24 Sep Baby, It’s Stupid but Deadly Outside
As you may or may not know, the cultural Left has a nasty habit of trying to portray its male opponents as sexual misfits, dysfunctional perverts who behave the way they do and support the policies they do because of their “infirmities.” For example, the Left likes to suggest that men who adamantly support the Second Amendment only do so because they have…uhhh…miniature genitalia. The same is often said of men who drive big trucks, which Leftists find menacing and insist are totally unnecessary. Men who are ardently Pro-Life are considered fetishists who want to see women imprisoned and used as sex slaves and “breeders.” Men who criticize the excesses of the LGBTQ+ movement are either closeted homosexuals or frustrated “incels” (i.e. “involuntary celibate”). And on and on it goes….
It (almost) goes without saying that this is one part projection, one part sophistry, and two parts mindless ad hominem. It makes them feel better, though, so…it’s what they do.
What’s ironic about the whole thing is that there really is one monumentally important and omnipresent political issue that may be the result, at least in part, of sexual dysfunction and the hostility derived from it. The Left doesn’t discuss it, however, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The foundational story here begins three-quarters of a century ago in a small town in Colorado. But before getting to that, the contemporary story and the inspiration for this note began this past weekend, on Twitter/X. It was there that a poster named Daniel Haqiqatjou posted a picture of a mid-century social event, with young men in suits and young ladies (with blurred-out faces) in dresses, with the following text:
Conservatives and nationalists think of the American past as a wholesome, pure place, and it was only the “globalists” who corrupted this with degeneracy. But, look at 1947 Oklahoma. Unmarried teens rubbing on each other, etc., is degenerate, whether from a traditional Christian perspective or an objective one. The roots of the problem extend centuries into the past.
At first, I thought this was a parody or a joke or…something. For starters, 1947 isn’t “centuries” ago. Second, the people in the picture don’t appear to be “teens.” They’re young adults, to be sure, but not kids. Third, they’re hardly “rubbing on” each other. They’re dancing quite modestly.
As it turns out, the post was (probably) not a joke. Haqiqatjou has 160,000 followers and, according to Wikipedia, is a Harvard-educated “American Muslim polemic, writer, public speaker, debater, philosopher, and Da’i.” So, the guy either is or, at least, thinks he is a big deal.
The seriousness of the post and the self-seriousness of the author make the whole incident that much weirder. The final – and most notable – reason I thought the tweet might be a parody is that it’s not even original. It is, in fact, a blatant rip-off of one of the best-known and oft-recounted stories about contemporary Islamism.
You see, way back in the late 1940s, an Islamic scholar named Sayyid Qutb left his home in Egypt to travel to Greeley, Colorado, where he was to study as an exchange student for two years. At the time, Greeley had a population of roughly 20,000 and was officially a dry town in a dry county. Nevertheless, Qutb found much “degeneracy” in Greeley and, as a result, decided that he hated America for all sorts of reasons. Apparently, the event that most triggered the young Egyptian was a church social, at which the town’s young people (presumably in suits and dresses) danced with one another: “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on 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 hOrRoR!
Among the songs that irritated Qutb the most was one that also irritates contemporary feminists, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:
A dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late and her mother was waiting, but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with his line: but baby it’s cold outside.
Qutb returned to Egypt from Greeley, became the primary theorist for the Muslim Brotherhood, and also became the “godfather” of the modern Islamist movement.
In a 2002 profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri – Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command in al Qaeda and a devotee of Qutb’s – Lawrence Wright noted that:
Qutb returned to Egypt a radically changed man. In what he saw as the spiritual wasteland of America, he re-created himself as a militant Muslim, and he came back to Egypt with the vision of an Islam that would throw off the vulgar influences of the West. Islamic society had to be purified, and the only mechanism powerful enough to cleanse it was the ancient and bloody instrument of jihad.
In addition to Zawahiri, Qutb and his works influenced and radicalized millions of young Muslim men over the better part of a half-century. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas are both connected to and descendants of Qutb’s Muslim Brotherhood. Many Iranian revolutionary leaders admired and respected Qutb (despite the fact that he was a Sunni). Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini reportedly admired Qutb and his ideas and him memorialized with a postage stamp. The current Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally translated some Qutb’s works into Persian.
All of this, in turn, confirms that Qutb was one of the ugliest, deadliest, and most destructive individuals in modern history. It is largely inarguable that the attacks of 9/11 and the current war pitting Israel against the Iranian regime and all its satellites are essential pieces of his legacy.
As for the rest of the story, Qutb was a sickly man, introverted and depressed. He was a lifelong bachelor. Indeed, there is no evidence that he ever had a romantic relationship with any person (female or otherwise). He is said to have complained constantly that he just couldn’t find a woman who was morally pure enough to deserve him. In short, he was socially (if not sexually) dysfunctional. And since he spent a great deal of time complaining about women and their particular need for spiritual purification, it’s clear that this dysfunction affected him deeply and influenced his ideas about the world.
Engaging in historical counterfactuals is a fool’s errand, of course. Nevertheless, it’s not unreasonable to think that if Sayyid Qutb had never been born, or more simply, if only some girl had taken pity on him and shown him some affection, the world today might be a much different place.
As for Daniel Haqiqatjou, I have no idea what his problem is – other than a lack of originality.
