The America I Saw

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.