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[Sayyid Qutb] the lone poor young man from the home he supports through his labor and the sweat of his brow, leaving behind his wife and children and, often, his elderly father and mother, abandoning them for five full years without income or compensation.

His salary, composed of paltry millimes, does not allow him to send them anything. He leaves them for five full years, which he spends in humiliation, torment, and degradation that remain forever a bitter memory and a dark point in his imagination.

The English turned honorable Eastern military service into humiliation, shame, ruined homes, broken families, and a disaster that people try to avoid and that is always linked in their minds with memories of misery, wretchedness, and degradation. As for the officers' huge salaries, their aims within that system were:

First, to create a great chasm between the army's officers and its soldiers.

Second, to exhaust the army's budget so that nothing remained for armament.

Third, to immerse army officers in luxury so that they would not know the rigors of military life.

Fourth, to arouse their greed and their fear of losing this comfort if the serious moment came, duty called them, and the homeland wanted them to stand on its side against those who had lavished money upon them and provided them with luxury and enjoyment.

The English thought they had succeeded. They thought they had extinguished this people's martial spirit beyond recovery.

Military service had become the “ghoul” from which the people's nature recoiled, before whose terror families and homes trembled, and from which individuals fled as they fled humiliation, degradation, and ruin.

But this nation's nature was stronger, and this nation's faith was deeper.

A new light burst forth in people's souls that the English had not reckoned with. Or perhaps they had