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 was unsympathetic to the organization's gradual approach to Islamic revival. Faraj parted with the group, seeking more direct militant solutions to the perceived problem of secular government that prevented the implementation of an Islamic state ruled by Islamic law (Shari'a). He also disagreed with other radical Islamist groups, such as Mustafa al-Shukri's Takfir wa al-Hijra (Excommunication and Withdrawal), whose members physically separated themselves from society and lived in communes outside urban centers. Faraj regarded such approaches as ultimately succumbing to the tyranny of jahiliyyah and undermining the mandated duty of physically combating the non-Islamic state. As such, Faraj preferred infiltrating the security services and the military to take over the state machinery directly and then impose a Shari'a-based Islamic system. In the short run, Faraj's strategy was successful—Khaled Islambouli, Sadat's assassin, was an army lieutenant.

Jansen (1986) began The Neglected Duty with an emphasis on jihad as an offensive struggle (refusing to confine it to spiritual struggle or defensive struggle), which is fundamental to the revival of Islam:

Jihad, … in spite of its extreme importance and its great significance for the future of this religion, has been neglected by the ulema (religious scholars) of this age. They have feigned ignorance of it, but they know that it is the only way to the return and the establishment of the glory of Islam anew. (pp. 160–161)

The ultimate end goal of his treatise is the restoration of the Caliphate, which, in turn, is only possible through the establishment of an Islamic state.

Echoing Qutb's radical reading of the Qur'anic verse 24:55, “Whosoever does not rule by what God sent down, those, they are the unbelievers,” Faraj declares the Muslim administrators of a non-Islamic state to be infidels. This distinct theological position provides the basis for the legitimization of warfare against a Muslim leader and was used as justification for the assassination of Sadat. As an appeal to orthodoxy and tradition, Faraj grounded himself in the rulings (fatwas) of the revered medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and thus compared the present leaders with the Mongols, who after conquering Muslim lands, allegedly only nominally converted to Islam.