Images of sayyid qutb greeley

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 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.

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 , he was once considered for a Cabinet post. But he was later accused of plotting against the government and executed in They represented a state of ignorance -- Islam offered liberation," Siegel says.

Search Query Show Search. Live TV. The Qutb saga rises to the surface again with social unrest in Egypt and fears that the country could become an Islamist state led by the Muslim Brotherhood or a religious regime of the type Qutb conceptualized. Qutb, educator turned revolutionary, was hung by the Egyptian government in His followers are credited with the assassination of Anwar Sadat in The strange story of Qutb in Greeley was all but forgotten there until the terrorist attacks of Sept.

She still receives calls inquiring about how a quiet Colorado agricultural community helped to create the father of the anti-Western jihad. He spent the Christmas season of in New York City. For the instincts and their interests of all Occidentals are bound up together in the crushing of that strength. This is the common factor that links together communist Russia and capitalist America.

Images of sayyid qutb greeley

I think he was more political than religious. That quickly changed. Qutb reinvented himself as a militant fundamentalist. As the story goes, Qutb was already suffering a high fever on the day of his arrest. The officers forced him to walk to jail, even after he fainted twice. He was tried before a panel of three judges that included future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

Conditions in the prison were deplorable. Physical torture was routine, and when Qutb and his fellow inmates returned to their cells they were forced to listen to taped recordings of Nasser speeches 20 hours a day. Somehow, Qutb managed to write. From his cell, Qutb saw parallels between current events and the world in the time immediately prior to the time that the Koran was revealed to Muhammad.

At the start of the seventh century, a large portion of Arabia was occupied by foreign powers, and the rest was a battleground for warring tribes. Arab society had become morally bankrupt, consumed by perversity, drinking, and greed. It was into this setting that Allah intervened with the gift of the Koran. Qutb blamed Christianity for this state of affairs, but not for the reasons you might guess.

Though Christianity and Islam have much in common, Qutb saw that they completely differed in their relationship to government, and, thus, day-to-day life. Unlike Islam, which brought order to a region of warring tribes, Christianity was born to the Roman Empire — the most powerful and fully mature state yet seen in history. Jesus set a clear example for his followers that his new religion would coexist with, not replace, the secular government.

And nowhere did he see a more troubling case of this illness than in the United States. Americans were self-absorbed with no real connection to their god or even to their fellow man. The cure for this spiritual illness, he wrote, was Islam, the same medicine that had once before revived man from jahiliyyah:. Eventually, nations would disappear, leaving the whole world for Allah.

First, he took the concept of jihad, which traditionally was largely a defensive concept, and expanded it into an offensive struggle that was the obligation of all Muslims. The ultimate objective is to re-establish the Kingdom of God upon earth. Second, Qutb made the case that there was more to being a Muslim than simply professing to be one.

In , Qutb was released from prison due to his failing health, but he was quickly re-arresed, this time on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. He was eager to set an example of martyrdom for his fellow believers. Once again, he was found guilty, and this time the sentence was death. He would grow up to become a surgeon and the head of Islamic Jihad.

But in June , they would merge their two organizations officially, the new group calls itself Qaeda al-Jihad, but is more widely known as Al Qaeda. It would prove to be a deadly match. Bin Laden would provide the charisma and the cash. 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.

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. He was an Arab -- American public opinion favored Israel, which had come into existence just a year before. 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.

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 ," Siegel says.