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Egyptian Extremist Rewriting Rationale For Armed Struggle
Jailhouse Dissent Seen as Challenge to Al-Qaeda
The guerrilla leader who crafted what became al-Qaeda's guide to jihad is preparing to renounce its extremes, including the killing of innocent civilians, according to his onetime colleagues and his own writings.

Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, an emir, or top leader, of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, is writing his dissent behind prison walls on Egypt's Nile River.

Retired Gen. Fouad Allam says state security officials tried to discredit extremists' religious reasoning for armed attacks.
Such jailhouse "revisions," as they are known here, have helped to widen rifts between al-Qaeda and some of its former admirers and have led to the release of thousands of erstwhile Islamic extremists from Egypt's prisons. "It will be a challenge to al-Qaeda, from someone from inside, who speaks the same language," said Kamal Habib, a former Islamic Jihad leader imprisoned for 10 years after Islamic extremists assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Habib, who bears scars from cigarettes that he said Egyptian security officials stubbed out in his palms during interrogations, said that based on his own experience, Sherif probably was tortured after he was imprisoned in Egypt in 2004 but not as he has been writing his revision. "Torture is not the thing to break Sayed Imam," Habib said, using an honorific for Sherif. "He is very strong."

Fawaz A. Gerges, a Middle East scholar at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, said the revisions "pour fuel on a raging struggle within the jihadist community and . . . challenge the narrative offered by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden."

Without such dissents, armed attacks "would be much greater, much broader and much more devastating," Gerges said.

The main body of Sherif's revision is a tract of no more than 100 pages that Egypt's state security forces and state-allied religious scholars are vetting. Publication is expected to lead to Egypt's release of up to 5,000 former Islamic Jihad members and other activists.

Among other well known Islamic Jihad figures behind bars in Egypt, Abbud al-Zumar, another former leader, is believed to support Sherif's revision; Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the younger brother of the al-Qaeda deputy leader, publicly "neither supports nor condemns it," according to an associate of the radicals familiar with the revision. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The associate said he was not convinced of the sincerity of Sherif's revision, in part because Sherif had argued at length against revisions issued by Egypt's other leading militant movement, the Islamic Group.
Posted by: ryuge 2007-07-15
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=193516