I found Qutb’s “The America I Have Seen” by turns insightful, ignorant and frustrating. On the one hand, Qutb’s critique of sexuality in American life rings true in many places; I think particularly of Qutb’s account of his conversation with a university student who profoundly proclaims, “Sex is not a moral matter at all.” The discussion of sexuality, though written seventy years ago and featuring rhetorical excesses which make a contemporary reader wince, rings perhaps even truer in 2020 than it did in 1951.
Qutb’s critique of American sexual mores, however, is couched within a larger thesis that American culture has (morally and emotionally) scarcely transcended the state of human affairs in a primordial jungle . This issues in a tendentious and untenable history of America — for instance, the controversial assertion that the sole motive for America’s Civil War was to ensure Northern economic supremacy, or the insistence that all of America’s earlier settlers were either criminals or adventurers with no moral or religious dimension. These first Americans sought solely personal gain and so developed their technical skills in their struggle with the primordial American wilderness, but had no occasion or appetite for moral cultivation and so remain painfully stunted.
Such passages render Qutb’s moralizing about sex considerably less palatable. They do confirm Qutb’s distinct disinterest in fairly describing his subjects. One is left, then, with the question of the work’s intention. On the one hand, there is the real possibility that Qutb’s provides a tendentious history simply to buttress a valid insight into American moral failings. Such a maneuver falls within the typical strategies of cultural polemic. But is the work intended to fulfill solely a polemical purpose, to undermine attraction to Islam in Egypt and the Arab world? Or is it meant to offer a different form of cultural critique? And how influential has it been?
Christian-Muslim relations blog 
Claude, thanks for these insightful questions. I shared similar reactions to Qutb’s piece— much of it made me wonder how widely he had traveled in the US, because– even more so when the piece was written– it’s an overstatement to present a monolithic American culture. (As a New Orleanian, I must protest the characterization of jazz and also offer our food for him to try!) Much of the religious critiques seems to be resulting from observations of various denominations of Protestant Christianity, but it reads as a blanket critique.
I do think it aligns with the polemical purpose of criticizing the West/Christian West and claiming Islam/the Arab world to be more “civilized” and “rational”– again, as I’ve expressed before, this is a logic that I struggle to find persuasive, given its presuppositions that seem difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the Christian “logic” of the folly of the cross.
–Stephanie
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Claude, I really enjoyed these questions as well. I found the blanketed critiques a little frustrating as well. I was confused about what the goal was of the writing was. Obviously, the emphasis on the individual in America is sharply contrasted by a government that closely espouses a religious practice.
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