Egyptian Sayyid Qutb's writings were the foundation for al Qaeda and other radical Islamic movements. But the America he visited in 1949 -- the conservative town of Greeley, Colo. -- doesn't ...

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 ...

Qutb, according to Wright, saw “sex as the main enemy of salvation.” According to Wright’s book, Qutb was radicalized by what he saw during a visit to America in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1948, Sayyid Qutb went to America, where he stayed for almost two years. It was a formative experience for the devout, uptight, disgust-prone Egyptian, who is regarded as one of the founding ...