Did you now the holiday classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” played a role in the rise of radical Islam?
As crazy as that sounds, it’s true. Way back in 1950, a religious author named Sayyid Qutb attended a teacher’s college in Greeley, Colorado for two years.
The religiously conservative Qutb was often angered about many aspects of American life. Commenting on a church dance where “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was playing, Qutb wrote:
“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.”
And remember, this was him being offended by a church dance in 1950!
Baby it’s Cold Outside was the song that summed up all that was evil about America for Sayyd Qutb, the Egyptian who became an inspiration for Al Qaeda. https://t.co/pGBxzcbs7A
— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) December 1, 2018
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” long a holiday classic in the United States, has recently come under scrutiny in the #MeToo era for its light-hearted portrayal of sexual coercion—though a close reading suggests the song could just as easily be a sly homage to female empowerment,” Quartz observed.
“Not to Qutb. His description:
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.”
“The song confirmed Qutb’s worst suspicions about American culture,” Quartz noted. “To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent dance of happiness,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis observes in his film, The Power of Nightmares. “But Qutb saw something else. The dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed they were free, but in reality they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires.”
When Qutb returned to Egypt he was already on the path to radicalization, seeking a more extreme form of Islam that would reject the West and its values.
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” can somehow be linked to inspiring the man, albeit in a negative way, who in turn inspired the evil Osama Bin Laden?
Who knew?