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Egyptian Sunni Islamist movement

(الجماعة الإسلامية, "Assembly of Islam") is an Egyptian Sunni Islamist movement, and is considered a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom and the European Union, 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. From 1992 to 1998, fought an insurgency against the Egyptian government during which at least 796 Egyptian policemen and soldiers, fighters, and civilians including dozens of tourists were killed. During the fighting was given support by the governments of Iran and Sudan, as well as from al Qaeda. The Egyptian government received support during that time from the United States. 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 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.

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. However, with some "discrete, tactical collaboration" with the government, who sought a "useful counterweight" to its leftist opponents, 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. in the student movement and by 1977 "they were in complete control of the universities and had driven the left organizations underground." 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. In other universities Jama'at also forbade the mixing of genders, films, concerts, and dances, and enforced their bans with clubs and iron bars. From the universities the groups reached out to make new recruits, preaching in poor neighbourhoods of cities, and to rural areas.

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." Islamic Group(s) were accused of participating in the incident and in September 1981, one month before the assassination of Sadat, the were dissolved by the state (although they had never been legally registered in the first place), their infrastructure was destroyed and their leaders arrested. Members in Asyut launched a rapidly suppressed uprising two days after the assassination. Following the assassination, Karam Zuhdi expressed regret for conspiring with Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the assassination, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Zuhdi was among the 900 militants who were set free in April 2006 by the Egyptian government.

The cleric Omar Abdel Rahman was the spiritual leader of the movement. He was accused of participating in the World Trade Center 1993 bombings conspiracy, and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his espousal of a subsequent conspiracy to bomb New York City landmarks, including the United Nations and FBI offices. The Islamic Group had publicly threatened to retaliate against the United States if Rahman was not released from prison. However, the group later renounced violence and their leaders and members were released from prison in Egypt. Abdel Rahman died on 18 February 2017.

By 1997, the movement had become paralyzed. 20,000 Islamists were in custody in Egypt and thousands more had been killed by the security forces. In July of that year, Islamist lawyer Montassir al Zayyat brokered a deal between the and the Egyptian government, called the Nonviolence Initiative, whereby the movement formally renounced violence. The next year the government released 2,000 members of the Islamic Group. After the initiative was declared Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman also gave his approval from his prison cell in the United States, though he later withdrew it. The initiative divided the Islamic Group between members in Egypt who supported it and those in exile who wanted the attacks to continue. Leading the opposition was EIJ leader Ayman Zawahiri who termed it "surrender" in angry letters to the London newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat.

Zawahiri enlisted Ahmed Refai Taha, both exiles in Afghanistan with him, to sabotage the initiative with a massive terrorism attack that would provoke the government into repression. So on 17 November 1997 killing campaign climaxed with the attack at the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el Bahri) in Luxor, in which a band of six men dressed in police uniforms machine gunned and hacked to death with knives 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians. "The killing went on for 45 minutes, until the floors streamed with blood. The dead included a five year old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons." Altogether 71 people were killed. The attack stunned Egyptian society, devastated the tourist industry for a number of years, and consequently sapped a large segment of popular support for violent Islamism in Egypt. The revulsion of Egyptians and rejection of jihadi terrorism was so complete, the attack's supporters backpedaled. The day after the attack, Refai Taha claimed the attackers intended only to take the tourists hostage, despite the evidence of the systematic nature of the slaughter. Others denied Islamist involvement completely. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman blamed Israelis for the killings, and Zawahiri maintaining the Egyptian police had done it. When Refai Taha signed the al Qaeda fatwa "International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" to kill Crusaders and Jews on behalf of the Islamic Group, he was "forced to withdraw his name" from the fatwa, explaining to fellow members than he had "only been asked over the telephone to join in a statement of support for the Iraqi people."

After spending more than two decades in prison and after intense debates and discussions with Al Azhar scholars, most of the leaders of have written several books renouncing their ideology of violence and some of them went as far as calling ex Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, whom they assassinated, a martyr. renounced bloodshed in 2003, and in September 2003 Egypt freed more than 1,000 members, citing what Interior Minister Habib el Adli called the group's stated "commitment to rejecting violence." Reportedly, there have been "only two instances where members showed signs of returning to their former violent ways, and in both cases they were betrayed by informants within their own group."

Following the 2011 Revolution, established a political party, the Building and Development Party. In August 2011, it presented 6,700 proxies (signatures) to the Egyptian political parties' committee on behalf of its party. In a statement the Jama'at said that any legislation drafted in Egypt after the revolution must refer to the sharia of God, "who blessed us with this revolution. We believe that the suffering we endured during the past years was due to neglecting religion and putting those who don't fear [God] in power." It also stated that "Islam can contain everyone and respects the freedom of followers of other religions to refer to their own sharia in private affairs." The Building and Development Party contested the 2011–2012 elections to the People's Council, the lower house of the Egyptian parliament, as part of the Islamic Alliance which was led by the salafi Al Nour Party. It gained 13 seats: 12 in Upper Egypt and one in Suez. In June 2013, Egypt's president Mohammed Morsi appointed Adel el Khayat, a member of the group, as governor of Luxor. el Khayat resigned within a week of his appointment due to public unrest related to the group's commission of the 1997 massacre in Luxor.