This is from the rough draft of the dossier, so you guys get to read some of it before Rohan and Tim do ...
The actual origins and founding of EIJ are somewhat murky, but it appears to date back to the 1960s, when Egyptian president Gamal Nasser attempted to enlist the Muslim Brotherhood into supporting his Arab Socialist Union by granting a general amnesty to its imprisoned members. While Nasser's plan failed, the attempt led to the formation of divisions within the Brotherhood on the use of violence to achieve its political objectives. By the 1970s, these divisions had led to some Muslim Brotherhood members splintering away entirely from the main group to form the Islamic Liberation Organization (ILO), which gained in strength and influence in Upper Egypt during throughout 1970s.
In 1974, ILO attempted to mount a coup d'etat against President Anwar Sadat in an attempt to seize control of Cairo's Technical Military Academy, assassinate Sadat, and declare the creation of an Islamic state in Egypt. The scope of the threat posed to the Egyptian government by ILO can be seen in the composition of the group's members, who were drawn from Sadat's own presidential guard, military intelligence, civil servants, radio and television workers, student activists, and university professors. While the attempted coup failed and ILO was brutally suppressed and forced underground in the subsequent violence, many of its former cadres became senior members of EIJ, which can be viewed as ILO's evolutionary descendant.
A second spike Egyptian Islamism occurred in 1977 when Shukry Mustafa led the Takfir wal Hijra (a name attributed to his group by the Egyptian press), likely consisting of disaffected ILO cadres, against night clubs in Cairo during a period of food riots in the city as well as kidnapping and murdering the moderate Islamic cleric Sheikh Mohammed al-Dhahabi. Mustafa was later arrested along with 400 of his followers, tried, and executed.
The key factor in the modern outbreak of Egyptian Islamist violence was Sadat's peace talks with Israel and above all else his decision to sign the Camp David Accords. No sooner had the Accords been signed than did the Egyptian Islamists, never the most united of movements, closed ranks against Sadat, with IG's disparate factions uniting around the Asyut-based Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and former ILO cadres organizing their members into clandestine cells under the name Gama'at al-Jihad (GaJ) and cultivating ties with disaffected members of the Egyptian military furious over the decision to make peace with Israel. Led by Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, electrician Mohammed Abd al-Salaam Farag, and IG leader Karam Zuhdi, the Egyptian Islamists formed a shura or consultative council to coordinate their activities. Islambouli supervised activities with dissidents in the Egyptian military, Farag was the principal ideologue, and Zuhdi coordinated between GaJ and IG.
The culmination of more than 3 years of plotting by the Egyptian Islamists culminated in 1981. Violence, possibly orchestrated by the Islamist shura, broke out in June between the Muslim and Coptic communities of Cairo's al-Zawiyya al-Hamra slum. Mass detentions of more than 1,600 Coptic and Muslim Egyptians followed and IG (which was at the time regarded as a student organization) was formally banned on September 3. Among the Muslims arrested during the mass detentions was the influential Sheikh Abd al-Hamid Kishk, who had previously called for the prestigious al-Azhar theological academy to be made independent of the Egyptian government. While Sheikh Kishk did not call for the overthrow of the Sadat government, his support of making al-Azhar independent of the Egyptian government were seized upon by Islamists seeking the theological sanction of such prominent religious figures for their activities. Having already secured a fatwa from IG spiritual leader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman sanctioning the assassination of Sadat, the Egyptian Islamists decided to finally move against the Egyptian leader.
On October 6, 1981, Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli and 7 other GaJ army regulars assassinated Sadat during a military parade through Cairo. 2 days later on October 8, 50 IG members attacked the police headquarters in Asyut and 87 people died in the subsequent shoot-out, 66 of the policemen. While the planned Islamist revolution in Egypt was quickly suppressed by Sadat's successor Hosni Mubarak, the investigation into the assassination revealed the full scope of the militant Egyptian Islamist movement and the clandestine cell structure that enabled it to operate under the radar of the government and its pervasive security apparatus. At Lieutenant Islambouli's 1982 trial it was revealed that he was part of a 24-man GaJ cell based in Upper Egypt whose members included Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ayman al-Zawahiri. President Mubarak's reaction to the failed Islamist revolution was swift and ruthless. Islamist groups based in Upper Egypt were crushed and thousands of their members arrested, unlicensed mosques were demolished, and a state of emergency was implemented that is still in effect to this day. While human rights groups and others have criticized Mubarak's policies, what cannot be denied is that by 1985 the Islamist forces that orchestrated the initial uprising had been more or less destroyed. Lieutenant Islambouli and Mohammed Farag were both executed, while Karam Zuhdi was imprisoned until September 2003 for his role in the assassination. As a result, after 1985 GaJ as an organization was no more, but it was soon replaced by the Jihad al-Jadiid (New Jihad), which is known today as EIJ.
| Editor's note: I put up that big picture of Sadat's assassination to remind us just how brazenly it was done. The link in the article title is mine; I found it while looking for the Sadat pic. And finally, the little picture is of the stamp issued by Iran "In Honour of Lieutenant Islambuli, The Revolutionary Execution Agent of Sadat" (1982.) Carry on, Dan. |