Jami?a Al-Islamiyya, Al- (Al-Gama?a Al-Islamiya, "Islamic Group")

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JAMIʿA AL-ISLAMIYYA, AL- (al-Gamaʿa al-Islamiya, "Islamic group")

Islamic militant movement that surfaced in Egypt in the late 1970s. In the early 1970s the regime of President Anwar al-Sadat released many of the Islamic militants who had been jailed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat encouraged and aided the spread of the Brotherhood and of new Islamic groups (al-gamaʿat al-Islamiya), some of which had been created in prison, to counteract the influence of leftists in universities and the labor movement. All fundamentalist tendencies were represented in these groups, and they had various affiliations and influences in and out of Egypt. Their success soon put them beyond the government's control, particularly in the period after the Arab-Israel War of 1973 when Sadat was following a policy of rapprochement with Israel and the United States and opposition to the regime was rising.

In 1978, representatives of the jamiʿa won a landslide victory in the university student union elections. The following year, their increasing opposition to the policies of President Sadat forced the government to ban their activities in the universities. But, encouraged by the success of the Iranian revolution, the Islamic movement become more radical, demanding, among other things, the cessation of negotiations with Israel. Small extremist splinter groups appeared, among which the most radical was one called simply al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group. Its principal initiators, Karam Zuhdiand Najeh Ibrahim, advocated resorting to violence in order to gain power and establish an Islamic state in Egypt. In 1980, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made efforts to convince Karam Zudhi of the desirability of an alliance between their two movements. The following year, the latter was arrested and accused of complicity in the murder of President Anwar al-Sadat, carried out by a commando of the Jihad.

In 1985, one of the principal leaders of the Jamiʿa, Muhammad Shawqi, quit the movement to found his own group, Al-Shawqiyun, inspired by Ahmad Shukri Mustafa, former head of Al-Takfir wa al-Hijra. The Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya was made up of small cells, coordinated by leaders either in Egypt or abroad (Pakistan, Europe). In liaison with Islamic Jihad, the terrorist actions of the Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya targeted Egyptian political personalities, heads of security services, and sometimes tourists. On 5 July 1997, at the opening of a trial of ninety-seven Islamists before the military court of Cairo, six founders of the movement, condemned to hard labor for the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, launched an appeal to end the violence. In February 1998, the Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya and the Jihad joined the World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, of which Osama Bin Ladin was one of the principal leaders.

On 26 April 1999, the Egyptian government decided to liberate one thousand militants of the movement, after a number of al-Jamiʿa leaders announced that they were renouncing violence. The main leaders of the movement are Jamal Ferghali Haridi, Mustafa Hamza, Rifaʿi Ahmad Taha, and Muhammad Shawqi Islambuli. The spiritual head of al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya was Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman, who had emigrated to the United States in 1989. He was convicted in 1995 of being involved in the February 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and is currently serving a life sentence.