By Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
As we mark another anniversary of September 11, it's worth revisiting not just the tragedy of that day, but the origins of the ideas that drove it.
The ideological lineage behind al-Qaeda's violence traces back to a specific, identifiable strand of thought; one that took shape not in an Afghan cave, but in an Egyptian prison cell during the 1950s and 60s.
Tracing that lineage matters: it reveals how ideas radicalize and mutate across decades, and how al-Qaeda's architects saw themselves as successors to an earlier movement: the Muslim Brotherhood.
The ideological history of Islamist terrorism cannot be told honestly without confronting the Brotherhood. For decades, the Brotherhood has benefited from a convenient distinction: when its ideas produce political violence, the violence is attributed to "extremists" who supposedly broke away from the movement; when its political ambitions are discussed, the Brotherhood presents itself as a moderate, civic and democratic organization.
That distinction may be useful for public relations, but it does not erase the ideological history.
One of the most important figures in that history was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who joined the Brotherhood in the early 1950s after spending time in the United States.
He returned deeply hostile to what he regarded as Western materialism, secularism and moral decay. After the Brotherhood's confrontation with Gamal Abdel Nasser's government, Qutb was imprisoned. Rather than moderating his worldview, imprisonment hardened it.
It was during this period that he wrote Milestones (Ma'alim fi al-Tariq), a text that would become one of the foundational works of modern jihadist ideology.
Qutb's central contribution was to redefine the problem facing Islam. He argued that the Muslim world itself had fallen into jahiliyyah; a condition traditionally associated with the ignorance of pre-Islamic Arabia.
But Qutb extended the concept to Muslim societies and governments that did not conform to his conception of Islamic rule. A government could call itself Muslim and still, in his framework, be fundamentally illegitimate. Political authority was no longer validated by its Muslim identity; it had to submit to Qutb's extremist definition of divine sovereignty.
This created an ideological framework in which Muslim rulers could be wrongfully branded apostates, Muslim societies could be declared corrupted, and confrontation with the existing order could be transformed from a political choice into a religious obligation.
This is where the Brotherhood's historical legacy becomes impossible to dismiss with the phrase "those were just extremists." Qutb did not emerge from some unrelated fringe.
He was a senior intellectual figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his writings were produced within the Brotherhood's ideological environment. His ideas subsequently became a source of inspiration for generations of militants. The Brotherhood never distanced itself from Qutb's violent conclusions, and even if we were to suppose that it did, distancing itself from the consequences of an ideology does not erase its role in transmitting that ideology.
Ayman al-Zawahiri provides perhaps the clearest example of when the Brotherhood's children became its rivals. Zawahiri did not invent his worldview in isolation. He grew up in the Egyptian Islamist milieu shaped by Qutb's ideas and became deeply influenced by Qutbist thought.
But where the Brotherhood increasingly experimented with political participation and gradualism, Zawahiri and other militants concluded that gradualism was surrender. That divergence is important, but it should not be mistaken for a clean ideological divorce.
Zawahiri moved toward underground militancy and became associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which pursued armed struggle against the Egyptian state and was involved in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
The Brotherhood's history is not simply a story of violence. It is also a story of ideological radicalism being repackaged, compartmentalised and, when politically necessary, separated from the organisation's public image.
The result was a peculiar division of labour: the Brotherhood could pursue political and social influence while other organizations carried Qutb's revolutionary logic into the realm of armed jihad. The organizations were not identical. The ideological genealogy, however, was real.
The next transformation came through the convergence of Egyptian jihadism with Osama bin Laden's transnational movement. Zawahiri eventually joined forces with bin Laden, bringing with him the ideological and organizational experience of Egyptian jihadism.
Bin Laden brought money, networks and a global strategic vision developed through the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. Together, they took the Brotherhood worldview beyond the Egyptian state.
Earlier militants had concentrated on the "near enemy": Muslim governments they considered apostate, corrupt or insufficiently Islamic. Bin Laden and Zawahiri expanded the battlefield to the "far enemy"; principally the United States and its allies, whom they portrayed as the external force sustaining the political order they opposed across the Muslim world.
The logic was brutally simple. If Muslim governments were illegitimate because they failed to implement the militants' conception of Islam, and if Western powers supported those governments, then the West itself became a legitimate target of jihad. Qutb had supplied the intellectual architecture. Zawahiri helped turn it into a revolutionary organization. Bin Laden internationalized it.
This is why the history cannot be reduced to the claim that "the Muslim Brotherhood is not al-Qaeda." But that is not the issue. The question is whether the Brotherhood and its intellectual tradition contributed to the ideological environment from which Islamist terrorism emerged. The answer is unmistakable.
Qutb was a Brotherhood ideologue. His concept of jahiliyyah radically expanded the category of those who could be regarded as living outside authentic Islam. His doctrine of divine sovereignty delegitimized political systems that failed his ideological test. His writings inspired militants who rejected the Brotherhood's later political pragmatism precisely because they believed it had abandoned the revolutionary implications of his thought.
The Brotherhood's problem, therefore, is not simply that "some former members became terrorists." That formulation is far too convenient. The deeper issue is that the movement produced and disseminated an ideological vocabulary that radicals would weaponize forever; whether or not they were within the Brotherhood's organizational structures.
And this pattern matters because the Brotherhood's greatest political achievement may not have been the seizure of power. It was the normalisation of a worldview in which Islam was treated not merely as a faith, but as an all-encompassing political project; in which secular political authority could be portrayed as illegitimate; and in which society could be divided between those regarded as authentically Islamic and those condemned as living in jahiliyyah.
The militants took that worldview to its bloodiest conclusion.
By the time al-Qaeda planned September 11, the genealogy was already decades old.
The Brotherhood had provided the ideological rupture. Zawahiri had transformed revolutionary theory into militant organisation. Bin Laden had supplied the money, networks and global battlefield.
The Brotherhood gave birth to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas. Pretending their ideological ancestry has nothing to do with the Brotherhood's intellectual history is simply dishonest.
*The writer is a parliamentary adviser and research partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory.