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In the early history of Islam there had been a tradition of ideas passed on by pupils, each of whom listened to the words of his master, and then transmitted them to his own successors. It was a chain binding each scholar irrevocably to his predecessors and to those who in turn had learned the truth from his own lips. A similar chain of connection linked the theorists and activists of the Islamic revival, each of whom added his own contribution. An intellectual movement centered upon fighting the power of the West began with a complex figure called Jamal al-Din, often known as Al-Afghani, who taught in Egypt, was exiled to Paris, and eventually died in Constantinople in 1897. He called on Muslims to resist the West, to turn the West’s own weapons and techniques against it.26

One of his most devoted supporters was Muhammad Abduh. When Al-Afghani was expelled from Egypt, Abduh followed him to Paris. There they published a short-lived journal called the Indissoluble Bond, which preached Muslim unity in the face of Western power. Abduh’s work was continued by his pupil, a Syrian called Rashid Rida. He in turn became a powerful influence on Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and on its most notable theorist, Sayyid Qutb.27

Banna created a new kind of political and religious organization that began “as a youth club with its main stress on moral and social reform through communication, information and propaganda.”28 Banna began a tradition where Islamist politics were allied to providing assistance for the poor and dispossessed. By 1940 there were more than 500 branches in Egypt, which had risen to 5,000 by 1946. Banna’s Ikhwan al-Muslimim found many adherents throughout the Middle East, where they were often ruthlessly repressed by secular authorities. King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said he had his own ikhwan, and politely declined their offer to establish a branch in his domains.

Sayyid Qutb was both a scholar and a prolific author, who wrote his last (and arguably) his greatest work in prison in the 1960s. He became one of the leading figures of the Muslim Brotherhood. When he was hanged on the orders of the Egyptian government, he turned into a martyr in the eyes of his supporters. A younger Egyptian, Abd al-Salem Faraj, suffered the same fate as Qutb; in 1979 he had founded a group called the Society for the Holy War (Jamaat al-Jihad), usually known simply as Al-Jihad. On October 6, 1981, Al-Jihad succeeded in killing the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, whom they had proscribed as an evil prince. As one of the assassins publicly declared, “I am [Lieutenant] Khalid Islambuli. I have killed Pharaoh and I do not fear death.”29 For Faraj, Islambuli, and their group, Sadat merited death. “We have to make the Rule of God’s Religion in our own country first, and to make the Word of God supreme … there is no doubt that the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders [“corrupt” Muslims like Sadat] and to replace them by a complete Islamic Order. From there we should start.”30

Al-Jihad believed in the near-magic potency of a dramatic revolutionary act. In their eyes, “killing Pharaoh” would ultimately usher in the restoration of a true Islamic state.31 Unlike Qutb’s profuse and articulate writings, Faraj wrote only one single work, an eighty-page pamphlet called The Neglected Duty (Al-Faridah al-Gha’iba), but its influence was out of all proportion to the number of copies printed.32 Faraj, like his predecessor, had joined the chain. He advanced the idea that in the desperate situation of his own time, the (lesser) jihad, or armed struggle, had became the individual duty of each and every true Muslim. If not exactly an innovation, this represented a complete reversal of many centuries of Muslim practice. This was in Faraj’s eyes the duty which had been “neglected.” His concept of struggle waged through a symbolic chiliastic act had a long-forgotten parallel within Western thought in the nihilism of the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Nechaev. Political murder