Jihadism traces its historical roots not to the Prophet Muhammad but to the Arab anticolonialists of the twentieth century, men like Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It looks not to the Qur’an for its doctrinal basis but to the writings of the thirteenth-century legal scholar Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. It has more in common with the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries than it does with militant Muslim nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. To talk about Jihadism as Islamofascism is to misunderstand both Jihadism and fascism. Fascism is an ideology of ultranationalism; Jihadism rejects
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