Baby It's Cold Outside: The benefits of cultural/educational exchange ....

From Robert Irwin, "[Review of] James Toth, Sayyid Qutb [:] the life and legacy of a radical Islamic intellectual 400 pp. Oxford University Press], The Times Literary Supplement. 

In 1948 the Egyptian government sent him [Qutb] on a two-year scholarship to the United States in order to study the American education system.  Greeley is the twelfth-most populous town in Colorado.  There does not seem to be anything special about the place and few people would rank it with Sodom or Chorazin. Yet Quth was appalled by what he found there. A church dance was particularly horrifying: "The dance floor was illuminated with red, blue, yellow and a few white lights. It intensified (convulsed) to the tunes of the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion". The pastor put on the record player a disgustingly lubricious song, "But Baby, It's Cold Outside!"

Churches were nothing more than amusement centres and sexual playgrounds. As Toth notes, Qutb even managed to be shocked by the Greeley residents' "obsession with lawn care, an indicator, he claimed, of America's materialism, individualism, and detachment".

Though some Western commentators have argued that it was the American sojourn (and perhaps also sexual frustration) that set Qutb off in the direction of a rigorous form of Islamism, Toth demonstrates that he was turning towards a deeper commitment to Islam as early as 1939.

On Qutb, see. Image from