just a flavour of Qutb’s mendacity. Yet it was under Altikriti’s presidency of MAB with Kozbar serving as MAB director that Qutb was lionised on MAB’s website as the “doyen” of the Muslim Brotherhood. I don’t suggest Qutb reflects either man’s views of Jews for I know of no Qutb-like reference by them to Jews. But when a journalist challenged MAB in 2004 about its reverence for Qutb, the best MAB could do was to suggest that his “Zionist ex Mossad friends” had misled him.

In the 2013 interview Altikriti granted to his own Cordoba Foundation, he was asked if he thought “the Muslim Brotherhood, since its arrival in the UK . . . had an intellectual effect on the Muslim community in Britain?” He replied: “Undoubtedly so.” He is right — but not in the virtuous way he intended. Brotherhood ideology has also been the intellectual inspiration behind those violent Islamist groups that have appealed to thousands of British Muslims. No one more so than Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb drew on the thoughts of another MAB website poster boy, the Indian Islamist theologian Abul Ala’a Mawdudi, who founded Jamaat-e-Islami, to promote the doctrine of takfirism. This is the practice used by extremists to stigmatise other Muslims as “impure” infidels or apostates, and of Muslim states as “unislamic.” Takfir is the war cry of groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State to murder other Muslims in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the most bestial ways imaginable in pursuit of the perfect Islamic society. Like these groups, Qutb was viscerally anti-Western, with a psychotic loathing of its “decadent” and materialistic ways (triggered by sights like Americans dancing cheek-to-cheek and their neatly mown lawns),

Qutb is now widely recognised as the father of modern jihadism because he decided it was going to take more than just Da’wah (preaching) to establish the kingdom of God on earth.  He argued that a revolutionary vanguard should establish an Islamic state and then impose Islamisation, first on Arabs, then the rest. Ring any bells? It’s why Islamic State today quotes Sayyid Qutb so heavily in its public discourse.

When I listen to the current MAB president Omer El-Hamdoon — who is also an imam — castigating with such passion and conviction the “ignorance” and “arrogance” and “warped mentality” of the “savages” of Islamic State, I wonder if he links it back to the Brotherhood’s ideologue whom his organisation so publicly admired just a few years ago. It’s a fair question because, beyond MAB’s muted qualifier that some scholars disagreed with Qutb “on a number of issues”, British-based Brotherhood organisations and associates have not openly or consistently refuted the poison he wrote. But then according to Altikriti, there is no need. “If anything,” he says “the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideas has (sic) constantly, constantly, without fail, been the very antithesis of the ideology of the likes of al-Qaeda.”