Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya
Al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah (Arabic: الجماعة الإسلامية, "Assembly of Islam") is an Egyptian Sunni Islamist movement, and is considered a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom[6] and the European Union,[7] but was removed from the United States list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in May 2022. The group was dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state; the group has committed to peaceful means following the coup that toppled Mohamed Morsi.[8]
For other uses, see Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya (disambiguation).الجماعة الإسلامية Al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah
Omar Abdel-Rahman[1]
Karam Zuhdi
Ala Mohieddin
Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim 
Ahmed Refai Taha †
1992–1998 (as an armed group)
Sunni Islamism
Islamic extremism (formerly)[2][3]
Salafi jihadism (formerly)[4]
Assassination of Farag Foda
Hosni Mubarak 1995 assassination attempt
1995 Rijeka bombing
1996 Cairo shooting
Luxor massacre
Al-Qaeda (factions)[5] Egyptian Islamic Jihad
From 1992 to 1998, al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah fought an insurgency against the Egyptian government during which at least 796 Egyptian policemen and soldiers, al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah fighters, and civilians including dozens of tourists were killed.[9] During the fighting al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah was given support by the governments of Iran and Sudan, as well as from al-Qaeda.[10] The Egyptian government received support during that time from the United States.[10]
The group(s) is said to have constituted "the Islamist movement's only genuine mass organizations" in Egypt.[11] While the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 is generally thought to have been carried out by another Islamist group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, some have suggested al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah was responsible for or at least related to the assassination. In 2003, the imprisoned leadership of the group renounced bloodshed, and a series of high-ranking members were released, and the group was allowed to resume semi-legal peaceful activities.[12] Then again some of its members were released in 2011. The imprisoned cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman was a spiritual leader of the movement, and the group actively campaigned for his release until his death in 2017.[4]
Following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the movement formed a political party, the Building and Development Party, which gained 13 seats in the 2011–2012 elections to the lower house of the Egyptian Parliament.[13]
History[edit]
Origins in universities[edit]
Al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah began as an umbrella organization for Egyptian militant student groups, formed, like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, after the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s.[11]
In its early days, the group was primarily active on university campuses, and was mainly composed of university students. Originally they were a minority in the Egyptian student movement which was dominated by leftist Nasserists and Marxists. The leftists were strongly critical of the new Sadat government, and urged Egypt to fight a war of revenge against Israel, while President Sadat wanted to wait and rebuild the military.[14] However, with some "discrete, tactical collaboration" with the government,[15] who sought a "useful counterweight" to its leftist opponents,[16] the group(s) began to grow in influence in 1973.
The Jama'at spread quite rapidly on campuses and won up to one-third of all student union elections. These victories provided a platform from which the associations campaigned for Islamic dress, the veiling of women, and the segregation of classes by gender. Secular university administrators opposed these goals.[17]
By March 1976, they were "dominant force"[18] in the student movement and by 1977 "they were in complete control of the universities and had driven the left organizations underground."[11]
Expansion[edit]
Having once been favored by the Egyptian government of Anwar Sadat they now threatened it, passionately opposing what they believed was a "shameful peace with the Jews," aka the Camp David Accords with Israel.[19] By 1979, they began to be harassed by the government but their numbers grew steadily.[11][19] In 1979, Sadat sought to diminish the influence of the associations through a law that transferred most of the authority of the student unions to professors and administrators. During the 1980s, however, Islamists gradually penetrated college faculties. At Assiut University, which was the scene of some of the most intense clashes between Islamists and their opponents (including security forces, secularists, and Copts), the president and other top administrators – who were Islamists – supported Jama'at demands to end mixed-sex classes and to reduce total female enrollment.[17] In other universities Jama'at also forbade the mixing of genders, films, concerts, and dances, and enforced their bans with clubs and iron bars.[20] From the universities the groups reached out to make new recruits, preaching in poor neighbourhoods of cities, and to rural areas.[19] and after a crackdown against them, inmates of Egyptian jails.
In April 1981, the group became involved in what was probably started as a clan feud/vendetta about livestock or property lines between Coptic and Muslim Egyptians in the vicinity of Minya, Egypt. The group believed in the position of tributary or dhimmi for Christians in Egypt and opposed any signs of Coptic "arrogance" (istikbar), such as Christian cultural identity and opposition to an Islamic state. The group distributed a leaflet accusing Egypt's one Christian provincial governor (appointed by the government) of providing automatic weapons to Christians to attack Muslims, and the Sadat administration of following orders given by the United States.[21]
Crackdown[edit]
In June 1981, a brutal sectarian Muslim-Copt fight broke out in the poor al-Zawaiyya Al Hamra district of Cairo. Over three days of fighting, 17 people were killed, 112 injured, and 171 public and private buildings were damaged. "Men and women were slaughtered; babies thrown from windows, their bodies crushed on the pavement below; there was looting, killing and arson."[22] Islamic Group(s) were accused of participating in the incident and in September 1981, one month before the assassination of Sadat, the al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah were dissolved by the state (although they had never been legally registered in the first place), their infrastructure was destroyed and their leaders arrested.[11]
One scholar studying the group, Gilles Kepel, found that the group repeatedly used the name of radical Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb, and often quoted from his manifesto, Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), in their leaflets and newsletters. They emphasized the right to legislate belongs to God alone; and that divine unity (tawhid) in Islam signifies liberation (tahrir) from all that is corrupt in thought – including the liberation of all that is inherited or conventional, like customs and traditions.[46]
There was a scant supply of any writing by the group's members, but some issues leading writer(s) of the Jama'at thought worth mentioning included:
While secularist social analyses of Egypt's socioeconomic problems maintained that poverty was caused by overpopulation or high defense expenditures, al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah saw the cause in the populace's spiritual failures – laxness, secularism, and corruption. The solution was a return to the simplicity, hard work, and self-reliance of earlier Muslim life.[17]
Members allegedly allying with al-Qaeda[edit]
Deputy leader of al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri announced a new alliance with a faction of Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya. In a video released on the internet on 5 August 2006.[12] Zawahiri said "We bring good tidings to the Muslim nation about a big faction of the knights ofal-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah uniting with Al-Qaeda," and the move aimed to help "rally the Muslim nation's capabilities in a unified rank in the face of the most severe crusader campaign against Islam in its history." An al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah leader, Muhammad al-Hukaymah, appeared in the video and confirmed the unity move.[48] However, Hukaymah acknowledged that other al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah members had "backslid" from the militant course he was keeping to, and some al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah representatives also denied that they were joining forces with the international Al-Qaeda network.[49] Sheikh Abdel Akhar Hammad, a former al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah leader, told Al-Jazeera: "If [some] brothers have joined, then this is their own personal view and I don't think that most al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah members share that same opinion."[50]