After World War II, the political, military, and economic power of the United Statesâ rising international empireâone working with and through other nation-statesâwas accompanied by âsoft power,â to use a term coined later. Victorious in a global war, Americans embraced ânationalist globalism,â as John Fousek put it in To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (2000). They wished the postwar world to follow their way of life rather than that of their Cold War Soviet rivals. Vice versa, people around the world paid more attention to them. Very few swallowed Americansâ self-view hook, line, and sinker. But a good number came, adopted what seemed of useâand often did (and could) openly oppose what they disliked, as Matthew Shannon discusses in Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (2017).
An Egyptian visitor was Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a Cairene inspector of public schools. Egyptâs Ministry of Education chose him to analyze US education from November 1948 to August 1950. He studied at the Wilson Teacherâs College in Washington, DC, and the Colorado State College of Education, in Greeley. He visited New York, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Diego. Qutb wrote about this experienceâfor by the mid-1940s he had become a rising author and cultural critic in Egypt. There, as Giedre Sabaseviciute has shown in âSayyid Qutb and the crisis of culture in late 1940s Egyptâ (2018), Qutb, like others of his generation, accused the cultural establishment of selling out to Western imperialism culturally and hence politically; at the time, Britain still controlled the Suez Canal, and would withdraw its last troops only in June 1956. Some young nationalist critics were leftists; others, like Qutb, had a more religious bent. (In the early 1950s Qutb would officially join the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and later texts like Maâalim fi al-Tariq [Milestones (1964)] would make him the intellectual father of contemporary Islamic radicalism; Gamal Abdel Nasserâs regime imprisoned him after an MB coup attempt in 1954, until 1964, and again from 1965 to 1966, when he was executed.)
As for Qutbâs texts on America, they were much more critical than texts by earlier Arabs who had visited and studied in Western imperial countries. Thus, Rifaâa Rafiâ al-Tahtawiâs (1801-1873) or Taha Husaynâs (1889-1973) reflections on sojourns in France, while critical, also identified commonalities and affirmed that Egypt could use some European traits to catch up with Western imperial powers. Not so Qutb, as John Calvertâs ââThe World Is an Undutiful Boy!â: Sayyid Qutbâs American Experienceâ (2000) shows. In letters home and in a three-part Arabic article titled âThe America That I Have Seen,â published after Qutbâs return, he described Americans as a shallow, soulless people driven by status and money: Egyptâs opposite. This was the external inter-civilizational front of a conflict whose domestic cultural front countered those who presumably served Western imperialism. Qutbâs thinking was complex, then. This was the case doubly as it embraced Islam, whose spirituality imbued Egyptâs, and as he called Egypt a civilizationânay the civilization, the worldâs first. In the late 1940s, in sum, Qutb was an anti-imperialist civilizational nationalist with a religious bent, or, perhaps, an Eastern civilizationalist of Egyptian nationality and Muslim faith. This showed also in the text here: Qutbâs first one in English, printed in the Greeley College literary society magazine in 1949.