After President Obama announced he would close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Colorado lawmakers went up in arms over the possibility that the 240-plus detainees being held there might be transferred to the state.

Moving the prisoners from Cuba to Colorado is within the realm of possibility, because the state is home to the federal government’s most secure prison facility, Administrative Maximum (most people know it as Supermax).

A spokesman for Gov. Bill Ritter initially said the facility was designed for just such purposes, and the state wouldn’t take a “not in my backyard” approach. But Ritter himself later backed off, saying in a radio interview that the government would have to find “some other place.”

“There are, I think, neutral places, or places at least where they don’t have a hostility to that place, where the country would hopefully be willing to accept them,” Ritter told radio host Mike Rosen, adding that Pakistan might an option.

If the detainees are brought to Supermax, they would join some of the world’s most famous terrorists, including Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker”; Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”; and Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

But a transfer to Supermax would be more symbolic than that. Colorado already has a connection to extremist Islam that reaches far beyond potential prisoners.

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In Colorado, Greeley is known, however unfairly, for its smell and its conservative values.

It’s also widely known in the Muslim world, but for reasons that may surprise some Coloradans — for the liberalism, even hedonism, that one Egyptian scholar saw there 60 years ago.

As a visiting college student, Sayyid Qutb (pronounced kuh-tub), who has been called the intellectual father of al-Qaeda, saw immorality and decay even in Greeley’s best attributes.

Qutb was an early promoter of the social and political role of Islam and a member of the Muslim Brothers, which he joined after visiting America. His longest stay in the country was in Greeley.

He used his experiences in Greeley as a tool to share his views on Islam as a superior way of life, and as a separate ideology from either capitalism or communism.

In 1949, America and the Soviet Union were in the beginning stages of the Cold War, with each holding itself out as an example to the rest of the world.

In the Arab world, scholars advocated their own philosophies: secular Arab nationalism or the creation of truly Islamic states.

“They were saying the right way is the way that’s not like America, its not like the Soviet Union; it’s something that is culturally authentic, uniquely ours, not some imported model,” said Nathan Citino, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University.

Qutb similarly defined his position through negation, by sharing his experiences in Greeley, Citino said.

John Calvert, an associate professor of history at Creighton University in Nebraska, was the first to unearth the connection between Qutb and Colorado.

His dissertation focused on Islamist movements, and he knew Qutb’s importance in shaping the views of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man. Calvert started researching Qutb’s life, including translating his autobiography, “A Child From the Village,” and realized little was known about his time in America.

In the summer of 1999, Calvert drove from Omaha to Greeley and found a cache of documents chronicling Qutb’s studies at Colorado State Teachers’ College, now the University of Northern Colorado. He had to get an encyclopedia to prove to the registrar that Qutb had been executed before he was allowed to see the records.

To Calvert, who has written a book about Qutb scheduled to be published next fall, Greeley may have helped solidify Qutb’s beliefs about America.

“A lot of people suggested that Qutb’s views of America and the West shifted when he was in Greeley. But he wrote his first significant Islamist work a year prior to coming to the U.S.,” Calvert said. “His mind was already made up about America prior to his trip to the U.S. and his coming to Greeley.”

In that book, “Social Justice in Islam,” and in other writings published in Egyptian periodicals, Qutb wrote about how the United States was primed to step into the shoes of Great Britain and France as the next great imperialist power, Calvert said.

“As early as the 30s, he was writing about how the West was materialistic and how it had lost its Christianity, whereas the East was spiritual and godly,” he said. “So I think when he came to the U.S. and when he came to Greeley, he saw the U.S. through the tinted spectacles of a man already beholden to a particular view of the world.”

He points to Qutb’s views about lawn care as an example.

Qutb wrote to friends back home about Greeley’s bucolic, tree-lined streets, noting that residents rarely ventured past their own lawns. He saw it as a symptom of American obsession with material, selfish dimensions of life, Calvert said.

Qutb, who grew up in the vibrant, close-knit streets of Cairo, would have found that offensive, though he had seen similar insular life in his short stints in New York City and Washington, D.C., Calvert said.

“He obviously knew Greeley was a much smaller type of place, but cut of the same cloth. There were manifestations of the same civilization, imbued in the same values of degeneracy,” Calvert said.

While his focus lay with his own country, Qutb believed the entire world would benefit from Islam.

“The basic distinction in his mind is between spiritual and materialist societies. He believes Islam is superior to any other religion, but he also believes true Christianity is better than materialism,” Calvert said. “But in his view, Americans have gone away from their Christianity. They no longer know what it means to be Christian. They have all these churches in a city like Greeley, but the teachings in those churches are misguided.”

He was even scandalized that dances would take place in church basements.

After he left the United States in August 1950, Qutb joined the Muslim Brothers, a group founded on the principle of converting Egypt into an Islamic state. Members also fought the British occupation of the country.

A coup placed Gamal Abdul Nasser in charge of the government in 1952, and Qutb worked as a civil servant for awhile; the two were even briefly political allies. But Nasser advocated a secular government, and Qutb was infuriated, according to an account of the period in the book “The Looming Tower,” a history of the Islamist movements that led to 9/11, by the author Lawrence Wright.

Qutb was imprisoned after being accused of involvement in a botched attempt to kill Nasser.

He was imprisoned for more than a decade, during which he revised his first book and wrote two others, “In the Shade of the Koran” and “Milestones,” his most influential work, in which he advocates jihad.

In 1964, the president of Iraq, a fan of Qutb, asked Nasser to release him. After returning home, the former prisoner began working on a conspiracy to assassinate public figures and overthrow the government, Wright wrote.

He was executed in 1966, an experience that deeply affected al-Zawahiri, who was then 15.

Calvert said al-Zawahiri writes extensively about Qutb in his own book, “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.”

“Zawahiri is very explicit in his debt of gratitude to Qutb,” Calvert said.

Qutb’s execution was a pivotal moment in Zawahiri’s life, Calvert said.

Al-Zawahiri went on to found his own underground group, which eventually became Islamic Jihad. That group claimed responsibility for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat in 1981. In 1998, Islamic Jihad joined forces with al-Qaeda.

Some of the most famous people held at Guantanamo are also adherents to the philosophy Qutb helped formulate more than 50 years ago. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

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In the few weeks after Obama’s Guantanamo closure announcement, speculation has run rampant about where the detainees would go next.

Some who spent time at Guantanamo have already been released to other nations; that could be the case for the remaining detainees. Others, including Mohammed, have already been charged with war crimes.

Because Supermax is a federal facility, the Guantanamo detainees may have to be charged in U.S. court to go there.

Alternatively, they might be brought up on military charges and wind up at a military prison like Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Or, they could come to America under some hybrid of those systems.

But Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the National Security division of the U.S. Department of Justice, said he wouldn’t speculate on any of that.

“This is a process that is going to take a lot of heavy lifting,” he said. “There are many legal issues to be resolved before we make an individual call. I’m not in a position to speculate on the outcome.”

He said President Obama ordered the formation of a task force to examine each detainee’s case and determine how to proceed.

“Some detainees may be transferred to other nations; some may be prosecuted in federal courts; some may be handled via other mechanisms. All the relevant agencies will first have to conduct a thorough review and case-by-case analysis to determine the best available option for addressing each detainee,” Boyd said.

Colorado lawmakers are having none of it, in any case.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Springs Republican whose congressional district includes Supermax, introduced a bill that would prevent any federal money being spent to bring Guantanamo detainees to Colorado.

Lawmakers at the state level were equally perturbed.

State Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, whose district includes Larimer County except Fort Collins, said the Guantanamo detainees would create a “new set of problems” for management at Supermax.

“There is also the concern that their terrorist organizations might bring something undesirable to the state of Colorado,” he said.

Lundberg signed a petition against the relocation of any Guantanamo-based detainees to Colorado, which said it would burden the state and pose a national and local security threat.

“In my opinion the closing of Guantanamo Bay has not been proposed because of practical considerations of how to best handle these detainees,” Lundberg said. “It has become a political football for posturing on bigger issues. I do not see that Colorado has anything to gain by becoming a part of this discussion.”

Citino said it is interesting to remember the connection between al-Qaeda and Colorado, however.

“I use that connection when I travel outside the state,” he said. “I’ll say, I live in Fort Collins, Colo., down the street from where Sayyid Qutb went to school in the late 1940s.

“But I think that contextual piece is important: The U.S. had a very different relationship with the Middle East than it does in 2009.”