8
this chaos that the Free Officers Society in the Egyptian military led by Colonel Gamal
‘Abd al-Nasser ousted the monarchy of King Farouk in a coup de’teat on July 23, 1952.
Although relations between the regime of Abdel Nasser and the Ikhwan from day
one had been uneasy, however, the alleged attempt on the life of President Nasser by a
member of the Ikhwan on October 26, 1954 provided the pretext to the Egyptian
state’s brutal crackdown on the Ikhwan. This was the second phase of the suppression
of the Ikhwan whose members experienced arrest, torture, and executions. Qutb in an
effort to make sense of the suppression of Muslims seeking to advance the cause of
Islam at the hands of fellow Muslims advanced his celebrated thesis of
Neo-Jahiliyyah,
which perhaps inadvertently furnished the intellectual framework for the jihadist groups
that were to surface decades later. The government’s campaign against the Ikhwan
reached its peak with the execution of Sayyid Qutb on August 29, 1966 after being
charged with subversion, terrorism, and inciting sedition. This was followed by the third
Arab-Israeli war in June of 1967, in which the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and
Jordan, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israeli defense forces
13
.
These events ultimately gave way to the emergence of proto-jihadist groups
Gama’a al-Islamiyyah, Takfeer wa al-Hijrah, Tandheem al-Jihad
14
. However, the single
most important event that provided the major boost to revolutionary Islamists of all
shades throughout the Muslim world was the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. With
the ousting of the pro-western monarchy of the Shah, and the subsequent
establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran became the
champion of the worldwide Islamic cause by providing support for a variety of Islamic
Convention