A Lesson In Hate

How an Egyptian student came to study 1950s America and left determined to wage holy war ___ Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

Born in 1906 in the northern Egyptian village of Musha and raised in a devout Muslim home, Qutb memorized the Koran as a boy. Later he moved to Cairo and found work as a teacher and writer. His novels made no great impression, but he earned a reputation as an astute literary critic. Qutb was among the first champions of Naguib Mahfouz, a young, modern novelist who, in 1988, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Qutb matured, his mind took on a more political cast. Even by the standards of Egypt, those were chaotic, corrupt times: World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East. For a proud man like Sayyid Qutb, the humiliation of his country at the hands of secular leaders and Western puppets was galling. His writing drew unfavorable attention from the Egyptian government, and by 1948, Mahfouz has said, Qutb’s friends in the Ministry of Education were sufficiently worried about his situation that they contrived to send him abroad to the safety of the United States.

Some biographical sketches suggest that Qutb arrived with a benign view of America, but if that’s true it didn’t last long. During a short stay in Washington, D.C., he witnessed the commotion surrounding an elevator accident and was stunned to hear other onlookers making a joke of the victim’s appearance. From this and a few offhand remarks in other settings, Qutb concluded that Americans suffered from “a drought of sentimental sympathy” and that “Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.”

This became the lens through which Qutb read nearly every American encounter—a clash of New World versus Old. Qutb easily satisfied the requirements at the graduate school of the Colorado State College of Education (now known as the University of Northern Colorado) and devoted the rest of his time to his true interest—the American soul, if such a thing existed. “This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values?” Qutb wondered. “And what does it add to the moral account of humanity?” His answer: nothing.

Still, Qutb’s contempt for America was not as simple as some people might now imagine. He did not recoil from political freedom and democracy, as, say, President Bush might expect from a jihadi theorist, nor did he complain about shades of imperial ambition in American foreign policy, as writers on the left might suppose. Regarding the excesses of American culture—vulgarity, materialism and promiscuity—Qutb expressed shock, but it rang a bit hollow. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.” These curvy jezebels pursued boys with “wide, strapping chest[s]” and “ox muscles,” Qutb added with disgust. Yet no matter how lascivious his adjectives, the fastidious, unmarried Egyptian could not convincingly portray the church dances and Look magazines he encountered in sleepy Greeley as constituting a genuine sexual “jungle.”

Qutbs ranting about America contains obsessive and enlightening passages about those like him interpret the liberated role of women in western society who are in charge of their own sexuality.

Coming from his own primitive islamic background, he interpreted this as one of the offerings of "modernity" he could not understand or assimilate into. His ideology kept him a social outcast, so like many islmaic immigrants, he retreated further away from the ways of the kuffar, seeking help in deluded islamic fantasies.

His not being able to cope with a woman as an equal combined with his reading of the koran (Jews being "ape and pigs" - confirmed in his Koran commentary) lead him to develop antisemitic fantasies to explain the condition of western society as he saw it. From Qutb's "Our Battle Against the Jews":

"The Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society. Principal among them are Marx, Freud, Durkheim and the Jew Jean-Paul Sartre."

Of course, Qutb had no fondness of Christians or anyone else either.

"The unbelievers were of three kinds: adversaries in war, people with treaties, and Dhimmies. The people with treaties eventually became Muslims, so there were only two kinds left: people at war and Dhimmies."

The element of sexual frustration, Qutbs repressed sexual envy, and primitive coping mechanisms, is not to be overlooked... the article covers some of his obsession with his looks (his hair etc) and of American women with their "body’s seductive capacity... round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs... - and she shows all this and does not hide it." The last part is important.. all this was "available" but poor social misfit Qutb was left high and dry as they ignored him to chase "“wide, strapping chest[s] and ox muscles." In the "sexual jungle," Qutb, the ugly outsider who could not assimilate was not only at the bottom of the food chain. He was a reject.

This frustration with women in control of their own sexuality, free to choose and reject a mate as they pleased, probably played a key role in turning him all the more inwards towards islam and to reject and grow hatred towards the new culture he witnessed around him.

In a way, there are similarities with Yusof Islam, aka Cat Stevens. Stevens with his talent and fame and failed relationship with a Boston stripper, Qutb with his intellectual and literary prowess, both being made to look like fools by failed relationships or rejection by women they could not control or sexually subjugate.

In islam, they have a system and ideology to totally dominate a woman, the safety of hiding your woman away from potential competition and removing abilities to reject or disobey a husband.

For the weak, rejected man, or control freak, islam is the ideal answer. Allowing a woman equality or to dress as they want, pursue a career, and choose and reject her own partner is so terrifying to them that they would choose to be a slave of allah instead, so they may fall back on the laws of islamic society to enforce their womens submission and obedience to them.

My favorite Qutb quote once again, as it sums up the essence of his message:

"It is not the function of Islam to compromise with the concepts of Jahiliyya (the ways of the infidels) which are current in the world or to co-exist in the same land together with a jahili system. Jahiliyyah, to whatever period it belongs, is Jahiliyyah; that is, deviation from the worship of One Allah and the way of life prescribed by Allah.
It derives its system and laws and regulations and habits and standards and values from a source other than Allah. On the other hand, Islam is submission to Allah, and its function is to bring people away from Jahiliyyah towards Islam. Jahiliyyah is the worship of some people by others; that is to say, some people become dominant and make laws for others, regardless of whether these laws are against Allah's injunctions and without caring for the use or misuse of their authority.
Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible."

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