Deadly history of extremism narratives in Egypt 
The 1970s represented an important and decisive stage in understanding the Egyptian collective mind’s involvement with extremist narratives. These ideas began to emerge in a more direct way in 1972 with the Military Technical College incident led by Saleh Sirriyya, an Iraqi of Palestinian origin and employee at the Arab League who sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.
However, organizationally, he was one of the cadres of the Islamic Liberation Party, which was formed as a secret organization in Jordan. Its main goal was to overthrow what he described in his writings as the Arab regimes. It was one of the first multinational organizational formations in the Arab region that worked to target multiple countries, including Egypt, and carried out violent terrorist acts.
Sirriyya may have failed to complete his operation, but his ideology did not die with him. Shukri Mustafa adopted it in 1974 when he established the Takfir wal-Hijra group after parting with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The religious nature of this ideology attracted a large number of Egyptian youth, especially university students, and as the idea of sacrifice or retribution began to take hold, group members were responsible for a series of murders that claimed the lives of family and close relatives. Fathers, mothers and sisters were killed in the name of “true religion.”
Meanwhile, doctors, engineers, lawyers and other professionals affiliated with the ideology began to withdraw and leave their jobs, claiming that Egyptian society was infidel and ignorant. Some sought to establish groups even more violent than Takfir wal-Hijra, but the party was on the lookout and would-be defectors were threatened, assaulted and sometimes killed.
By the late 1970s, in the wake of the October 1973 war and following the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords, many extremist groups sought to carry out terrorist operations in Egypt, based on the claim of rejecting the peace agreement.
Yasser El-Shazly
The influence of this ideology at the time was so severe that some security officials began warning of the danger of its spread and domination over the minds of many young people, especially when the group began increasing the level of violence in its operations.
This lead to the brutal assassination of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al-Dhahabi in June 1977 after he wrote a book criticizing the spread of the idea of excommunication among the youth. Al-Dhahabi was targeted as an Egyptian minister of religious endowments and Al-Azhar scholar, and his killing was a challenge to the legitimacy of the state. The group’s founder, Shukri Mustafa, was executed and its influence quickly began to wane.
Nevertheless the Muslim Brotherhood continued to act as incubator for extremist thought, with Sayyid Qutb claiming in his manifesto “Milestones” that all those outside the group are infidels, and that Islam is limited solely to members of the group.
It is the same idea that later gave rise to other terrorist organizations with an Islamic dimension. This ideology was not hidden by the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Tarek El-Bishry, who warned in “The Political Movement in Egypt” that loyalty to the brotherhood was paramount.
By the late 1970s, in the wake of the October 1973 war and following the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords, many extremist groups sought to carry out terrorist operations in Egypt, based on the claim of rejecting the peace agreement.
However, the narrative on which the violence was based was far from clashing with the state, as Shukri Mustafa proposed. Rather, it was based on adopting and spreading sectarian ideas to ignite violence in the street between Muslims and Copts — a period that witnessed many incidents of sectarian terrorism.
• Yasser El-Shazly is an Egyptian journalist and author.
