"The America That I Have Seen:" The Effect of Sayyid Qutb's Colorado Sojourn on the Political Islamist Worldview

Hagler 1 “The America That I Have Seen” The Effect of Sayyid Quṭb’s Colorado Sojourn on the Political Islamist Worldview Aaron M. Hagler ACM/ Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teacher/Scholar Fellow Department of History Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, IA Introduction Sayyid Quṭb, the foremost Islamist thinker of the middle of the twentieth century, was already negatively predisposed to the West when he came to the United States on a mission for the Egyptian Ministry of Education in 1948. The Egyptian monarchy, headed by King Farouk, hoped that the stellar academic and literature scholar would be positively impressed with American culture, and return to Egypt with an American educational skill set that would be of use to the government. However, Quṭb’s preexisting vague negative impression of America crystalized into specific concerns that affected his entire worldview as a result of studying at the Colorado State College of Education (later the University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado. To the dismay of the Egyptian monarchy, and to the annoyance of the later Nasser government, Quṭb would go on to write staunch invectives against the West (as well as the secular regimes ruling Egypt and the rest of the Middle East), based in large part on his Colorado experience. Quṭb, who, in the 1950s, would become among the most prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and who, in 1966, would be hanged for his role in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Gemāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir (Gemal Abdel Nasser), was both awed and appalled by American life. When he left Greeley, and after short stays in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego, Quṭb returned to Egypt, where he published the article “The America That I Have Seen” (Amrīka allatī Raʾaytu) for the Egyptian magazine al-Risāla. A scathing collection of anthropological observations about his American neighbors, “The America That I Have Seen” reveals a man fascinated by American science, efficiency, and knowledge, but aghast at American “primitiveness,” immorality, and lack of proper human feeling. It was these negative personal qualities that led Quṭb, a decade after returning to Egypt, to come to the opinion that the West was both jāhilī—“ignorant,” an opprobrious term initially reserved for pre-Islamic Arabia, but which came to include all non-Islamic societies—and powerful, which made it a clear and present danger to the Islamic world. Had Quṭb’s opinion of the United States and the West not evolved from the disgust evident in “The America That I Have Seen,” it would have been the end of the story. After all, he was not alone in his distaste for Western materialism; Nietzsche, Kirkegaard, Heidegger, and even Martin Luther King, Jr., agreed with him that the West had become scientifically advanced, but had lost (or had never had) the spiritual and moral wherewithal to wield technological and scientific innovation responsibly.1 But Quṭb’s understanding of history, and in particular the history between the West and the Islamic world, was far deeper, and made his observations about life in the West particularly ominous for him. Deeply interested in literature, history, and politics, and soon to become a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Quṭb saw the West as an “undutiful boy” that had turned against and sought to dominate its intellectual ancestor of Egypt, beginning with the Crusades and culminating in European Colonialism.2 In the West’s immorality, licentiousness, and inhumanity, Quṭb saw a grave threat to the Islamic World. He  Hagler 2 wrote, “The Crusader spirit that runs in the blood of all Occidentals….colors their thinking, [and] is responsible for their imperialistic fear of the spirit of Islam and for their efforts to crush the strength of Islam.”3 The America that Quṭb saw in Greeley was dominating, insidious, and immoral, spiritually bankrupt and religiously, culturally, and militarily expansionist: a true successor to the European Crusader enterprise of what the West remembers as the Middle Ages. The Crusader Spirit and Immorality: The Nature of the Threat to Islam from America The “Crusader spirit” to which Quṭb refers, however, was not the threat in and of itself. After all, the Islamic world had withstood the Crusades; the Muslims had beaten back the Crusaders and destroyed the statelets they had created along the Levantine Mediterranean coast. The danger of the West, with which Quṭb came face to face in Greeley, was its insidious religious and cultural disorientation. In Milestones, Quṭb’s manual of Sunni Islamist thought and call actively to resist the non-Islamic forces threatening the Islamic world that would become seminal to a range of Islamist movements, he warns of the West’s dominance and derides Muslims who adhere to a Western perception of religion. Islam, he argues, “is not merely a belief…[it] is a way of life [that] takes practical steps to organize a movement for freeing man.” 4 This notion of religion, he argues, is anathema to Western cultural and social norms, which are, on the whole, utterly immoral: “Those of our contemporary Muslim scholars who are defeated by the pressure of current conditions and the attacks on of treacherous orientalists do not subscribe to this characteristic of Islam. The orientalists have painted a picture of Islam as a violent movement which imposed its belief upon people by the sword. These vicious orientalists know very well that this is not true, but by this method they try to distort the true motives of Islamic Jihad. But our Muslim scholars, these defeated people, search for [defensive] reasons with which to negate this accusation. They are ignorant of the nature of Islam and of its function, and that it has a right to take the initiative for human freedom….These research scholars, with their defeated mentality, have adopted the Western concept of ‘religion’, which is merely a name for ‘belief’ in the heart, having no relation to the practical affairs of life, and therefore they conceive of religious war as a war to impose belief on peoples’ hearts.”5 In other words, it is the Western perception of what religion is that not only reveals the West to be a bankrupt society, but also has informed upon the West’s own misperception of Islam. Quṭb argues that religious war, Jiḥād, is the struggle to assert Islam’s divinely ordained right to political dominion over the earth, and specifically not a struggle to impose an Islamic system of personal belief upon the world. To Quṭb, the worst part of the West’s misperception of Islam— indeed, of religion—is the insidiousness of Western, orientalist thought. He sees that the Western concepts of Islam and religion have invaded the thinking even of Muslim scholars, whom Quṭb does not name, who misguidedly seek to defend Islam’s history on Western theoretical grounds, rather than asserting Islam’s moral right to assert political control “so that it may establish the divine system on earth, while it leaves the matter of belief to personal conscience.”6 Thus, the greater danger, to Quṭb, is not the continued military domination of Islam by the West, nor even what he considers the neo-Crusader project of the State of Israel. It is not even Christianity, Islam’s greatest historical rival. Rather, it is the Western concept of  Hagler 3 religion combined with the “Crusader spirit.” The Western notion of religion is a dangerous idea that has the potential to undermine the entire Islamic worldview. The “Crusader spirit,” coupled with the West’s persistent and flawed view of Islam as a venture that seeks to impose a system of belief upon everybody in the world, is a sure sign, to Quṭb, that the purposeful exportation of Western cultural and theoretical norms, the intellectual colonization of notion of religion itself by the immoral West, would endure, and would need to be resisted. By 1964, when he wrote Milestones, Quṭb’s perception of the West was concreted. His mistrust of the West, although present, had not been so deeply set fifteen years earlier, when he first came to the United States and took up residence in Greeley. Reading through “The America That I Have Seen,” it is not difficult to see where the seed of Quṭb’s perception that religion in the West was only a system of personal belief first was planted. This notion, of course, is not incorrect; personal belief is, generally, what religion means in the West. However, to Quṭb, who in Milestones would advocate the re-creation of the community of the Prophet as the most desirable political and social schema, the disconnect he perceived between churches and spirituality in Greeley was clearly jarring. “In America [the church] is for everything but worship,” he writes, flabbergasted. “[Americans] go to church for carousal and enjoyment, or, as they call it in their language, ‘fun.’ Most who go there do so out of necessary social tradition, and it is a place for meeting and friendship, and to spend a nice time. This is not only the feeling of the people, but it is also the feeling of the men and the church and its ministers.”7 “Religion” in the West was not only improperly divorced from politics; it was not even spiritual. The houses of worship were not places of worship; rather, they had, at some point, lost their spiritual function, and had become clubs, circuses, and theatres. Even worse, the churches themselves, Quṭb writes, were not only unspiritual, but also venues for licentious behavior. One particular infamous night in Greeley—the evening of a social dance at a church to whose social group Quṭb belonged—made a particular impression on him. “The dance floor was lit with red and yellow blue lights, and with a few white lamps. And 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. When the minister descended from his office, he looked intently around the place and at the people, and encouraged those men and women still sitting who had not yet participated in this circus to rise and take part. And as he noticed that the white lamps spoiled the romantic, dreamy atmosphere, he set about, with that typical American elegance and levity, dimming them one by one, all the while being careful not to interfere with the dance, or bump into any couples dancing on the dance floor. And the place really did appear to become more romantic and passionate. Then he advanced to the gramophone to choose a song that would befit this atmosphere and encourage the males and the females who were still seated to participate. “And the Father chose. He chose a famous American song called “But Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which is composed of a dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late,  Hagler 4 and her mother was waiting but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with this line: but baby, it’s cold outside! “And the minister waited until he saw people stepping to the rhythm of this moving song, and he seemed satisfied and contented. He left the dance floor for his home, leaving the men and women to enjoy this night in all its pleasure and innocence!”8 This is the picture of the American church that Quṭb brought back with him to Egypt: a place of community, gathering, and carnivals, but also of immorality and licentiousness, and of hypocrisy. There is some irony in this characterization, given Greeley’s origins. The town had been conceived as a dry town, with the initial call for settlers emphasizing morality and upright living above all else. Nonetheless, it is evident that Quṭb was operating under a different standard of morality, and easily dismissed any notion that Greeley, or the American church in general, was anything but corrupt. “I return to Egypt,” he writes, “and I find those who speak or write about the church in America, even if they have not seen America for a moment, and its role in societal reform, and its activities in purifying the heart and edifying the soul….But what can I say? Strange things can happen in this world! For God has created all kinds of people and things.”9 To be sure, one does not find in “The America That I Have Seen” the absolute mistrust of the Western concept of religion, explicit in Milestones, whose parasitic appeal was being actively hawked in the intellectual markets of international academia, or implicitly assumed in the expanding, culturally hegemonic American empire. Nonetheless, it is clear from the astonished tone of “The America That I Have Seen” that Quṭb’s encounter with American “spiritual” or “religious” life in Greeley was deeply unsettling to him. He found American religious life spiritually impoverished and politically inert; both shortcomings made Quṭb ask himself deeper questions about American and Western Civilization. “Islam is the Real Civilization”: The Inherent Superiorty of Islamic Culture To Sayyid Quṭb, and to Islamist posterity, the ideal of the Islamic state existing conterminously with the Islamic faith meant that the nature of religion, as a system of personal belief as well as a set of cultural norms, laws, and body politic tied into one, was inextricably linked to the greatness of Islamic civilization. The American misconception of religion as only a system of personal belief was the rotten core at the heart of the decadence of American civilization. By the time Quṭb composed Milestones, he had become aware, he says, of the implicit influence Western conceptions of what “civilization” connoted exercised on his thinking. He admits that the Western concept of civilization “had clouded [his] intuition….[it] was his standard; it had prevented [him] from seeing with clear and penetrating vision.”10 Quṭb explains “civilization” in strictly religious terms, and draws a critical distinction between a civilization— based upon divine law—and a society (not a civilization) based upon human legislation: “When, in a society, the sovereignty belongs to God alone, expressed in its obedience to the divine Law, only then is every person in that society free from servitude to others, and only then does he taste true freedom. This alone is ‘human civilization’, as the basis of a human civilization is the complete and true freedom of every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and  Hagler 5 some others are slaves who obey them, then there is no freedom in the real sense, nor dignity for each and every individual. “It is necessary that we clarify the point that legislation is not limited only to legal matters, as some people assign this narrow meaning to the Shariʿah. The fact is that attitudes, the way of living, the values, criteria, habits and traditions, are all legislated and affect people. If a particular group of people forges all these chains and imprisons others in them, this will not be a free society. In such a society some people have the position of authority, while others are subservient to them; hence this society will be backward, and in Islamic terminology is called a ‘jahili’ society. “Only Islamic society is unique in this respect, in that the authority belongs to God alone; and man, cutting off his chains of servitude to other human beings, enters into the service of God and thus attains that real and complete freedom which is the focus of human civilization….Only Islam has the distinction of basing the fundamental binding relationship in its society on belief; and on the basis of this belief, black and white and red and yellow, Arabs and Greeks, Persians and Africans, and all nations which inhabit the earth become one community.”11 In other words, Quṭb asserts that a civilization must be based on belief, since other factors— primarily nation of origin and ethnicity—take into account neither human selection of belief (and, thus, humanity) nor the divinely revealed Truth. He is careful to distinguish an “Islamic society” from a society “in which people call themselves Muslims”—the former has the distinction of being governed by Islamic law, while the latter refers to nominally Muslim regimes Quṭb considers impious—such as Egypt’s Nasser regime.12 According to Quṭb’s schema, only religion (really, only Islam) is the proper basis for “civilization” since all other concerns are jāhilī, and thus, beneath the dignity of the appellation “civilization:” “Indeed, Islam establishes the values and morals which are ‘human’—those which develop characteristics in a human being which distinguish him from the animals. In whatever society Islam is dominant, whether it is an agricultural or industrial society, nomadic and pastoral or urban and settled, poor or rich, it implants these human values and morals, nurtures them and strengthens them; it develops human characteristics progressively and guards against degeneration toward animalism. The direction of the line which separates human values from animal-like characteristics is upward; but if this direction is reversed, then in spite of all material progress the civilization will be backward, degenerative and ‘jahili’!”13 He goes on to argue that Western concepts of morality, since they do not extend to the personal and sexual realms, are so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. Religious morality, he argues, is the true measure of civilization’s advancement past an animal state; material and scientific progress measure only power. It is no surprise to Quṭb that the West’s “civilization” is lacking, given Western concepts of religion. When relegated strictly to the realm of personal belief, religion and faith lack the societal stature required to form the basis of an upright, respectable, and respectful civilization.  Hagler 6 Islam, on the other hand, has all the necessary components of a civilization, and has had them since the earliest Islamic community came into existence: “According to our unvarying definition of civilization, the Islamic society is not just an entity of the past, to be studied in history, but it is a demand of the present and a hope of the future. Mankind can be dignified, today or tomorrow, by striving toward this noble civilization, by pulling itself out of the abyss of Jahiliyyah [“ignorance”] into which it is falling….The [moral] values to which we referred above as human values were never attained by mankind except in the period of Islamic civilization. We also ought to remember that by the term ‘Islamic Civilization’ we mean that civilization in which these values are found to the highest degree, and not a civilization which may make progress in industry, economics and science but in which human values are suppressed.”14 The dichotomy between Islamic civilization and Western society could not be clearer: to Quṭb, any society that focuses on materials (regardless of whether that focus comes from a communist or capitalist perspective) immediately errs, and proves itself uncivilized—jāhilī. Since “Islam knows only two kinds of societies, the Islamic [which is civilized] and the jahili [which is not],” Quṭb is forthright in his titular assertion that “Islam is the Real Civilization.”15 When Quṭb was wandering the metaphorical American desert, however, he was still young, and still operating under at least some influence of what he considered the fog of American misconceptions. The uncertainty he felt in his initial personal encounter with the West—widely self-marketed as the world’s most advanced, if not only, civilized society—is palpable in his introductory remarks about America. “This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values? And what does it add to the moral account of humanity? And, by the journey’s end, what will its contribution be? “I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people. And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.”16 His discomfort with the things his Greeley neighbors used to measure their civilization—“the invention of tools, the wielding of powers, or the making of objects”—is evident in his conclusion that such concerns are “in and of themselves weightless in the scale of human values.”17 After all, he concludes, “tools break down and objects perish, only to be replaced by newer tools and objects from one moment to another anywhere on this earth.”18 Quṭb’s process of dismissing Western notions of civilization may have been largely complete, even at this early stage in his journey. However, he was still not yet the avowed Islamist he would become; his writing was not yet the intellectual locus classicus of modern political Islam. Here he affirms that the fundamental distinguisher of civilization is man’s “feelings for this life”: “This fundamental value is the place of comparison between one civilization and another and one philosophy and another.”19 Absent from his early reflections on life in America is Milestone’s firm and exclusive proclamation that there are only two options for  Hagler 7 human society—either Islamic (civilized) or jāhilī (in this case, uncivilized). In the early “The America That I Have Seen,” Quṭb allows the possibility of two civilizations that may be compared. It is only later that his assessment of American society as technologically and materially advanced, but religiously, legislatively, ethically, and morally bankrupt, will engender his revision of the concept of civilization to exclude the West. But the seeds for that reassessment are clearly present. “The researcher of American life will stand at first puzzled before a wondrous phenomenon, a phenomenon that exists nowhere else on earth. It is the case of a people who have reached the peak of growth and elevation in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of the senses, feelings, and behavior….But this confusion vanishes after scrutinizing the past and present of this people, and the reason that this zenith of civilization has combined with this nadir of primitiveness is revealed.”20 The origin of this “primitiveness,” Quṭb goes on to argue, lies in the interaction between the types of people who would become the pilgrims—“adventurers [who] came seeking wealth, pleasure and adventure” and “criminals [who] were brought to this land from the lands of the British Empire as labor for construction and production”—with the hostility and expansiveness of the unfamiliar nature the “wild” American continent presented. He is amazed that the grandeur and danger of the New World “did not leave a shadow upon the American spirit and inspire a belief in the majesty of nature and that which is beyond nature, opening for the American spirit a window on things that are more than matter and the world of matter.”21 Since the pilgrims, in Quṭb’s words, “tackled nature with the weapons of science and the strength of the muscle, so nothing existed within them besides the crude power of the mind and the overwhelming lust for the sensual pleasure,”22 the society they created was a spiritless one, a technocratic culture without a properly spiritual leadership. The result, he says, is a degenerate society: “When humanity closes the windows to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether, there remains no outlet for its energy to be expended except in the realm of applied science and labor, or to be dissipated in sensual pleasure. And this is where America has ended up after four hundred years.”23 For a man who saw in America an emerging superpower, and with the technological capability to expand its culture into the Islamic heartlands, America’s immorality was troubling indeed. Quṭb’s view of American society and culture was a direct outgrowth of the perception of American religion and spirituality (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) he acquired in the streets and churches of New York, Washington, D.C., California, and Colorado. Quṭb does not consider this unreligious and unspiritual society startling; it is, simply, the latest iteration of the ever-present jāhiliyya, the state of ignorance that is delineated by everything that is not Islamic. By the time he wrote Milestones, he perceived that the American cultural poison he had first discerned in Greeley had spread to the Muslim world: “We are also surrounded by Jahiliyyah today, which is of the same nature as it was during the first period of Islam, perhaps a little deeper. Our whole  Hagler 8 environment, people’s beliefs and ideas, habits and art, rules and laws—is Jahiliyyah, even to the extent that we consider to be Islamic culture, Islamic sources, Islamic philosophy and Islamic thought are also constructs of Jahiliyya! “This is why the true Islamic values never enter our hearts, why our minds are never illuminated by Islamic concepts, and why no group of people arises among us who are of the caliber of the first generation of Islam.”24 For America specifically and the West in general, the state of jāhiliyya was predictable; these were not, after all, Islamic societies. But America was so defective in its morals and religious values—ignoring even what Quṭb would consider “proper” Christianity—that by the time he wrote Milestones he did not consider the United States worthy of even the term “civilization.” But the situation was worse than that for him. The rise of the post-colonial secular regimes in Egypt—first the monarchy, then the Nasser regime—and the rest of the Muslim Middle East, as well as the birth, expansion, and dominance of the State of Israel portended the spread of the poisonous jāhiliyya into the heart of the Muslim world itself. Jāhiliyya and Islam; The West and the Middle East The real problem, as Sayyid Quṭb came to see it, was the effect on Muslim civilization of jāhilī influences; America and the West may have been the latest iterations of the causes of jāhiliyya, but the consequences of jāhiliyya constitute the true damage. Milestones was part political theory, part international relations assessment, and part religious assertion—but it was entirely a call to action, a warning to the Muslim world to cast off the jāhilī West (whether it be in the form of the West itself or Western-imposed, impious, nominally Muslim regimes) and return to a purer form of society, based on the first generation of Muslims: “We should remove ourselves from all the influences of the Jahiliyya in which we live and from which we derive benefits. We must return to that pure source from which people derived their guidance, the source which is free from any mixing or pollution. We must return to it to derive from it our concepts of the nature of the universe, the nature of human existence, and the relationship of these two with the Perfect, the Real Being, God Most High. From it we must also derive our concepts of life, our principles of government, politics, economics and all other aspects of life. “We must return to it with a sense of instruction for obedience and action, and not for academic discussion and enjoyment. We should return to it to find out what kind of person it asks us to be, and then be like that. During this process, we will also discover the artistic beauty in the Qurʾan, the marvelous tales in the Qurʾan, and all other such benefits which are sought in the Qurʾan by academic and literary people. “….We must also free ourselves from the clutches of jahili society, jahili concepts, jahili traditions and jahili leadership. Our mission is not to compromise with the practices of jahili society, nor can we be loyal to it. Jahili society, because of its jahili characteristics, is not worthy to be compromised with. Our aim is first to change ourselves so that we may later change the society.”25  Hagler 9 Given that this passage is Quṭb’s main message in Milestones, the fact that the notion of Jāhiliyya is utterly absent from the earlier “The America That I Have Seen”—articles written in response to Quṭb’s sojourn in the heart of jāhilī America—demonstrates that, from 1950 to 1964, there is an evolution in his assessment of America and the West. The more anomalous, unfavorable view of America, and its moral and religious deficiency, that dominates “The America That I Have Seen” gives way, fourteen years later, to Milestones’ explicit conflation of the West with jāhiliyya itself. Jāhiliyya has even spread, he warns, to the Islamic world through its impious, secular regimes. If there is one concept that demonstrates the dangers an impious and irreligious, uncivilized and immoral, yet culturally ascendant and hegemonic, West, it is the concept of jāhiliyya and its metastasization in the Middle East. It is no surprise that jāhiliyya would become Quṭb’s representation of the greatest danger; he sees the world in Islamic terms, and the great accomplishment of the first generation of Muslims that Quṭb reveres was to transition Mecca and Medina, and begin the transition of Arabia, from a jāhilī culture—cut off from God’s guidance and utterly lacking in righteousness—to an Islamic civilization, guided by God Himself, and perfectly righteous. But the victory of Islam did not herald the utter defeat of jāhiliyya. On the contrary, to Quṭb, jāhiliyya is like the weed that must forever be pruned to prevent its takeover of the Islamic garden. There would be times—such as the era of Western ascendance and the associated rule of secular, Western-style Arab regimes in the Middle East—when jāhiliyya seemed to be prevailing over Islam. This is the context of his call to action: “Our foremost objective is to change the practices of this society. Our aim is to change the Jahili system at its roots—this system which is fundamentally at variance with Islam and which, with the help of force and oppression, is keeping us from living the sort of life which is demanded by our Creator.”26 The evolution of Quṭb’s thinking about jāhiliyya, again, has its roots in his early impressions of the West, culled in Greeley. Although he never uses the term “jāhiliyya” (or similar words) in “The America That I Have Seen,” he frequently refers to American “primitiveness” (bidāʾī): spiritual, religious, sexual, emotional, interpersonal, artistic, culinary, and stylistic “primitiveness.” The concepts of jāhilī and bidāʾī are not so very different from each other; the distinction is that jāhilī is a concept that stands in opposition to the pious “Islam,” whereas bidāʾī is a word that can carry either a secular or religious connotation. Both still convey a similar meaning of “ignorance,” of “primitiveness.” This notion of American “primitiveness” is inextricably tied to Quṭb’s estimation of American’s improper engagement with religion (even Christianity), as well as his condemnatory disinclination to speak of “American civilization” rather than “American society.” Primitive, irreligious, unspiritual, and uncivilized: all of the denigrations Quṭb lays upon Americans in “The America That I Have Seen” are simply elemental versions of the estimations that, internalized and cultivated over fourteen years of struggle against the West and its sycophants, would grow into an elegant catchall connoting “non-Islamic,” “barbaric,” “ignorant of God,” and even “pagan”: jāhilī. The fact that the West was jāhilī probably would not have bothered Quṭb to the extent that it did were it not for the influence of America and the West on the Islamic world. The interdepended historical concepts of dār al-islām (“the abode of Islam,” or the territory where Islamic law rules) and dār al-ḥarb (“the abode of war,” or all the other territory in the world, where Islamic law does not rule) provide a binary set of possibilities for a devout Muslim like  Hagler 10 Quṭb. Of course the non-Islamic countries were jāhilī; that was by definition for him. Abū al- Aʿlāʾ al-Mawdūdī (1903-1979), the native Indian whose work provided the intellectual underpinnings for modern Islamism, and who was a large influence on Quṭb, allowed for the possibility of partial or mixed jāhiliyya, “which associate religion with infidelity and do not rule by God’s order.”27 But there was no middle ground for Quṭb: he also considered majority Muslim countries, like Egypt, jāhilī if they were not governed by Islamic law. In the countries with a majority of Muslims, like Egypt, in whose prison Quṭb composed Milestones, the government’s idle compliance with jāhilī influence had led to the domination of those countries by Western cultures and Western-leaning, secular political elites—or, equally harmfully, anti- Western leaders who adopted any non-Islamic mode of governance, like Nasser. The period of colonialism had seen direct Western rule over the Middle East; the postcolonial period had seen the establishment of ostensibly independent governments throughout the region, but in reality these governments were still dominated by Western powers, or at least Western (or Soviet, but to Quṭb this was just as bad) notions of proper rule. The establishment of the State of Israel over Mandatory Palestine was another mode by which jāhilī, Western actors rolled back the potential for Islam to reassert itself over its rightful territory following the European decolonization of the region. The problem was deep, and it was wide: the jāhilī weeds were choking the Islamic garden. Egypt, and the rest of the region, were in the grip of jāhilī regimes—governments that ruled with secular, Western laws, rather than “authentic,” Islamic laws—regardless of the professed faith of their ministers. This was the state of affairs that Quṭb wished to overturn. His opinion was that a return to the Islamic foundations of the culture would herald an escape from this ignorance, a return to greatness—but most importantly, of course, a return to life according to God’s will. “Our first step will be to raise ourselves above the jahili society and all its values and concepts. We will not change our own values and concepts either more or less to make a bargain with this jahili society. Never! We and it are on different roads, and if we take even one step in its company, we will lose our goal entirely and lose our way as well. “We know that in this we will have difficulties and trials, and we will have to make great sacrifices. But if we are to walk in the footsteps of the first generation of Muslims, through whom God established His system and gave it victory over Jahiliyyah, then we will be masters of our own wills. “It is therefore desirable that we should be aware at all times of the nature of our course of action, of the nature of our position, and the nature of the road which we must traverse to come out of ignorance, as the distinguished and unique generation of the Companions of the Prophet—peace be upon him—came out of it.”28 The stakes were quite clearly as high as possible, as far as Quṭb was concerned. The threat of jāhiliyya was far worse “and more insidious than at any point in Islamic history, coming as it did from within the citadel and through the agency of ostensibly faithful believers.” 29 The irreligious, jāhilī values of American and Western society, which he had observed firsthand in Greeley during his visit to the Colorado State College of Education, through the medium of Western military, cultural, and political influence, had fully infiltrated dār al-islām, and dominated it, from the highest levels of government to the secular social mores that Quṭb saw  Hagler 11 taking over. To Quṭb, the danger from the West was much less the ability to bully Middle Eastern leaders or dominate Middle Eastern economies—although those things were serious problems—and much more what he had observed that night at the church in Greeley, where he saw the house of worship turn into a dance hall, the pastor encourage debauchery, and the music lyrics openly allude to sexual coaxing.30 Quṭb understood that power waxes and wanes, and societies that are dominant in one era are downtrodden in the next. He was patient in that regard, and had no great love for the nation-states of the Middle East, which had, anyway, been created by Western colonialists in order to suit Western purposes. But to see the Islamic civilization fall under the jāhilī spell of immorality, impiousness, and callousness of human feeling was a peril to God’s plan for the proper direction of the Islamic world in particular, and the whole of humanity in general. The Evolution of Sayyid Quṭb: From Moderate to “Radical” None of this would truly matter if the impressions of the West that Sayyid Quṭb culled over the course of an approximately two-year trip to America, the largest portion of which was spent in Greeley, had been the isolated observations a single well-lettered traveler, an educator and literature lover who was simply disaffected and alienated by what he saw of American life. When he returned to Egypt in 1950 and penned “The America That I Have Seen” for al-Risāla magazine, indeed it would have seemed to the casual observer that this was the extent of Quṭb’s situation. Of course, this is not the case. Quṭb’s influence on a wide range of Islamist thought is profound, and thus the effect of the formative encounter he had with the West in Greeley became intensely magnified. Part of what made him so influential, argues Calvert, is his lateness to adopt an Islamist worldview. He did not become a true Islamist until the mid-1950s, a few years after his return to Egypt from the United States; before then, he was “a moderate, a dyed-in-the- wool Muslim Brother who looked to politics as the appropriate means for Islamists to attain power.”31 After that, however, “Qutb’s writings targeted the state [which he viewed as a Western, jāhilī graft], insisting that the elite either conform to the precepts of Islam or step down.”32 Quṭb was by no means the first Islamist, and his late conversion away from the reformist trend of Islamism—which “sought to implement change gradually through a campaign of hearts and minds”—to “radical” Islamism—which sought the immediate overthrow of existing political and hegemonic authorities—meant that his work “spans the spectrum of Islamist positions, from reformism to revolution.” 33 Quṭb’s transition to “radical,” however, was only partly a response to his time in the United States, which gave context and shape to a negative predisposition about the West. Largely, it was a response to the unrest in Egypt, and the direction of his country. In 1949, Ḥassān al-Bannāʾ, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was assassinated. Claiming to see Americans gloating over his death, Quṭb realized that he, and the Brotherhood, stood staunchly in opposition to the West; why else would they be so jubilant? He wrote: “My attention was very much drawn to the extreme interest in the Brothers shown by American newspapers as well as the British newspapers which used to reach America, and their gloating and obvious placidity over dissolving the Muslim Brothers group, hitting it and killing their leader. At the same time a book of mine, Social Justice in Islam, was published in 1949 and in which I put this sentence as a dedication: ‘To the youngsters whom I see in my fantasy coming to  Hagler 12 restore this religion anew as it began fighting for the cause of Allah by killing and getting killed…etc.’ The Brothers in Egypt understood that I meant them by this dedication. The matter was not like that. However, on their part, they adopted the book. They considered its author as their friend and they began to be interested in him. So when I returned at the end of 1950, some of their young men began to visit me and to talk to me about the book.”34 When he returned to Egypt, he was welcomed at the airport by some of the younger Muslim Brothers. This experience made an impression on him, and began a professional relationship with Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, including al-Risāla, the magazine where “The America That I Have Seen” was published. Quṭb returned to Egypt in 1950, with the country, and the whole Arab world, still smarting from what it perceived to be a shocking and traumatizing defeat at the hands of the newly-independent Israel in 1948-49. The defeat in the 1948 War ultimately discredited the Egyptian Monarchy of King Farouk, who was also the subject of financial and sexual scandals. At the same time, cost of living increases and food shortages exacerbated the King’s standing amongst the Egyptian population. Already an Islamist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Quṭb probably perceived that the time was right for the return of Islamic rule: the West-leaning, playboy King was clearly not long for power. However, it was a secular revolution, the Free Officers Movement, engineered by Muḥammad Naguib and then appropriated by the popular Gemal Abdel Nasser, that toppled King Farouk in 1952. It was Nasser who would have Quṭb imprisoned for his Islamist agitation, and ultimately executed for his alleged part in a plot to assassinate the Egyptian leader. At the same time as Egypt was undergoing this internal turmoil, and the Arab and Islamic Middle East continued to reel in the aftermath of the 1948 War, Quṭb looked around the world and saw even more mayhem. World War II was only five years over, and he saw Europe divided between the American and Soviet blocs, with the two facing off in Berlin. Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces had driven Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists out of mainland China, and this conflict widened into Korea, where the United States entered the fray in 1950. With all the war and turmoil in what must have seemed to Quṭb the aptly named dār al-ḥarb, he became increasingly convinced that Islam was the solution, not just for the region, but for the world, and penned the treatise Al-Salām al-ʿalamī wa-al-Islam: “Islam and World Peace.” Quṭb saw a jāhilī world in need of Islam’s principles: “Humanity shall continue to suffer increasing injury at the hands of atheists, beguiled and misled by corrupted civilizations, unless man follows the Islamic system which leads people to justice, discipline, and peace.”35 Quṭb was not only disenchanted by the Western bloc; the Soviet bloc, despite its laudable attention to the plight of the masses, was hostile both to religion and, Quṭb saw, to the Arabs, as evidenced by its support of the Jews in the 1948 War. Quṭb envisioned a “third bloc,” aligned with neither the West nor the Communists, and based upon Islamic principles of justice and peace.36 Ironically enough, his native Egypt was indeed at the center of a nonaligned movement in the Cold War; but it was under the aegis of Nasser’s nationalist government, and certainly not consistent with Islamic principles.  Hagler 13 Quṭb’s increasing affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, coupled with the regional frenzy of pan-Arab nationalism that Gemal Abdel Nasser sought actively to foment, radicalized him further. He was deeply dismayed by the Free Officers revolt, and saw the nationalism that it espoused as yet another example of the West’s parasitic intellectual influence. Quṭb was of the opinion that nationalists were playing into the hands of Western imperialists “by tearing up the Muslim nation into narrow national entities.”37 Despite the fact that the Brotherhood, and even Quṭb himself, initially supported the nationalists in their struggle against the Monarchy, when it became clear that the new government had no interest in instituting an Islamic system of law, Quṭb’s association with the Brotherhood deepened, and as an active and full member he began vigorously propagandizing for them by 1954. He was arrested in December of 1954, charged with anti-government agitation, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.38 Although various health problems exempted him from the hard labor, he spent ten years in Egyptian prisons. It was during his tenure as a prisoner that he finally wrote Milestones. From his moderate, less politically interested but still pious, beginnings through his “radicalization” and adoption of a more politically active program, Sayyid Quṭb did not stop writing. His writing, and the calls to action he expressed, evolved with him, and thus he became a central intellectual basis, a foundational text, for all Sunnī varieties of late twentieth and early twenty-first century political Islam.39 However, the scope of Quṭb’s writings only scratches the surface as to the reasons for its popularity among Islamist movements off all stripes. His writing was galvanizing; his call was for a future whose model, the (Sunni) Islamic past, was one with which all Islamists easily and readily identified. “More systematically than others before him, he established Islam as a culturally authentic, programmatic ideology at odds with the various political orders dominating the Muslim world. Against the modern-era Western hegemony, he upheld Islam not in terms of privatized religion but as a comprehensive ideological system (niẓām) covering politics, society and the economy, which finds its form as an Islamic state. His was an ethical vision that connected Muslims to God’s truth against the contingency and dross of the material world. It was also one intimately connected to the question of worldly power. According to Qutb, once Qurʾanic principles are implemented in their entirety, Muslim societies will find their God-given potential and slough off the defeatism that has plagued them for the past two centuries or more. Strengthened thus, Muslims will defeat their enemies and lead humankind to a new future of prosperity, peace, and deep spiritual satisfaction.”40 Although both the scholarly and popular treatment of Sayyid Quṭb, since the September 11, 2001 attacks brought political Islam into the forefront American consciousness, has tended to focus on his appropriation by Jihadi groups like al-Qaeda, his oeuvre is too multi-faceted to be summarily pigeonholed with that most extreme brand of Islamism. It was not merely a yearning for “cultural authenticity” or a desire to “provide a channel for material discontent” that motivated Quṭb, nor was it some sort of pathological hatred of the West. He was a true believer, both in God Himself and in the power of Islam, of submitting to God’s will, for people to “realize their potential and fulfill their destiny.”41 This is the context in which he must be understood, and our understanding of him and of his career must be based on that career itself; it should not be based upon how other men have interpreted his works.  Hagler 14 That said, there can be no denying that Quṭb’s influence extended far beyond his years, and his understanding of the West, which took its most developed shape during his American sojourn, has been deeply significant in the developing view of America and the West on the part of political Islamists of all kinds. The Muslim Brotherhood is currently in charge of the Egyptian government—at last, Quṭb would add—and seeking to find a balance between the ideal of Quṭb’s call for Islamic rule and the political realities of ruling a state that is an integrated member of a global system that includes both Muslim and non-Muslim governments. Political Islam, after all, is not just terrorism. Conclusion: A Chemical Reaction In the present context, it is a matter of some irony to note that Sayyid Quṭb probably would have found at least some common ground with Nathan Meeker, the New York Times reporter who coined the phrase “Go West, Young Man,” and founded the city of Greeley, Colorado, based on “high morals and total abstinence from alcohol.” “I propose to unite with the proper persons in establishing a colony in Colorado territory. The persons with whom I would be willing to associate must be temperate men and ambitious to establish a good society. In particular moral and religious sentiments should prevail, for without these qualities, man is nothing.”42 While Quṭb and Meeker would have disagreed on the religion of choice, the sentiment could easily have been penned by either man. Greeley, in fact, was such an upright place in it conception and early years that by the 1880s, the town’s unused jail had been rented out to hunters wanting to store buffalo hides.43 The town had an ethos of gardening, and each household sought to maintain a beautiful garden as a matter of culture and civic pride. When he got to Greeley, Quṭb noted the beauty of the gardens and lamented that the citizens spent so much time on them, while ignoring the human aspects of life. It may have been that the human aspects of his neighbors’ relations was simply lost in cultural translation; after all, Colorado had (and continues to have) a reputation for cultural informality, an inheritance of the pioneer culture that, according to Quṭb, caused them to “[tackle] nature with the weapons of science and the strength of the muscle, so nothing existed within them besides the crude power of the mind and the overwhelming lust for the sensual pleasure,” adding that “no windows to the world of the spirit or the heart or tender sentiment were opened to the Americans.”44 Greeley did not change into any kind of sin city over the early part of the twentieth century, but that is nonetheless what Quṭb perceived. And given Quṭb’s slow evolution from moderate to “radical” Islamist, and the fact that he was prolific with his writings and that they reflected his political philosophy, Quṭb’s perception of Greeley went to the heart, not only of Quṭb’s view of the West, but of Quṭb’s view of the dominant forces in the world of his time. He was greatly disturbed to find the jāhiliyya he saw in Colorado, New York, the District of Columbia, and California spreading through Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Jerusalem, and his understanding of just what that jāhiliyya was, and how pernicious an influence it seemed to be, not only shaped his understanding of the latest attempt by the West to dominate Islam, but combined with other events to convince him that the danger was dire, and that direct action was imperative. This urgency came to define Quṭb’s legacy. It is an overstatement to claim, as some have, that al-Qaeda was born in Greeley. The truth is far more complex than that, both in terms of Quṭb’s wide influence on a large range of  Hagler 15 Islamist thought (from moderate to radical), and in terms of the overall effect Greeley had on him (which was more formative than initiative). But that does not mean that there was no effect at all; the chemical reaction that occurred in Quṭb’s mind as a response to the Colorado catalyst was substantial. If nothing else, Greeley provided for Quṭb the profound confirmation of his preexisting negative inkling about the United States and the West. Quṭb’s time in Greeley, Colorado, as well as in other parts of the United States between 1948 and 1950, clarified for him the form of the danger that threatened to take over the upright, religious, and Godly Islamic world. The people of Greeley may have taken pride in the gardens, but all Sayyid Quṭb saw was an ominously expansionist and frighteningly decadent jāhilī weed of a culture.  Hagler 16 Bibliography Brogan, Daniel. “Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots.” 5280 Magazine. June/July 2003, Web. Accessed May 1, 2013. Calvert, John. Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Kepel, Gilles. Muslim Extremism in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Moussalli, Ahmad S. Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Quṭb. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992. Musallam, Adnan A. From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2005. Quṭb, Sayyid. “Faqaqi” [“Bubbles”]. Al-Risāla, no. 974 (March 3, 1952), pp. 237-38. ----------------. Islam and World Peace. Indianapolis: American Trust Publication, 1977. ----------------. Limadha aʿdamūnī? [“Why Did They Execute Me?”] Riyadh: Saudi Research and Marketing Group, 1965. ----------------. Milestones. USA: SIME Journal, 2005. ---------------- (John B. Hardie, trans.). Social Justice in Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1953. ---------------- (Tarek Masoud and Ammar Fakeeh, trans.). “The America That I have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values,” in Kamal Abdel Malek, ed., America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature: An Anthology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ----------------. “The World is an Undutiful Boy!” Fulcrum: The Literary Magazine of Colorado State College of Education, vol. 3, no. 1. (Fall 1949), P. 29. Singh, Nagendra. Social Justice and Human Rights in Islam. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998. Sivan, Emmanuel. Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.  Hagler 17 Notes 1 Daniel Brogan, “Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots,” 5280 Magazine, June/July 2003, online. http://www.5280.com/magazine/2003/06/al-qaeda%E2%80%99s-greeley-roots. 2 Sayyid Quṭb, “The World is an Undutiful Boy!,” Fulcrum: The Literary Magazine of Colorado State College of Education, Fall 1949, Vol. III, No. 1., p. 29. 3 Nagendra Singh, Social Justice and Human Rights in Islam (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998 ), p. 223. 4 Sayyid Quṭb, Milestones (USA: SIME Journal, 2005), p. 48. 5 Ibid., p. 48. 6 Ibid., p. 48. 7 Tarek Masoud and Ammar Fakeeh, trans.: Sayyid Quṭb, “The America That I have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values,” in Kamal Abdel Malek (ed.), America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature: An Anthology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 12-13. 9 Ibid., p. 15. 10 Quṭb, Milestones, p. 65. 11 Ibid., pp. 65-6. 12 Ibid., p. 64. 13 Ibid., p. 67. 14 Ibid., p. 72. 15 Ibid., p. 64. 16 Quṭb, “The America That I Have Seen,” p. 2. 17 Ibid., p. 2. 18 Ibid., p. 2. 19 Ibid., p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 3. 21 Ibid., p. 5. John Calvert quips that Quṭb must never have read Thoreau or the nineteenth century New England Transcendentalists. 22 Ibid., p. 5. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 24 Quṭb, Milestones, p. 6. 25 Ibid., p. 6-7. 26 Ibid., p. 7. 27 Ahmad S. Moussalli, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Quṭb (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992), p. 20. 28 Ibid., p. 7. 29 Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 30 See John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 7, n. 23. Although many newspaper articles claim that Quṭb’s perception of the dance led directly to Quṭb’s hatred of the West, and thus, to radical Islamist terrorism, they overstate the case; the fact is that the dance was much more emblematic of his American experience as whole, rather than a single, galvanizing event. Besides, his negative opinion of America was already extant before his trip; his experiences in Greeley and other American cities only helped solidify the shape of his discomfort with America. 31 Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, p. 4. 32 Ibid., p. 2. 33 Ibid., p. 2. 34 Sayyid Quṭb, Limadha aʿdamūnī? [“Why Did They Execute Me?”] (Riyadh: Saudi Research and Marketing Group, 1965), pp. 10-11. 35 Sayyid Quṭb, Islam and World Peace (Indianapolis: American Trust Publication, 1977), p. 81. 36 Ibid., pp. 176-77. 37 Sayyid Quṭb, “Faqaqiʿ” (“Bubbles”), al-Risāla, no. 974 (March 3, 1952), pp. 237-38. 38 Adnan A. Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2005), pp. 148-150.  Hagler 18 39 Shīʿite political Islam is distinct by virtue of its perspective on dialectical reasoning; Shīʿite Islam generally places the responsibility for interpreting God’s word on humans, where Sunni Islam does not grant humans the possibility of what they consider creative interpretation. 40 Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, p. 4. 41 Ibid., p. 9. 42 Brogan, “Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots.” 43 Ibid. 44 Quṭb, “The America That I Have Seen,” p. 5.