The Man Who Taught Bin Laden's Teacher a Muslim Brother

Al-Qaeda and ISIS didn't invent their ideology from nothing. They inherited it — from a prisoner in a Cairo jail cell who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. Congress is finally asking why that lineage still gets a pass.

By Michael Arizanti

AI-generated editorial illustration depicting Sayyid Qutb in prison

Before Bin Laden, There Was Sayyid Qutb—and the Muslim Brotherhood

Al-Qaeda and ISIS did not invent their ideology from nothing. They inherited its central concepts from Sayyid Qutb, a leading Muslim Brotherhood thinker whose writings transformed modern jihadism. Washington is finally beginning to confront that lineage.

Before Osama bin Laden declared war on America, before Ayman al-Zawahiri built Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and before ISIS proclaimed its caliphate, a sickly Egyptian literary critic sat in a Cairo prison and wrote the ideological blueprint they would follow. His name was Sayyid Qutb.

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The Egyptian state hanged Qutb in August 1966. But the ideas he developed as a senior Muslim Brotherhood ideologue—most famously in his short, furious book Milestones—survived him. They became some of the most consequential ideas in the history of modern jihadist terrorism. Most Americans have never heard of Qutb. They have heard of what his ideas produced.

The Muslim Brotherhood Thinker Who Shaped Modern Jihadism

Milestones argued that the modern world—including nominally Muslim countries—had fallen into jahiliyya, the state of pagan ignorance traditionally associated with the period before Islam. Qutb was not merely criticizing Muslim governments as corrupt or insufficiently religious. He was declaring the entire political and social order fundamentally illegitimate.

From that premise flowed the architecture later adopted by jihadist movements. If society is trapped in jahiliyya, its rulers lack Islamic legitimacy. If those rulers govern outside Qutb’s understanding of sharia, they can be declared apostates through takfir. If they are apostates, armed jihad against them becomes not merely permissible but obligatory. And because ordinary Muslims cannot be trusted to recognize their condition, a disciplined vanguard must lead the revolution and impose a new Islamic order.

Jahiliyya. Takfir. Vanguardism. Revolutionary jihad against nominally Muslim governments. Read the founding literature of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State, and much of it reads like an expansion of Qutb’s central propositions.

From Sayyid Qutb’s Cairo Prison Cell to Al-Qaeda

This ideological transmission is not speculative. It is biographical. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a teenager when Qutb was executed. According to his own accounts and those of his biographers, Qutb’s hanging helped radicalize him. While still a schoolboy, Zawahiri joined an underground cell influenced by Qutb’s ideas.

That movement eventually developed into Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the organization associated with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and later led by Zawahiri. In 1998, Zawahiri joined Osama bin Laden in announcing the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Egyptian Islamic Jihad subsequently merged with al-Qaeda, which carried out the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, and the September 11 attacks.

Zawahiri became al-Qaeda’s chief ideologue and, after bin Laden’s death in 2011, its overall leader. He remained in that position until a CIA drone strike killed him in Kabul in 2022. The ideology Zawahiri carried throughout that journey was deeply Qutbist.

The Man Who Taught Bin Laden’s Generation

Bin Laden’s connection to Qutb’s intellectual world was also direct. After Sayyid Qutb’s execution, his brother Muhammad Qutb moved to Saudi Arabia and taught Islamic studies at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where bin Laden studied during the 1970s.

Several bin Laden biographers, including Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, describe the influence of Muhammad Qutb’s teaching circle and the broader spread of his brother’s ideas in Saudi Islamist circles. The ideology that helped provide al-Qaeda with its justification for mass murder was kept alive partly through the teaching and promotion of Sayyid Qutb’s own brother.

ISIS emerged through a different but overlapping stream. Its lineage ran through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and thinkers such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, combining Salafi literalism with the revolutionary concepts Qutb had popularized. But the underlying structure was familiar: society had fallen into jahiliyya; Muslim rulers and their supporters could be declared apostates; and a militant vanguard had the right to wage war against them.

When ISIS declared a caliphate in 2014 and began executing supposed apostates on camera, it was applying that logic with industrial efficiency. Al-Qaeda and ISIS cannot be understood merely as armed organizations. They were ideological movements that convinced thousands of people to kill civilians and sacrifice their own lives. Both were built, in important part, on foundations laid by a senior Muslim Brotherhood thinker.

Did the Muslim Brotherhood Really Reject Qutb?

The Muslim Brotherhood’s standard defense is that it rejected Qutb’s radicalism decades ago. After his execution, Brotherhood leader Hassan al-Hudaybi was credited with Preachers, Not Judges, a text commonly interpreted as rejecting indiscriminate takfir and recommitting the organization to gradual political and social change rather than immediate armed revolution.

That distinction matters. The Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are not operationally identical, and jihadist groups have frequently attacked the Brotherhood for participating in elections and accepting aspects of democratic politics. But the Brotherhood’s supposed repudiation of Qutb remains incomplete.

The movement distanced itself from some of his conclusions without fully disowning the man or the worldview behind them. Qutb remains one of the Brotherhood’s most influential thinkers. His writings continue to circulate internationally, including through Islamist and Brotherhood-adjacent networks.

The Brotherhood moderated the tactic without fully rejecting the diagnosis. It moved away from immediately declaring Muslim rulers apostates and shooting them, but continued to present modern Muslim societies as corrupted systems requiring comprehensive Islamic transformation. That was not a complete ideological break. It was a change in tempo and method.

Hamas Is the Brotherhood’s Most Important Case Study

The debate cannot remain purely theoretical because the Brotherhood produced a major terrorist organization of its own. Hamas identifies itself in its 1988 founding charter as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The United States has designated Hamas as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997. Calling Hamas an offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore not an analogy invented by the Brotherhood’s critics. It is part of Hamas’s own declared institutional identity.

Hamas demonstrates how Brotherhood ideology, political organization, charitable networks, religious mobilization, and armed violence can exist within the same ecosystem. The movement participates in politics, operates social institutions, raises funds internationally, and maintains a terrorist army responsible for suicide bombings, rocket attacks, hostage-taking, and the October 7 massacre. That is why the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is wholly separate from jihadist violence has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

Washington Is Beginning to Act

In 2026, the United States began moving from analysis toward enforcement. In January, the Treasury Department designated the Egyptian and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists over their support for Hamas. The State Department designated the Lebanese Brotherhood organization al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

In July, Treasury sanctioned Mahmoud al-Abyari, the London-based secretary-general of the Egyptian Brotherhood’s General Secretariat, for helping raise funds that ultimately reached Hamas’s military wing through previously sanctioned organizations. Treasury described a multilayered network involving charities, shell companies, and informal financial channels spanning the United Kingdom, Turkey, Indonesia, and Gaza.

That network is difficult to reconcile with the image the Brotherhood has cultivated in the West: that of a moderate civic movement offering a peaceful alternative to jihadist violence.

Congress has also begun addressing the contradiction. The bipartisan Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, introduced in the House by Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and Jared Moskowitz with companion legislation from Senator Ted Cruz, advanced through the House Foreign Affairs Committee in December 2025.

The legislation seeks to move beyond designating individual branches, financiers, and front organizations. It would require the U.S. government to identify Brotherhood entities involved in terrorism and formally assess the organization’s transnational infrastructure. The bill describes the Brotherhood as a global movement whose branches provide support to organizations engaged in terrorism and pose a threat to U.S. national security.

The Distinction Between the Brotherhood and Jihadists Is Too Simple

For decades, much of Washington treated the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda-style jihadism as opposites. The Brotherhood participated in elections. Al-Qaeda rejected democracy as apostasy. The Brotherhood pursued gradual institutional influence. Al-Qaeda and ISIS demanded immediate revolutionary violence.

Those differences are real. But they should not obscure the shared intellectual lineage. The Brotherhood retained much of Qutb’s diagnosis while softening his prescription. Al-Qaeda and ISIS embraced both the diagnosis and its most violent implications.

They became rivals within the same broader ideological family—divided over timing, tactics, and political participation, but shaped by overlapping ideas about Islamic governance, Western influence, the corruption of Muslim societies, and the need for an organized vanguard to transform them. A family feud is still a family.

Nobody seriously argues that every Muslim Brotherhood office is planning terrorist attacks. The stronger and more defensible argument is that the Brotherhood has served as an ideological reservoir from which modern jihadism repeatedly drew—and that parts of its financial and organizational infrastructure have supported violent members of the same ideological family. Hamas is not a hypothetical example. It is the case study.

Why the United States Should Designate the Muslim Brotherhood

A formal U.S. designation of the Muslim Brotherhood or its principal transnational organs would not be unprecedented. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Russia, and Syria have designated or outlawed the organization, although their political systems, motives, and definitions of terrorism differ from those of the United States.

Washington should not simply copy those governments. It should build its case according to American law and evidence. But the current American approach is increasingly incoherent: sanction Brotherhood branches, financiers, charities, and armed affiliates individually while leaving the larger network’s legal status unresolved.

That ambiguity allows Brotherhood-linked organizations to operate in the United States and Europe under a presumption of legitimacy despite the movement’s ideological history and the terrorism record of its Palestinian branch. It also forces authorities into a slow game of enforcement whack-a-mole—sanctioning one charity, financier, or affiliate at a time while the broader network adapts.

A carefully constructed designation framework would establish a standing legal barrier against entities shown to be part of the Brotherhood’s terrorist-support infrastructure. It could strengthen financial screening, asset freezes, visa restrictions, criminal prosecutions, and enforcement against front organizations.

Such a policy must distinguish evidence-based security action from indiscriminate political repression. It should target organizations and individuals according to demonstrable conduct, financing, command relationships, and material support—not merely religious conservatism or political Islam in the abstract.

But refusing to act because the Brotherhood is complex is no longer a serious policy. Sayyid Qutb has been dead for sixty years. The prison in which he wrote is part of history. Yet his doctrine survived in books, organizations, financial networks, and terrorist movements that reshaped the Middle East and attacked the West.

The ideology that helped build al-Qaeda and ISIS did not remain inside a Cairo prison cell. The Muslim Brotherhood helped keep it in circulation.

It is past time Washington confronted that organization—and its legacy—by name.

Michael Arizanti is a geopolitical analyst and commentator with The Capitol Institute, where he covers Middle East security with a focus on Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Kurdish affairs. His work on regional conflict, energy geopolitics, and the post-Assad order has appeared in the Times of Israel and Türkiye Today, and he has provided on-air analysis for Al Hurra, i24NEWS and Al Arabiya. He writes on X at @ColdBrief.