Egyptian Islamist movements have been active for decades, and reemerged in the public spotlight during the major wave of terrorist attacks that took place between 2003 and 2006 at several Red Sea seaside resorts, and in Cairo with the February 2009 bombing that killed several foreign tourists and locals.³  These attacks marked an abrupt end to a period of relative moderation of Islamist groups, and served to highlight the fragility of the relationship between the now-defunct Mubarak regime and radical opposition forces.

Historically, three main Islamist movements have been present in Egypt. The first and most important is the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the ideology of which states that a true “Islamic society” should be one in which all state institutions and the government obey strict Koranic principles.⁴  Al-Banna, a teacher from a modest background, was heavily influenced by Syrian-Egyptian Salafist apologist Muhammad Rashid Rida, for whom a return to the ancestral foundations of Islam was the only solution to purge Muslim societies of Western influences and colonialism.⁵  Initially, al-Banna’s ambitions were moderate, and focused on moral and social reform within society. But his followers radicalized in the late 1940s as a result of the country’s deepening political turmoil. Al-Banna’s legacy was spread and developed by another key figure, Sayyid Qutb, who became the Brotherhood’s chief leader in the 1950s and authored the famous Islamist manifesto Milestones (Ma‘alim fi-l-Tariq) in which he calls Muslims to fight “paganism” (jahiliyya) through offensive jihad until the establishment of a united Islamic community worldwide.⁶

In the initial decades following its creation, the Muslim Brotherhood spread across the Islamic world. In the process, it provided many Islamists with inspiration in their attempts to establish Islamic states in their own countries, and to advocate for violent struggle as a means to achieve this goal. Due to its influence, the movement was officially outlawed in Egypt in 1954 and remained illegal until the February 2011 “Lotus Revolution”, although it was largely tolerated by the former regime. Indeed, the primary strength of the group has been its ability to adapt with the times, and to the needs of its constituents; specifically, its leaders and members have succeeded in developing large social networks that offer basic services, jobs and healthcare to impoverished Egyptians. This impressive web of charities has allowed the Brotherhood to step in where the state had largely failed and to expand its grip over all levels of society, making it one of the most powerful grassroots Islamist movements in the region.

A second notable Islamist movement is the Islamic Group (Al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, which emerged in the late 1970s as a student offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was first active on university campuses and carried out further recruiting within Egyptian prisons, as well as in the country’s poor urban and rural areas. Although loosely organized, the group was reportedly involved in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat, and in a series of attacks during the 1980s and 1990s aimed at deposing Egypt’s secular, autocratic government and replacing it with an Islamic theocracy. These attacks included the 1997 killing of Western tourists in Luxor, the attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995, the Cairo bombings of 1993, and several other armed operations against Egyptian intellectuals and Coptic Christians. The movement’s spiritual leader, Umar Abd al-Rahman, was connected to Ramzi Yusuf, the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.⁷  (Rahman and nine followers were subsequently arrested and convicted in New York of plotting to blow up the United Nations headquarters, the New York Fed, the George Washington Bridge, and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels). In 1999, the Islamic Group declared a unilateral ceasefire in its longstanding struggle against Cairo. This declaration marked a major ideological shift, and was accompanied by a steady drift away from the use of violence. While it has not dissolved, the Islamic Group’s members have not claimed responsibility for any armed attack since.⁸

The third group of note is the Islamic Jihad (al-Jihad). Active since the 1970s, it was officially formed in 1980 as a result of the merger of two Islamist cells led by Karam Zuhdi and Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. Faraj’s famous manifesto, The Absent Duty (Al-Farida al-Gha’iba), laid out the ideology of the new movement.⁹  Like affiliates of the Islamic Group, members of the Islamic Jihad form a relative minority within Egypt’s Islamist spectrum and are mostly former members of the Brotherhood. Some are believed to have fought alongside the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s against the Soviet Union. The organization’s stated objective was to overthrow the Egyptian “infidel” regime and establish an Islamic government in its place, but also to attack U.S. and Israeli interests in Egypt and abroad. The group is famous for having orchestrated the elimination of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, and for additional efforts to eliminate Egyptian government members in the early 1990s. It is also believed to have attacked Egypt's embassy in Pakistan in 1995 and to have been involved in planning bombings against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. In June 2001, the group merged with al-Qaeda to form a new entity, called “Gama‘a Qa‘idat al-Jihad” and headed by Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.¹⁰

Over time, this landscape has evolved considerably. One of the most significant changes has been a gradual “deradicalization” of Islamist movements and their ideological abandonment of violence. This process has primarily focused on the changing attitudes of many Islamists toward the use of terror; while the ideology of Egyptian Islamist groups might remain radical and anti-democratic in nature, there has been tangible movement away from violence as a vehicle by which to impose their political views.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood began undergoing broad deradicalization, and increasingly disavowed jihad in favor of political moderation. Hassan al-Hudaybi, the movement’s supreme guide, released a book in 1969 entitled Preachers not Judges, in which he justified the decision to reject violence and developed a series of theological counterarguments to Qutb’s radical views.¹¹  Under his influence and that of his successor Umar al-Tilmisani, the Brotherhood gradually distanced itself from armed action, gave an oath to al-Sadat not to use violence against his regime, and even named him a “martyr” after he was killed.¹²  This ideological shift drew condemnation from other Islamist groups, most notably the Islamic Jihad and its commander Ayman al-Zawahiri, who severely condemned the Brotherhood’s reorientation in a book entitled The Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood in Sixty Years (Al-Hasad al-Murr: Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun fi Sittin ‘Aman).¹³

A number of factors were necessary for this deradicalization to take root. Islamist ideas first had to be delegitimized through rational and theological arguments, with the process supported by charismatic and authentic former jihadists. One of the most prominent instances of this trend occurred within the Islamic Group. In July 1997, during a military tribunal, one of the group’s activists, Muhammad al-Amin Abd al-Alim, read a statement signed by six other Islamist leaders that called on their affiliates to cease all armed operations in Egypt and abroad.¹⁴  While it elicited considerable controversy within the Group, the statement heralded the beginning of its deradicalization. In March 1999, the group’s leadership launched an “Initiative for Ceasing Violence” and declared a unilateral ceasefire. Ideologues and leaders—widely respected within the larger grassroots movement, and many still held in Egyptian prisons—were able to convince their base to renounce armed struggle and support their new course by authoring a series of texts to provide the ideological legitimation for their rejection of violence. Four books were issued in January 2002 under the title of Correcting Conceptions (Silsilat Tashih al-Mafahim), addressing the reasons behind the Islamic Group’s ideological reorientation and explaining why jihad in Egypt had failed. Twelve others followed, offering a critique of al-Qaeda’s extreme ideology.¹⁵

A second factor that contributed to the deradicalization of Islamist movements was their interaction with external groups, among them “moderate” Islamists and non-Islamists. This, surprisingly, occurred within Egypt’s prison facilities, where inmates discussed their beliefs and tactics, with such interactions resulting in the deradicalization of many prisoners. The Muslim Brothers were the first to undergo such a process following the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966. Members of the movement began questioning the relevance of jihad as a way to combat the government, and chose to reject violence. Another notable example of this positive dynamic—all the more significant since the trendline elsewhere has been toward greater radicalization within prisons—was the interaction between the Islamic Group and the smaller, more radical Islamic Jihad that began in the 1990s and culminated in 2007 when the former finally embraced moderation. Deradicalization efforts were led by the movement’s former leader Sayyid Imam al-Sharif—also known as Abd al-Qadir Ibn Abd al-Aziz or “Dr. Fadl.” His Document for the Right Guidance of Jihad in Egypt and the World (Tarshid al-‘Amal al-Jihadi fi Misr wa-l-‘Alam) had an enormous impact within prisons and led numerous inmates to renounce returning to jihad.¹⁶

Eventually, the state’s use of repression coupled with inducements contributed as well to this broad deradicalization dynamic.¹⁷  Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Egyptian regime—in an effort to appease Western anger—increasingly mobilized its resources to tame jihadists. In the case of the Islamic Group, it provided fighters with pensions, and the Interior Ministry offered other inducements such as business grants to redeemed Islamists.¹⁸  In addition, the success of Egyptian security forces in suppressing radical movements convinced the leadership of such groups that armed violence was no longer a favorable method to achieve their goals. Many came to believe that the plight of Islamists in prison was proof that God no longer supported their actions.

Yet, many of the Islamist groups that have undergone ideological and organizational deradicalization have faced difficulties in imposing the same on their membership. Attempting to convince low- and mid-level jihadists to renounce terrorism carries the risk of mutiny and internal factionalization. The case of the Islamic Jihad, where deradicalization has only been partially successful, is instructive in this respect. While the group’s leaders have publicly abandoned violence, some affiliated factions have refused to renounce jihad, sometimes even leaving the movement (as one cell that is now openly allied with al-Qaeda did). The Islamic Group has faced similar difficulties. In a recent interview, Nagih Ibrahim, one of its leading ideologues, emphasized that although the group’s formal rejection of violence had obviously helped limit the spread of violent Islamism in Egypt, such ideological revisions had had less impact on younger generations, especially on those sympathetic towards or active within hard-line jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda.¹⁹  Also, he noted that de-radicalized fighters—many of whom generally have no education or skills—remained exposed to Islamist ideology (and open to a possible return to armed struggle) due to the state’s failure to address their grievances.

Cases of re-radicalization within the Muslim Brotherhood have also been particularly troubling. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this tendency has been the group’s unprecedented affiliation with, and public support for, terrorist movements in recent years, such as Iranian-backed Hamas (itself a Brotherhood offshoot that always gave preference to violence) and the Hezbollah Shi’ite militia. In May 2009, following the dismantlement of a Hezbollah cell in the country, the Brotherhood took the unpopular position of supporting the group despite its repeated violations of Egypt’s sovereignty. The group’s former supreme guide, Muhammad Mahdi Akif, directly contradicted Cairo by declaring that Hezbollah “[did] not threaten Egyptian national security.”²⁰  As well in 2009, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, the Brotherhood issued a communiqué demanding, among other things, the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Cairo, the opening of the Rafah crossing to Gaza, a cut-off of gas and oil supplies to Israel, and that all Arab governments “bolster the resistance and support [Hamas] by every possible means.”²¹  Akif’s deputy, Ibrahim Munair, went one step further, condemning Egypt’s relations with Washington, and telling Al-Alam television that the group “[wanted] to send a message to the Zionist entity, which supports [the Mubarak regime], and to the West, especially America.”²²

The terrorist attacks that hit Egypt between 2003 and 2009 led many to conclude that homegrown Islamism was on the rise again and that, quite paradoxically, the “deradicalization” of Islamist movements on a political level had brought about new and more radical discourses within Egyptian society. In particular, the quick rise and spread of Salafism in Egypt has been emblematic of the success of radical Islamists to rally the country’s youth to their ideology.²³

Besides, the complex combination of severe political repression and extremely tough economic conditions faced by most Egyptians has contributed to this reradicalization of the society at large. Inspired by Saudi Wahhabis, Salafists consider that the only true path is to abide by the practices of the first Muslims (sahaba) and that anything that deviates from the strictly literal interpretation of the Koran is innovation (bidaa) and therefore apostasy (kufr). Although few Egyptians openly identify themselves as Salafists, popular thinking has been critically influenced by this puritanical approach to faith in the last decade, which has reached into all sectors of society, as evidenced by the mounting number of women wearing the niqab (full veil) or men growing their beards. Beyond the traditional role of radical imams in mosques, television satellite channels with an overt Salafist tone—Al-Naas and Al-Rahma for instance—have also gained unprecedented audience.²⁴

In recent years, Salafists have increasingly targeted Egyptian religious minorities. The January 1, 2011 blast at an Orthodox Coptic church in Alexandria which killed 23 and was allegedly carried out by al-Qaeda, has been particularly emblematic of the rise of anti-Christian sentiment in Egypt, and of the country’s growing religious polarization.²⁵  This attack had been preceded in January 2010 by the killing of six Coptic Christians exiting a church in Naga Hammadi, Upper Egypt. Copts represent ten percent of Egypt’s population. This community has been politically marginalized since Nasser’s 1952 coup and has regularly accused the former regime of persecuting its members, a claim largely fueled by the absence of official responses to the Islamist violence against Christians. In the 1990s, dozens of Copts were killed by Islamists. These murders were accompanied by increasing attacks on Western tourists. By 1998, the situation had noticeably improved for the Copts and Pope Shenouda III himself declared that his community was no longer subject to coercion. Yet these events, and other similar incidents—anti-Coptic riots in Alexandria in 2005, and an attack on a Coptic Church in 2008—combined with the rise of Islamists in the post-Mubarak era, could worsen sectarian violence.

Indeed, Islamists of Salafist sensibility appear to have grown increasingly intolerant towards Christians. In February 2009, for instance, a Salafist cleric called for the “Islamization” of Coptic women in order to destroy apostasy.²⁶  For Salafists, Copts are not citizens but dhimmis—a religious minority subjected to Muslim rule. They are commonly portrayed on Salafist television channels as infidels who conspire against Islam. Salafists also daily express their hatred on online forums and websites, often calling for violent attacks on them.²⁷

It is interesting to note that Salafists have also targeted other sects such as Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam accused of “polytheism” for worshiping sheikhs and building mosques at their shrines.²⁸  A recent ban on dhikr (the Islamic devotional act of Sufi orders) was a victory for Salafists over moderate Sufism. Besides, Salafists regularly call for the banning of all Sufi ceremonies and succeeded in 2008 when the birthday celebration (mawlid) of the Prophet’s granddaughter Zainab, was officially outlawed because of alleged risks of swine flu contagion as reported by Egyptian authorities. In addition to bashing Sufis as infidels, Salafists have also accused them of encouraging sin and debauchery by mixing the sexes at the shrines and during their rituals—which Salafists see as evil. They point to the mosque of Ahmad al-Badawi in Tanta—where the founder of the Sufi Ahmadiyya order is buried—which does not enforce segregation between men and women, except during prayers.

From the 1960s until Mubarak’s ouster in early 2011, the Egyptian state waged a continuous campaign against Islamists, detaining militants, jailing leaders, and cracking down on their finances. In particular, the official crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood were largely a response to its political gains and to the threat that its members posed to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). In 2005, the group won 88 seats in the country’s national assembly—20 percent of the legislature—through “independent” candidates, thereby forming the largest political opposition bloc to Mubarak.

In 2007, in a clear attempt to curtail the Brotherhood’s political participation, the Egyptian government engineered constitutional amendments and a restrictive new electoral law making it nearly impossible for Muslim Brothers to participate in either parliamentary or presidential polls. The electoral law outlawed all political activities and parties “based on any religious background or foundation,” thereby targeting Islamist groups.²⁹  The year after, these restrictions resulted in the rejection of more than 800 Muslim Brothers as candidates for local council elections and the movement overall failing to participate in elections for professional lawyers and journalist syndicates. Additional constitutional changes also extended the “temporary” emergency law enforced after the assassination of al-Sadat in 1981 with the adoption of a new anti-terrorism law (article 179) that while pretending to protect democratic rights provided security forces with far-reaching powers to crack down on Islamists. The former regime also arrested many of the group’s mid and high-level members, including the leader of its guidance council, Abd al-Muanim Abu al-Fatuh, in 2009.³⁰  This combination of preventive and repressive measures, along with the massive fraud that stained Egypt’s December 2010 parliamentary polls, led the Brotherhood to temporarily withdraw from politics and forfeit all of its seats in the national assembly.³¹

Overall, the Brotherhood’s ideological posture was significantly affected by these waves of repression. Over the last few years, the movement has undergone some sort of internal identity crisis, with growing ideological divergences within its ranks—particularly among the group’s conservative old guard, its reformist branches, and a new generation of activists. These cleavages first emerged in June 2008 during the group’s guidance council elections, when conservative elements conducted a campaign intended to remove reformers and marginalize their influence. In December 2009 and January 2010, during internal balloting aimed at selecting the 16 executive committee members of the “guidance council” (shura) and replace its leader Muhammad Mahdi Akif, the group bypassed several younger, more liberal incumbents who had gained prominence—including Akif's deputy, Muhammad Habib, a reformist strongly opposed to violence³² —and empowered a conservative leadership instead.³³  The group’s new and controversial supreme guide, Muhammad Badi, is known as a hardline Salafist devoted to the spirit and methods advocated by Qutb, with whom he was jailed in the 1960s.³⁴  For some, Badi’s appointment and the renewed emphasis laid on religious matters constitute a regression for the movement that disengages from intellectual and political debate and have thus become less appealing to younger members.

While the apparent shift of Muslim Brothers towards a more conservative direction does not necessarily mean that the group intends to return to violence any time soon, such a scenario cannot be completely discarded. Even though the movement condemned most of the terror attacks that have hit Egypt in the past, some radical elements could very well choose to resume violence if their demands, both political and economic, are not heard by the future government.³⁵  Similarly, the threat of a reradicalization of Egypt’s Islamists remains. Several little-known violent offshoots of the Brotherhood, like the “Abdallah Azzam Brigades in Egypt” or the “Holy Warriors of Egypt,” are believed to have been behind some of the terrorist attacks that hit the country since 2003.³⁶  In 2010, a Salafist group suspected of spreading jihadist ideology and accusing society and state institutions of apostasy was also arrested.³⁷