Qutb's next stop was Greeley, Colorado, home of Colorado State College of Education (CSCE), now called University of Northern Colorado. In certain respects, Greeley would seem an out of the way destination for Qutb and an unlikely place to engender the sort of negative response from him that followed. The town was started in 1870 by Nathan Meeker as a planned utopian community. It was named after Horace Greeley, Meeker's boss at the New York Tribune and one of the community's original sponsors. Situated about 50 miles north of Denver between the Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers with the dramatic expanse of the Colorado Rockies in view to the west, Meeker saw the location as an idyllic agrarian setting for starting a temperate and morally upstanding community. After placing an advertisement in the New York Tribune, more than 3,000 applied to join the community, from which 700 were selected to settle in the new town. By 1949, when Qutb arrived, Greeley had a population of around 20,000, was still a dry town, and had more than 20 different churches.

It is not entirely clear why Qutb chose to visit Greeley, though there were a number of other Middle Eastern students at CSCE at the time, including students from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt. Additionally, CSCE was an education school, and the ostensible reason for Qutb's trip to America was “to study modern systems of education and training.” It is also possible that Qutb's friendship with the Egyptian graduate student, Ahmed Abbas, played a role. Abbas was finishing a doctorate in Education in the summer of Qutb's arrival. Like Qutb, Abbas had lived in Cairo; and he had completed degrees from Cairo's Fouad I University and the Institute of Education before going to Colorado. Given Qutb's position in the Egyptian Ministry of Education, it is likely he knew Abbas in Egypt. Moreover, in Colorado, Abbas and Qutb were known to be “good friends” and, like Qutb, Abbas reportedly joined the Muslim Brotherhood upon his return to Egypt.

I interviewed three former CSCE students who knew Qutb at Greeley: Saeb Dajani, a Palestinian who came to Greeley from Jerusalem; Ibrahim Insari, also from Jerusalem and a cousin of Dajani's; and Jaime McClendon, the only African American student at CSCE at the time.