Sunday, February 26, 2006

A lesson in hate

The February issue of Smithsonian has an article entitled "A Lesson In Hate", about the writings of Sayyid Qutb- an article that should be required reading for anyone attempting to understand Middle East politics. See http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/february/presence.php
I quote the first two paragraphs as a teaser:

Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”
Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

because of your government's policy of exterminating other nations that get into your way of being a world super economic and military power. since you're already at it, why don't you review the histories of vietnam, korea, russia, latin america and the middle east. you will see in there how the u.s. willfully caused the deaths of thousand civilians in the guise of liberating them.

bringing democracy to iraq? weapons of mass destruction? get real. Bush's nostrils ooze with oil while he is saying that he is freeing iraq.

Joel Monka said...

And this relates to the article referrenced how? Did you read the article I linked to?