"An extraordinary work of scholarship that overturns familiar assumptions about Qutb’s sojourn in America. Through meticulous archival research and lucid translations of Qutb’s letters—many translated into English for the first time—Ghyoot situates Qutb within the intertwined histories of twentieth-century Islamic thought, decolonization, and the global Cold War. An indispensable book."—Brannon D. Ingram, Northwestern University
"An amazing and valuable contribution to the scholarship on Qutb, and the more general field of Arab travelogues."—Peter C. Valenti, New York University
Description
In 1948, Egyptian writer and civil servant Sayyid Qutb crossed the Atlantic on a twenty-two-month study mission, traveling from New York to California to examine Western education. What he recorded instead was a searing yet nuanced account of a civilization he believed was surrendering to materialism. The America I Saw gathers thirty-three of Qutb’s essays, letters, poems, book reviews, and commentaries on America—translated into English for the first time.
Written in the years before he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and became President Nasser’s most formidable opponent, these pieces reveal a lesser-known Qutb: not yet the radical executed in 1966 but a searching intellectual grappling with racism, labor, and colonialism alongside contemporary travelers in the United States like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Drawing on previously unstudied archival material from Egypt and the United States, the volume’s vital introduction demystifies Qutb’s American sojourn and and reframes him as a both an anticolonial theorist and conservative critic of the modern world order.
An indispensable primary source, The America I Saw offers scholars and students of Islamic and Middle East studies a revelatory window into a formative mind—and into postwar America itself.
About the Author
Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) was a literary critic and civil servant in Egypt’s Ministry of Education. He later joined the Muslim Brotherhood, becoming a radical ideologue, and was eventually imprisoned for his political activism and executed in 1966.
Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD student in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is author of Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons.
May 2027