violent Islamist extremist ideology (and whose ‘legacy’ has been claimed by the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, as Professor Gleave himself accepts). Sayyid Qutb wrote: “Thus, this struggle is not a temporary phase but an eternal state - an eternal state, as truth and falsehood cannot co-exist on this earth.” (Qutb, 1964:7) 302. I reject Mr Bennett’s submission that Sayyid Qutb died before the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. It is clear that virulent Islamist terrorism began in the 1930s and 1940s with political agitation and assassination, i.e. decades before Sayyid Qutb’s execution in 1966 by Egyptian President Nasser. 303. In my view, Sayyid Qutb is a Dystopian Protagonist with a violent, apocalyptic view of the world. One obvious flaw in his thesis is that embracing his form of nihilist jihad is merely to be swapping one form of human servitude for another, i.e. the diktats of the jihadists.17 Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989) 304. Abdullah Azzam (1941-1989) was a Palestinian academic who fought in the 1967 Six-Day War but became disenchanted with the failure to oust the State of Israel from Palestinian territories and to establish Muslim power in the Arab World. He was highly influenced by Sayyid Qutb. He in turn met and influenced Osama bin Laden. He was expelled from universities in Jordan and Jeddah for his extremist views. He established the Peshwar recruitment office (maktab al-khadamat) for Arab recruits joining the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) and, as mentioned above, he drafted the fatwa (religious-legal judgment), Defence of Muslim Lands: the first obligation after faith (1979), which declared the Afghan Jihad an individual religious obligation on all adult Muslims in all times and places (fard al-'ayn) as opposed to a mere collective duty. He espoused the notion that enemies of Islam should be fought aggressively in their own countries. This notion became a central feature of the jihadist thinking of Al-Qaeda (as demonstrated by the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 th September 2001). He was also responsible for the propagation of the ideology of martyrdom (ishtishhad) and recounted often fantastical tales surrounding those who fought and died in fighting armed jihad, for example of corpses not rotting and heavenly hosts attending dying fighters. His tales have now become stock jihadist recruiting tools and were used as such in the Bosnian War (1991-1995), the First Chechen War (1994-1996), the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) and most recently in the Syrian Civil War (2011-present). 305. Abdullah Azzam’s twin ideas of armed jihad as an individual religious obligation and of “martyrdom” have been the doctrinal core of violent Islamist extremism ever since. Together, they have become powerful recruitment techniques and propaganda that Abdullah Azzam pioneered, and pivotal in shaping the ideology of Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network. Abdullah Azzam wore a trademark Afghan hat and Palestinian kefaya and became an iconic figure of violent Islamist extremism and has 17 As the philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains in his first Reith lecture 2016: “The paradox of fundamentalism is that it relies on precisely what it repudiates, [scriptural] interpretative latitude”. 69