In the 1950s, Islamist intellectuals and publics diagnosed the crisis of humanity as geopolitical, material, educational, and spiritual. This paper recovers their theorization, and it proceeds in two parts. First, it engages with how Sayyid Qutb’s books on capitalism and on peace discussed the precipice and crisis of humanity by directly naming and analyzing three converging forces. These forces are capitalism as it sanctions violence and transforms human self-understanding, colonialism as it remakes pre-existing institutions of education and finance and rewires the consciousness of the colonized; and the continued aftershocks of the crusades in the dominant ideological narration of Muslim history and in the frenzied energy of territorial dispossession. In these ways, Qutb analyzed the crisis of humanity--understood as the rise of inhuman violence and the loss of the morality that informs mankind—as having a material basis, an ideological structure, and a longer genealogy. The second (and larger) half of the paper situates Qutb’s arguments in relation to the pre-existing discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood. It turns to the weekly journal al-Da‘wa (The Call), focusing on the first three years of its publication. The journal was published by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and included Qutb among its regular contributors. Like Qutb, the journal’s articles theorized violence, colonialism, and capitalism as nodes of contemporary crisis. The language with which the periodical’s articles diagnosed these structures was authorized by an Islamist key that blended multiple ideological and historical idioms together. Attention to how the journal’s articles situated the crisis of humanity in relation to democratic hypocrisies and fictions, class structures, colonial interests, and the resurgence of a crusader spirit also shows that Qutb was embedded in a set of discourses to which he was only one participant. Finally, the paper draws out the implications of shifting the location of theory along these lines, in which the Muslim is not the source of crisis, but the theorist of how the crisis of modern man is an entire geography of violence that is maintained through colonialism, capitalism, and Orientalism.