An ideological founding figure for many islamists and a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, he was twice imprisoned and eventually executed by the secularist Egyptian government. He labelled all existing societies, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, as jahiliyya (a term for the age of ignorance that preceded the advent of Islam). He called for a jihad (struggle) to produce a new kind of society, which would be governed in every respect by Islamic principles. The Islamic principles espoused by Qutb included apparently modern liberal notions of democracy and social justice, but he undertood these as radically different from the corresponding Western values, which are based on a materialistic rather than an Islamic foundation.