Not necessarily. They were both influenced by the work of Sayyid Qutb, arguably the most influential political religious scholar in modern Islam. Following the 1952 coup which brought him to power with General Naguib, Nasser is said to have frequently visited Qutb's house to ask him for ideas about the Arab Revolution. From strands including Salafism and Wahabism, Qutb fashioned the lethal variant of political Islam, now the Al Qaeda doctrine, that provides so-called Koranic justification for violence as the sole way to rid the Muslim world of corrupting Western influences.

As described by the analyst Martin A. Lee, Qutb's incendiary writings decisively influenced a generation of Islamic militants, including Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi family, who had been first exposed to Qutb's prose while attending King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. One of bin Laden's instructors was Professor Mohamed Qutb, the brother of Sayyid Qutb, exiled to Saudi Arabia, who taught classes on the imperative need for Islamic jihad.