Rejecting America's Cold War: Sayyid Qutb's Nationalist-Islamist Agenda and the Failure of U.S. Efforts To Win Over Egyptian Muslims Following World War II
[Thesis]
Becca Synnestvedt Smith
Haddad, Yvonne Y.
Georgetown University
2017
115
Committee members: Abi-Mershed, Osama W.
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-76706-3
M.A.
Arab Studies
Georgetown University
2017
Known in the post-9/11 context as one of the fathers of Islamic extremism, Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb was writing squarely in the mainstream of anti-British nationalism and Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism in the early post-World War II period. Despite Qutb's public antagonism in the Egyptian press against America, Great Britain, and the Cold War paradigm, the U.S. government allowed him to spend two years in the United States on an exchange from the Ministry of Education. Furthermore, it appears that the U.S. government secretly paid for Qutb's 1949 treatise, Social Justice in Islam, to be translated into English and published in 1953. No sources in the existing literature adequately explain either the value of Social Justice in Islam to the U.S. government or the importance of Qutb's works from this period to his own career.
Middle Eastern history; American history; Islamic Studies; Middle Eastern Studies
Social sciences;International relations;Islamic studies;Near east studies;Regional studies