Sayyid Qutb and Malcolm X are two of the most seminal and ultimately tragic Muslim figures of the XXth century. This paper’s working hypothesis is that both represented, in two different political, religious, and social contexts, a modern understanding of Islam as a comprehensive, praxis changing system carrying a universal ethos of liberation. Therefore, the main argument of this paper is that Malcolm X/ Malik el-Shabazz as well as Sayyid Qutb express via a different conceptual lexicon a version of “Islamic totalism.” Defined as “the tendency to view Islam not merely as a "religion" in the narrow sense of theological belief, private prayer, and ritual worship, but also as a total way of life with guidance for political, economic, and social behavior.” [Shepard, 1987], this holistic view on Islam is shared in different but comparable degrees of systemicity by Malcolm X and Qutb alike. Consequently, analyzing a variety of primary sources, this paper attempts to compare Qutb’s Islamism and Malcolm X’s Islamically infused black nationalism employing as a methodological model the synchronic lens comparison. Being a working subcategory of the larger model of new comparativism, a lens comparison aims to comprehend the comparanda in the specific contexts in which they are created, while avoiding the isolationism generated by a restrictive contextualism that hampers attempts to employ cross-cultural categories. By considering the interplay between similarity and difference, the lens model provides a more capacious understanding that re-contextualize phenomena by analyzing them in light of one another [Doniger, 1998] This paper will show that Malcolm X (both before and after his conversion to Sunni Islam) and Sayyid Qutb understood Islam as the only genuinely universal and salvific alternative to the secular ideologies of modernity which are seen as universality deprived and harbouring an imperialist, oppressive core. Islam on the other hand is consistently presented as possessing comprehensiveness, realism, unity, and a perfect harmony with human nature. This comparative study will achieve two main heuristic objectives. First, it will contribute to the growing corpus of scholarship that aims to place Sayyid Qutb’s radical Islamism in a wider analytical context that goes beyond the limiting and overused exclusive focus on his vision of offensive jihad. Second, this paper will add to the recent corrective re-configuration of Malcolm X that rejects the de-Islamization and de-radicalization of his vision.