Qutb

He rejected the teachings of renowned Muslim Brotherhood firebrand Sayyid Qutb, whose support of armed struggle helped give the ideological underpinnings for al-Qaeda, Egypt’s Islamic Jihad and, later, some leaders of the Islamic State.

His work gained prominence when he challenged the teachings of the famous Brotherhood ideologue Sayid Qutb, whose advocacy of armed jihad was formative in the rise of groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad in Egypt.

“His invalidation of Qutb’s thought on jihad, in making the distinction that individual terrorist attacks are not jihad and that jihad is governed by specific rules, is his greatest legacy,” the veteran Egyptian journalist Abdel Azim Hammad said in an interview.

His inspiration was the Brotherhood’s founder, Sayyid Qutb, who saw the West as an erotic seductress that must be spurned and destroyed by pious Muslims.

An earnest, academically gifted youth, he was influenced early in life by one of his uncles, Mahfouz Azzam, an impassioned critic of Egypt’s secularist government, and by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and intellectual who became one of the founders of 20th-century Islamist extremism.