Library of Congress Sayyid Qutb, behind bars during his trial in Eqypt on charges he was helping an effort to overthrow the government. He was hanged in 1966.
Erik Dunham, NPR Online Greeley is about 100 miles north of Denver, Colo.
Robert Siegel, NPR News Fans of the Northridge High School Grizzly Bears wrestling team show their spirit. Qutb singled out the town's love of wrestling as evidence of the "brutish" nature of American males.
Library of Congress The town was named after newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, whose rallying cry was "Go west, young man, go west!" Greeley visited his namesake town just once, in 1870.
Library of Congress Nathan C. Meeker
Egyptian writer and educator Sayyid Qutb spent the better half of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., studying curriculum at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. What he saw prompted him to condemn America as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in.
Qutb's writings would later become the theoretical basis for many radical Islamic groups of today — including al Qaeda. Qutb increasingly saw the redemption of Egypt in the application of Islamic law.
But NPR's Robert Siegel reports that some of Qutb's conclusions may have been the result of the clash of two very different cultures. "The way Qutb saw America was sharply at odds with the way Americans saw themselves," Siegel says.
Qutb pointed out many things Americans take for granted as examples of the nation's culture of greed — for example, the green lawns in front of homes in Greeley.
Ironically, Greeley in the middle of the 20th century was a very conservative town, where alcohol was illegal. It was a planned community, founded by Utopian idealists looking to make a garden out of the dry plains north of Denver using irrigation. The founding fathers of Greeley were by all reports temperate, religious and peaceful people.
But Qutb wasn't convinced. "America in 1949 was not a natural fit for Qutb," Siegel says. "He was a man of color, and the United States was still largely segregated. He was an Arab — American public opinion favored Israel, which had come into existence just a year before."
In the college literary magazine, Qutb wrote of his disappointment:
"When we came here to appeal to England for our rights, the world helped England against the justice (sic). When we came here to appeal against Jews, the world helped the Jews against the justice. During the war between Arab and Jews, the world helped the Jews, too."
Qutb wrote about Greeley in his book,
The America I Have Seen. He offered a distorted chronology of American history: "He informed his Arab readers that it began with bloody wars against the Indians, which he claimed were still underway in 1949," Siegel says. "He wrote that before independence, American colonists pushed Latinos south toward Central America — even though the American colonists themselves had not yet pushed west of the Mississippi... Then came the Revolution, which he called 'a destructive war led by George Washington.'"
When it came to culture, Qutb denounced the primitive jazz music and loud clothing, the obsession with body image and perfection, and the bald sexuality. The American female was naturally a temptress, acting her part in a sexual system Qutb described as "biological":
"The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. 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."
Even an innocent dance in a church basement is proof of animalistic American sexuality:
"They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire..."
To Qutb, women were vixens, and men were sports-obsessed brutes: "This primitiveness can be seen in the spectacle of the fans as they follow a game of football... or watch boxing matches or bloody, monstrous wrestling matches... This spectacle leaves no room for doubt as to the primitiveness of the feelings of those who are enamored with muscular strength and desire it."
Egyptian political scientist Mamoun Fandy tells Siegel that Qutb's critique of America was in many ways a critique of Egyptian society. "Fandy says Qutb was warning Egyptians of the West, of modernity, of things they were very attracted to," Siegel says. As for Qutb's revulsion over American sexuality, Fandy says there is no evidence that Qutb ever had a sexual relationship in his life.
Qutb became a leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood on his return to Egypt. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1953, he was once considered for a Cabinet post. But he was later accused of plotting against the government and executed in 1966.
"In his prison writings, Qutb equated governments like Egypt's with the pre-Islamic tribes of Arabia. They represented a state of ignorance — Islam offered liberation," Siegel says. "Among his avid readers were the men who went on to found al Qaeda.
"As for the town? Greeley, Colo., remained conservative — But since 1969, it's no longer dry."
Sayyed Qutb video (notice the reference to Al Quada and 9/11)
http://wn.com/Sayyed_Qutb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Meeker
Nathan Meeker wikipedia
Excerpt:
The Ute Uprising and Meeker Massacre
The federal government had been trying to get the Utes to leave their nomadic lifestyle, and become farmers, send their children to school and adopt other elements of European-American culture.
An etching that appeared in the December 6, 1879 edition of
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper depicts the aftermath of the "Meeker Massacre." Meeker grave at lower left; W.H. Post grave at lower right
Meeker wanted to
convert the Utes from what he saw as a state of primitive savagery to
Christian farmers who worked in a way he recognized. He was warned that the Ute resented his reforms and attempts at conversion. Meeker ignored the warnings, and ordered that a horse racing track be plowed under to convert the track and horses' pasturage to farmland. The Utes, whose horses were a chief source of status and wealth, considered the order an affront. Meeker suggested to one man that the tribe had too many horses and they would have to kill some to give more land over to agriculture.
[citation needed]
The recently elected Governor of Colorado,
Frederick Walker Pitkin, had campaigned on a theme of "The Utes Must Go!"; both he and other local politicians and settlers made exaggerated claims against the Utes. They wanted to gain the rich land occupied by the Utes under the Treaty of 1867.
[2]
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAgreeley.htm
Excerpt:
Horace Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on 3rd February, 1811. He trained as a printer but he later moved to New York City where he became a journalist. Greeley worked for the New Yorker and in 1841 established the New York Tribune. A newspaper he was to edit for over thirty years.
Greeley took a strong moral tone in his newspaper and campaigned against alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prostitution and capital punishment. However, his main concern was the abolition of slavery.
In 1838 Greeley agreed to edit the Jeffersonian, a Whig newspaper in New York. A close associate of William Seward, Henry Clay and William Harrison, he edited the pro-Whig journal, Log Cabin, during the 1840 presidential election.
Greeley was very interested in socialist and feminist ideas and published articles by Karl Marx, Charles Dana, Margaret Fuller and Jane Grey Swisshelm in the New York Tribune. He also promoted the views of Albert Brisbane, who wanted society organised into co-operative communities.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1957/3/1957_3_20.shtml
Excerpt:
WHEN KARL MARX WORKED FOR HORACE GREELEY
By WILLIAM HARLAN HALE
On Saturday morning, October 25, 1851, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, entrenched after a decade of existence as America’s leading Whig daily, appeared with twelve pages rather than its usual eight. The occasion was too noteworthy to be passed over without comment by the paper itself. So a special editorial was written—probably by Greeley’s young managing editor, the brisk, golden-whiskered Charles A. Dana—to point it out.
Besides a “press of advertisements.” the editorial ran, this morning’s enlarged paper contained “articles from some foreign contributors that are especially worthy of attention.” Among these were “a letter from Madame Belgioioso, upon the daily and domestic life of the Turks, and another upon Germany by one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced—no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy.”
Turning the pages to see who this most clear and vigorous German might be, readers glanced past such items as a “Grand Temperance Rally in the igth Ward“; a Philadelphia story headlined “Cruelty of a Landlord—Brutality of a Husband”: a Boston campaign telegram announcing a Whig demonstration “in favor of Daniel Webster for President.” Then they reached a long article entitled “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” over the by-line, Karl Marx.
“The first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed,” it began upon a somber organ tone; ”“The ‘powers that were’ before the hurricane of 1848, are again the ‘powers that be.’ ” But, contributor Marx went on, swelling to his theme, the second act of the movement was soon to come, and the interval before the storm was a good time to study the “general social state … of the convulsed nations” that led inevitably to such upheavals.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/egypt-and-muslim-brotherhood-stratfor-special-report
Excerpt:
It was during this period that another relative outsider in the movement,
Sayyid Qutb, a literary figure and a civil servant, emerged as an influential ideologue of the group shortly after joining up. Qutb also experienced long periods of imprisonment and torture, which radicalized his views. He eventually called for the complete overthrow of the system. He wrote many treatises, but one in particular, Milestones, was extremely influential — not so much within the movement, as among a new generation of more radical Islamists.
Qutb was executed in 1966 on charges of trying to topple the government, but his ideas inspired the founding of jihadism. Disenchanted with the MB ideology and its approach, a younger generation of extremely militant Islamists emerged. These elements, who would found the world’s first jihadist groups, saw the MB as having compromised on Islamic principles and accepted Western ideas. Further galvanizing this new breed of militant Islamists was the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and the MB’s formal renunciation of violence in 1970.
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