The Jihad Against ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ Contemporary feminists aren’t the first to find the 1940s fugue an occasion for moral outrage. By Michael B. Mukasey
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-jihad-against-baby-its-cold-outside-11545090565
The #MeToo movement has caught up with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The 1940s fugue between a woman, who has dropped by a man’s home but says she wants to leave, and the man, who persuades her to stay, has become a Christmas-season staple. But “to some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape,” as one recent news story puts it. Some radio stations have yielded to the demand that they banish it from the airwaves.
That demand rings a bell. In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.
Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948. He didn’t much like it. “I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves,” he wrote. Even gardening drew his contempt: “There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment.”
But contempt curdled into revulsion when Qutb dropped in on a church dance that followed a service—a shocking juxtaposition in itself: “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 song that was playing: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” For Qutb, it epitomized the West’s moral degradation. He condemned the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” concluded that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and determined that Islam would have to be perpetually at war with such a society.
He went back to Egypt, quit the civil service, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and eventually became the organization’s spiritual leader.
Qutb and the Brotherhood continued to agitate for a return to fundamentalist Islam. They welcomed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 coup against the corpulent and corrupt Farouk, but became disillusioned when Nasser failed to institute Shariah or even ban alcohol. Qutb was arrested and tortured for opposing Nasser, but he continued to inveigh against Western civilization. He was eventually convicted for conspiracy against Nasser’s government and hanged in 1966. Qutb’s brother fled to Saudi Arabia, along with other Brotherhood members, and eventually became tutor to a young Osama bin Laden.
Fast forward to today, when our exquisitely sensitive thought leaders are cracking down on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Somewhere perhaps Sayyid Qutb is smiling as those who would make rules for the Western culture he so hated channel his moral sensibility.
Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006).
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