Muhammad Qutb
Qutbism is considered a product of the extreme repression experienced by Qutb and his fellow Muslim Brothers under the Nasser regime, which was resulted from the 1954 Muslim Brothers plot to assassinate Nasser. During the repression, thousands of Muslim Brothers were imprisoned, many of them, including Qutb, tortured and held in concentration camps. Under this condition, Qutb had cultivated his Islamist ideology in his seminal work "Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones)", in which he equated the Muslims within the Nasser regime with secularism and the West, and described them as regression back to "jahiliyyah" (period of time before the advent of Islam). In this context, he allowed the "tafkir" (which was an unusual practice before the rejuvenation by Qutb) of said Muslims. Although Qutb was executed before the completion of his ideology, his idea was disseminated and continuously expanded by the later generations, among them Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who was a student of Qutb's brother Muhammad Qutb and later became a mentor of Osama bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri was considered "the purity of Qutb's character and the torment he had endured in prison," and had played an extensive role in the normalization of offensive Jihad within the Qutbist discourse. Both al-Zawahiri and bin Laden had become the core of Jihadist movements which exponentially developed in the backdrop of the late 20th-century geopolitical crisis throughout the Muslim world.