The "Organization for Jihad" claimed responsibility for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat on October 6, 1981. Its leaders were army Lt. Khalid Islambouli (who organized and led the actual mission against Sadat), Muhammad 'abd al-Salaam Farag (an electrician by trade and the group's chief ideologue who was put to death along with Islambouli and three others on April 15, 1982), Karam Zuhd ( the head of a group of Islamic activists in Middle Egypt), and Sheikh Umar 'abd al-Rahman (a blind professor from Asyut University who served as the group's mufti and who was jailed in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing).
The group's philosophy was based on views contained in a pamphlet written by Farag entitled al-Faridah al Gha'ibah, "The Neglected Duty." The "neglected" duty was jihad, which in this context was narrowly defined as armed battle against apostates from the Muslim faith. The broader interpretation of jihad as spiritual resistance against evil was denounced as a "fabricated tradition" invented to "reduce the value of fighting with the Sword, so as to distract the Muslims from fighting the infidels and the hypocrites." (paragraph 88).
The pamphlet argued that Egypt was ruled by "apostates," and, that, "an apostate has to be killed." (paragraph 25). Thus, "there is no doubt that the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them by a complete Islamic Order" (paragraph 70). By this Farag meant the full restoration of the Islamic caliphate, which Ataturk had abolished in 1924. Sadat's trip to Jerusalem to meet with Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977 and his call in 1979 for the separation of religion and politics in Egypt sealed his fate.
Jihad organization members also made use of the sayings of Ibn Taymiyya in their rhetoric calling for Sadat's overthrow. Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi Arabia had distributed free copies of a volume of Ibn Taymiyya's sayings in Egypt.
The Palestinian branch of al-Jihad was founded by three students who studied in Egypt in the late 1970s: Fathi Shikaki, Abdul Aziz Odeh, and Bashir Mousa. Expelled from Egypt following Sadat's assassination in 1981, they returned home and began organizing in the Israeli occupied territories. Following the assassination of Shikaki in October, 1995 by the Israelis, leadership of the organization passed to Abdullah al-Shallah, who had been a professor at the University of South Florida. Palestinian al-Jihad (or "PIJ" for short) fell at odds with Arafat's mainline Fatah movement after he renounced violence against Israel in the late 1980s.
In the 1990s, Egyptian members of al-Jihad merged with Osama bin Laden's organization, al-Qaeda ("the Foundation"). One of Jihad's leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became one of Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenants.