Potts on Qutb in the Believer

For those out there who love music and good writing, I highly suggest the magazine The Believer. I believe (ha ha) it's put out by the same folks who put out McSweeneys, the online version of which I pay attention to for our Friday Funny, and the dead tree version to which I subscribe. The Believer is what Rolling Stone should be, and maybe what it was for a brief period in the 60s/early 70s .But anyway, it's a fine magazine, and Rolf Potts, as folks here know, since I blog about him every so often, is a fine writer.

In this abridged piece at the Believer Web site (you have to buy the mag to get the whole thing) Potts discusses one of Islam's lesser-known (at least among non-Muslims) intellectuals, a man named Sayyid Qutb...and a man who did not have a lot of good things to say about America, and yet a man who actually did spend a fair deal of time here in the late 1940s. This is significant, because a lot of Americans who resist anti-Americanism say (rightly) that much of the rhetoric out there against America comes from people who have never spent time here.

Well, Qutb did live here, and he spent a majority of his 1948-50 U.S. sojourn as a scholarship student at Colorado State College of Education, living in the high-plains town of Greeley. When he returned to Egypt he wrote an essay entitled "The America I Have Seen," a short travel memoir that appeared in the November 1951 issue of Egypt's Al-Risala magazine. As Potts explains, Qutb's disaffection with America stems from what he saw as a corrosive moral and spiritual primitiveness (and this BEFORE MTV?!).

I am always fascinated by others' perceptions of us, and Potts essay here, even the abridged version, gives a taste of that fro the eyes of someone that most Americans have never heard of, but whose views, while perhaps colored by religious fanaticism, are still interesting to understand.

Filed under: Activism, History, Learning, Stories, Africa, North America, Egypt, United States, Books