Abstract
One of the most interesting and least-examined episodes in the career of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the influential Egyptian ideologue of Islamism, is his sojourn in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950. Egypt's Ministry of Education had sent the 42- year-old Qutb to the US to investigate American instructional methods and curricula, a task for which his career as an educator in Egypt had well prepared him. A number of materials exists that allow the researcher to reconstruct the main lines of Qutb's itinerary in the US and to explicate his thoughts on the essential nature of American society and culture. These include articles, 'letters home' written by Qutb and published in the Egyptian periodicals al-Risala, al-Kitab, andal-Hilaland, interestingly, documentary materials available at the University of Northern Colorado,'where Qutb studied in 1949.