Faraj, Abd al-Salam (1952–1982)

Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj was a primary figure in the formation of Tanzim al-Jihad (Jihad Organization), also known as Islamic Jihad, the militant Islamist group that carried out the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. His pamphlet The Neglected Duty (al-Faridah al-Gha'iba), regarded as one of the most coherent statements of modern Jihadist ideology, builds on and further articulates the framework laid forth in Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. Most salient is his logical expansion of Qutb's doctrine that present society and its ruling authorities were directly comparable with the pagan state of pre-Islamic society, known in Arabic as al-jahiliyyah (the age of ignorance). Faraj, implicated in Sadat's assassination, was executed in 1982.

Faraj, an engineer by profession, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood but ...