Qutbism in the context of Hasan al-Banna

Jihadism is a neologism for modern, armed militant Islamic movements that seek to establish states based on Islamic principles. In a narrower sense, it refers to the belief that armed confrontation is an efficient and theologically legitimate method of socio-political change towards an Islamic system of governance. The term "jihadism" has been applied to various Islamic extremist or Islamist individuals and organizations with militant ideologies based on the classical Islamic notion of lesser jihad.

Jihadism has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and Salafi jihadism related ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries. Jihadist ideologues envision jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the international order to unite the Muslim world under Islamic law.

Islamic fundamentalism has been defined as a revivalist and reform movement of Muslims who aim to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. The term has been used interchangeably with similar terms such as Islamism, Islamic revivalism, Qutbism, Islamic activism, and has been criticized as pejorative.

Some of the beliefs attributed to Islamic fundamentalists are that the primary sources of Islam (the Quran, Hadith, and Sunnah), should be interpreted in a literal and originalist way; that corrupting non-Islamic influences should be eliminated from every part of Muslims' lives; and that the societies, economies, and governance of Muslim-majority countries should return to the fundamentals of Islam, the system of Islam, and become Islamic states.

Maʿālim fī aṭ-Ṭarīq, also Ma'alim fi'l-tareeq, (Arabic: معالم في الطريق, romanized: ma‘ālim fī t-tarīq) or Milestones, first published in 1964, is a short book written by the influential Egyptian Islamist author Sayyid Qutb, in which he makes a call to action and lays out a plan to re-create the "extinct" Muslim world on (what he believes to be) strictly Quranic grounds, casting off what he calls Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic ignorance).

Ma'alim fi al-Tariq has been called "one of the most influential works in Arabic of the last half century." It is probably Qutb's most famous and influential work and one of the most influential Islamist tracts written. It has also become a manifesto for the ideology of "Qutbism." Commentators have both praised Milestones as a ground-breaking, inspirational work by a hero and a martyr, and reviled it as a prime example of unreasoning entitlement, self-pity, paranoia, and hatred that has been a major influence on Islamist terrorism.

Islamofascism is a portmanteau of the words fascism and Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism, which advocate authoritarianism and violent extremism to establish an Islamic state, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. For example, Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamofascist and Islamic terrorist ideology.

Interactions between Muslim figures and fascism began as early as 1933, and some used the term fascism to describe as diverse phenomenon as the Pakistan independence movement, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism in Egypt, religious appeals used by Arab dictatorships to stay in power, and the Young Egypt Party (a fascist era-group inspired by Italian fascism). The invention of the term has been variously attributed to Khalid Duran, Lulu Schwartz, and Christopher Hitchens. Beginning in the 1990s, some scholars have described fascist influences to refer to violent Islamist movements such as those of Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, and "reached its apogee" following the September 11 attacks, but by 2018 it had "largely" disappeared from use among policymakers and academics.