Although the news that Colorado may have a tie to international terrorism might surprise some, the state is no stranger to Al Qaeda. In fact, the seeds of radicalism that led to the terrorist group's formation, can be found in the most unlikely of places: the windswept cow town of Greeley.

Anyone familiar with the city of cattle feedlots, pickup trucks and 4-H fairs might be hard pressed to see the association. Greeley is about as far from Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains as anywhere, not just geographically, but culturally as well. And yet it's that culture difference that many believe inspired Al Qaeda's philosophical godfather, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian student attending Greeley's University of Northern Colorado. According to his later writings, he was horrified by what he described as Greeley's hypocrisy - there was a church on every corner, but sinful temptations (in the form of evening dances, Hollywood movies and permissive rights for females) canceled out their messages of piety in Qutb's mind.

The following article was written by me and published in Fort Collins Weekly on April 2, 2003. It's an interesting glimpse of how the most American of towns played an unwitting role in formulating the ideology of America's worst enemy. Considering the recent eighth anniversary of 9/11, and the ongoing investigation into a possible Denver connection to those responsible for it, we thought it worth revisiting.

--

Greeley's Al Qaeda Connection
How 1940s Greeley influenced Al Qaeda's Mastermind

By all indications, Greeley in 1949 was little more than a real-life Pleasantville where Beaver Cleaver would have felt right at home. Surrounded by the rolling plains of the American West, it was an almost laughably quaint cow town characterized by sock-hops, church clubs and wide streets shaded by leafy trees.

Then, as now, Greeley was the sort of place loved and nostalgically memorialized by Americans.

Then, as now, it's the sort of embodiment of Western culture that's hated and loathed by Islamic terrorists, an example of all that's wrong with the world's lone superpower.

In truth, not everyone felt at home in Greeley of 1949. Although the town of 17,000 people would seem unbearably conservative by many modern standards, for Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, Greeley was a den of liberal degeneracy where churches promoted promiscuity, women flaunted bare skin by wearing shorts and sleeveless blouses, racism was rampant and God was nowhere to be found.

In other words, it was the exact opposite of everything a devotee of Islam like Qutb stood for.

But the utopian founders of Greeley weren't thinking of Allah when they established their city in the river basin formed by the confluence of the South Platte and Cache La Poudre rivers; their view of high morality meant that Greeley was void of alcohol and heavy on churches. Residents so prided themselves on their high moral fiber that they required future citizens to pass an application review before they were allowed to move there. It was-and still is-a town highly dependent on agriculture. There were times in which the daily newspaper had little to report about: a front page story on June 6, 1949, detailed the amount of time it took a turtle to cross a downtown street.

But it is likely this very über-Americana is responsible for Greeley's somewhat pivotal role in shaping the views of the United States' worse enemy: Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. As odd as it may sound, Greeley's culture in 1949 was instrumental in solidifying Al Qaeda's philosophical foundation, thanks to Qutb's experiences there at a time when he was just embarking on his life as the intellectual father of the modern anti-Western jihad.

Qutb's impression of America, enhanced by his experiences in Greeley, led directly to his vitriolic and often violent interpretation of the Koran that comprises the cornerstone beliefs of at least four of the world's worst terrorist organizations: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Egypt's Islamic Jihad and bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden himself was a student of Qutb's brother, who carried Qutb's ideas to Saudi Arabia, where he taught Islamic studies.

And many of Qutb's ideas were founded in the most unlikely of places: Greeley, Colorado.

The roots of jihad

Sayyid Qutb's influence on modern Islamic terrorist organizations can hardly be overstated. The New York Times refers to him as "Al Qaeda's Philosopher." For The Weekly Standard, he's "Osama's Brain." Whatever the catchy moniker, it's clear that Qutb's ideas-which he memorialized in a 30-volume interpretation of the Islamic holy text called "In the Shade of the Qur'an" and in what has become the terrorists' handbook, "Milestones"-represent the blueprint by which people like Osama bin Laden wage their wars on the United States.

Qutb was born in Egypt in 1906 and embarked immediately on an enduring relationship with the Koran; by the time he was 10, he'd memorized the text.

But the first half of Qutb's life was characterized more by his love of literature and education than by the religious zealotry for which he would remain eternally famous among radical Muslims.

Like many students of the Koran, Qutb felt that Egyptians and other Eastern peoples had been directed to live a life of spiritual devotion to God in which there was no distinction between a "spiritual self" and a "daily self." That is, unlike practitioners of Western Christianity, he believed that one's spiritual life and one's daily existence were eternally bound. Worshipping God was a calling that required minute-to-minute attention, not just perfunctory appearances at church once a week. Like many Muslims, he therefore found comfort in the strict rules of the Koran that dictated the course of worship in every imaginable daily situation. The detailed requirements of diet, prayer and interaction with women-including the myriad and often repressive requirements of female servitude-were nothing less than God's instructions for the faith into which Qutb was born. There was no life without worship; worship was life.

Qutb saw Islam threatened across the globe as secular governments-particularly in Turkey-replaced theocratic leadership. Of particular threat to Islam was Judaism, for in Qutb's belief-and indeed that of many Islamic scholars-it was the Jews who bastardized Christianity by harassing the followers of Jesus Christ. The belief is that Christ, like Mohammed, was attempting to deliver the true word of Allah, but Jewish leaders, seeing the threat to their religion, violently castigated the Christians to the point where the Gospels, the "word of God" in Christianity, are inaccurate and unreliable, ruined by political pressure brought to bear by Jews.

According to Qutb, it wasn't until the appearance of Mohammed between 610 and 632 that the true holy intentions of God where made known through the founding of Islam. The religion spread quickly over the following century and by then, Christianity was the religion with the most to lose with the acceptance of Islam. As a result, the Crusades sought to violently eradicate Muslims from the face of the earth.

So it was with a good deal of disdain, to be mild, that Qutb reacted to President Harry Truman's recognition of the state of Israel in the heart of the Muslim Middle East in 1948, only a year before Qutb visited Greeley.

Even before he arrived in New York City in 1949, he viewed the U.S. as decadent, materialistic, spiritually depraved and fully intent on crushing the one true religion, his religion: Islam.

And it only went downhill from there.

One man's utopia

Officially, Qutb was sent to the United States by Egypt's Ministry of Education to study American instruction methods and curricula. According to some, however, he was dispatched to America to quell his criticism of Egypt's ruling monarchy by getting familiar with the ways of the West. It made sense, then, that he spent the majority of his time in the U.S. in Greeley, home of the Colorado State College of Education. The location served his educational purpose, it was as "American" in its culture as it could possibly have been and its reputation as an island of moral purity may well have appealed to Qutb's pietistic nature.

In Greeley, Qutb found a small city with churches on every street corner. Alcohol was outlawed. Lush green lawns and stately broad-leafed trees presented something of an oasis in the semi-arid region that must have reminded him at times of his home in Egypt.

Part of the reason his time in Greeley had such a lasting, profound effect on him is because it was there that Qutb finally began to master the English language.

"He would have really been exposed to a lot of ideas in Greeley at a time when his English writing and speaking skills really came in," says Peggy Ford, the coordinator of research for the City of Greeley Museums. "His ability to absorb more and reflect on American culture and values would have really been brought to the forefront here."

"Greeley was his longest sojourn in the United States," says John Calvert, a history professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., and one of the world's leading authorities on Qutb's writings.

"His experiences in Greeley confirmed his prior notion as to what the United States was all about. It was in Greeley that he had most of his face to face contacts with Americans," he says, "and all he saw was inequity and vice."

Arguably, it could not have been a worse time for an impressionable Islamic scholar with a predisposition to dislike the United States to come face-to-face with Western culture. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. was a loud, happy and boastful society wallowing in its victories over Germany and Japan and looking to spread its culture far and wide ... including to Egypt. An article that ran in the Greeley Tribune on July 20, 1949, would have incensed Qutb if he read it. Headlined "Pharaoh's Daughters Get New Look," the article was about Western influences in Egypt and how Egyptian women were being educated for careers. The accompanying photo showed Egyptian women taking a calisthenics class at Cairo University wearing shorts.

Qutb audited English composition classes during the summer in Greeley and was a member of the International Club, where he met and interacted with other foreign students.

A former classmate of his, Palestinian Saeb Dajani remembers Qutb as "a lovely person. You would be impressed by his personality," he says from his California home during a telephone interview with Fort Collins Weekly. "He was intelligent, quiet and his hobby was classical music. He listened to it all day. He never really struck me as a religious person, though. He didn't talk like he was, more like a politician."

Dajani does recall one incident that summer that had an impact on Qutb. A fan of the movies-he professed a love of Gone With The Wind in one of his letters home-Qutb and fellow Egyptian Mohammed Abbas tried to take in a film one afternoon, only to be told that the theater didn't allow "coloreds," recalls Dajani. It was explained that they were Egyptians and the clerk apologized and offered to sell them tickets. Abbas and Qutb refused in protest, however, puzzled that dark-skinned Egyptians would be allowed into a movie theater when dark-skinned Americans were not.

"I think he was kind of impressed with certain things with the United States," says Dajani, "and disappointed with certain things like the racial issues. He was deeply disappointed with that."

One of the things he seems to have been most disappointed with is what he saw as America's spiritual hypocrisy. Much to his horror and disgust, the main pastime in Greeley seemed to be community dances-one square dance, according to the archives of the Greeley Tribune, attracted more than 500 participants and 500 spectators. Many of these events Qutb deemed to be lurid displays of sexuality and often they were sponsored by the same churches that professed to serve God.

In an often-quoted letter, Qutb described one church dance he attended immediately after a church service one night. The pastor dimmed the lights to create a "seductive atmosphere," he later wrote, and the men and women who'd just attended worship services danced to the tune "Baby, It's Cold Outside," a popular song from the movie Neptune's Daughter.

"Every young man took the hand of a young woman. And these were the young men and women who had just been singing their hymns!" he wrote. "Red and blue lights, with only a few white lamps, illuminated the dance floor. ... The dancing intensified. ... The hall swarmed with legs. ... Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love."

Later, Qutb wrote "Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do, yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion."

The Qaeda connection

Qutb's experiences in Greeley fortified in him the belief that Western countries like the United States were not only corrupt, but dangerous to the future of Islam. He returned to Egypt more convinced than ever that for Islam to survive the cultural onslaught of the West, drastic measures were required.

Upon his return to Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious/political organization, and almost immediately began dictating its philosophical direction. In short, that philosophy was a return to pure religious law, the sharia rules of earthly existence that are spelled out in his beloved Koran.

In 1952, the king of Egypt was overthrown in a coup led by Abdul Nasser. At first Nasser sought Qutb's support but the two men held differing ideologies. Nasser was an advocate of Pan-Arabism, or the political unification of all Arab nations of the Middle East. Qutb, on the other hand, rejected politics entirely and called for the complete reform of Islamic nations and a return to sharia and the strict word of God. The gulf between the two of them widened, with Nasser aligning himself with the U.S.S.R. in opposition to the United States' use of the Suez Canal and Qutb's condemning non-Muslims who didn't actively seek a purification of the religion. It's little surprise that he was shortly jailed for supposedly spearheading a plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow Nasser's government.

It was during his 10-year imprisonment in Cairo that Qutb honed his religious beliefs into a theocratic weapon still used by radical Muslims today. In the torturous, decrepit environment of the prison, where prisoners were forced to listen to Nasser's speeches on a tape recorder 20 hours per day, Qutb authored what has been called one of the greatest and farthest-reaching bodies of prison literature in world history: a 30-volume study of the Koran called "In the Shade of the Qur'an," and a description of Qutb's perfect society under Islam, titled "Milestones."

The crux of the works is the belief that there is no nation for Arabs outside their religion, and that it's God's will that all Muslims rise up in defense of their faith against the Western infidels and apostate Muslims who have fallen prey to capitalism and Western culture. Martyrdom, in Qutb's analysis, is tantamount to sainthood. "Jihad" forever changed its meaning from "a struggle for Islam" to a "holy war against the infidels."

Qutb was released from prison in 1965 and given the opportunity to flee the country. His works had gained a great deal of popularity in the Arab world and both Iraq and Libya extended invitations for him to be exiled there.

But he refused. The man who'd preached martyrdom to his followers couldn't very well leave without giving them a martyr. He was rearrested by Nasser's regime in 1965, quickly found guilty of sedition and treason, and hanged in 1966.

But Qutb's influence hardly ended with his death. Energized by their martyred figurehead, the Muslim Brotherhood changed its name to Islamic Jihad, and Qutb's followers assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Saddat in 1981. In the United States, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, in jail for conspiracy to commit terrorism stemming from the first attack on the World Trade Center, is a disciple of Qutb's. Leaders of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that hijacked American airliners and killed U.S. citizens in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s drew influence from Qutb's writing.

But the most significant influence Qutb has had is on Osama bin Laden.

Shortly before Qutb was executed in 1966, Qutb's brother Mohammed had fled to Saudi Arabia where he became a famous teacher of Arabic studies. Naturally, he taught Qutb's vision of Islam as the ruling order of the world and one of his students, Osama bin Laden, was paying close attention.

The son of a wealthy construction tycoon, bin Laden formed Al Qaeda in 1988 after his time battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. The organization was formed to spread Islam throughout the corners of the globe, a goal that Qutb would likely have found laudable. A decade later, at a news conference in Afghanistan, bin Laden announced that Al Qaeda had merged forces with Islamic Jihad-Qutb's old Muslim Brotherhood-and other terrorist organizations. The reason for the merger, he said, was to attack American interests and civilians anywhere they can be found. He said that the world would soon be seeing the effects of this new alliance.

Within months, Qaeda operatives had blown up American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

And of course, on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists piloted hijacked airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Greeley influenced Qutb. Qutb influenced Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked the United States because of its military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia. Now the United States is invading a sovereign Muslim nation in response to those attacks.

In Greeley in 1949, where this bloody cycle arguably began, a newspaper article summarized a prophetic speech given by anthropologist Thomas Bogard at a science and math conference at Qutb's university. Titled "Looking Toward a Scientific Understanding of Culture", Bogard told his audience, "We have spread out material culture throughout the world but we have not been so successful in spreading other aspects of our culture such as religion, political ideas, and moral values," he said. "Every culture in the world must be measured against itself, not compared with some other culture."

Among five points he hoped his audience would consider are these: every society values its own culture and perpetuates it through some form of education; every culture has its rebels and changes because of the pressures which they exert; and we understand our culture better if we understand others.

It's a lesson that Qutb-and many, many others, both then and now-sadly chose to ignore.

--

Photo: Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged in 1966, during his trial in Eqypt for attempting to overthrow the government. Courtesy Library of Congress