Anatomy of Egypt's militant islamic groups: Methodological note and preliminary findings

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1980, Pages 423-453

  Eddin Ibrahim, Saad ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO   (Egypt)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972262953     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743800031238     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. See for example Time magazine, 15 Jan. 1979, “The Crescent of Crisis”; in other stories on Iran the same theme, the resurgence of Islam, was central (see Time, 17 Feb, 26 Feb., 26 Nov., and 3 Dec. 1979); The New York Times (2 June, 23 Nov., 9 Dec., 13 Dec. 1978,7 Jan. and 11 Dec. 1979). The Guardian (London) featured a special report on Islam (Dec. 1979) and several articles on 26 Jan. and 23 July 1977, and an article by Martin Woolacott, “New Politics of the Muslim World,” 22 Nov. 1979.
2. Zbigniew Brzezinski is reputed to be fond of these terms. Recent scholarly treatment of resurgence of Islam includes Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” Commentary (January, 1976), 3949; John A. Williams, “A Return to the Veil in Egypt,” Middle East Review, XI, 3 (Spring, 1978), 40-55; R. S. Humphreys, “Islam and Political Violence in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria,” Middle East Journal, 33, (Winter, 1979), 1-19; Israel Altman, “Islamic Movements in Egypt,” The Jerusalem Quarterly, Winter, 1979, 87-108; Hrair Dekmejian, “The Anatomy of Islamic Revival and the Search for Islamic Alternatives,” Middle East Journal, 34 (Winter, 1980), 1-12.
3. See, for example, Manfred Halpem, Politics of Social Change in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963). A native Arab, Western-educated scholar Hisham Sharabi echoes the same thesis about the decline of Islam. In 1966 he wrote, “In the contemporary Arab world, Islam has simply been by-passed…. The decline of Islam in the twentieth century as an organized institutional force capable of exerting direct influence on society and the state cannot be explained or accounted for by a simple or unitary diagnosis.” Sharabi then lists the factors that contributed to the decline of Islam. See his article, “Islam and Modernization in the Arab World,” in J. H. Thompson and R. D. Reischauer (eds.), Modernization of The Arab World (New York: Van Nostrand, 1966), pp. 26-27.
4. For a critical discussion of the limitation of the Orientalist approach see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
5. Writing some thirteen years later and taking note of what is happening in Iran and elsewhere, Hisham Sharabi, for example, wrote in 1977 that “Islamic conservatism is at present the dominant.
6. The Egyptian cabinet on 26 January 1977 issued an order banning all demonstrations and strikes, Le Monde, 27 Jan. 1977.
7. See especially Sadat's statements in interviews published in the Cairo weekly October, 18 and 25 December 1977.
8. See Sadat's speech at Alexandria University, Al-Ahram, 27 July 1977.
9. Al-Ahram, 20 April 1974, reported that eleven people were killed and twenty-seven wounded when the group, henceforth MA, attacked the Technical Military Academy on 18 April 1974.
10. See for example Humphreys, “Islam and Political Values”; Dekmejian, “The Anatomy of Islamic Revival”; Nazih Ayubi, “The Political Revival of Islam; The Case of Egypt,” mem. (April, 1980); Ali Dessouki, “The Resurgence of Islamic Movements in Egypt,” mem. (1979).
11. Al-Da'wa, unlike most Egyptian opposition publications, never veiled its outright disapproval. The reader can easily see the escalation of its criticism of the whole Sadat “peace strategy,” starting with its issue of December 1977 and continuing through 1979.
12. Al-Khawrij, or Kharajites, was a group of early Muslim dissidents who sought strict adherence to Islamic egalitarian and pious principles as they saw them. They disapproved of the behavior and action of the fourth Guided Caliph Ali, as well as that of his challenger Mu'awiya. The Kharajites fought both at one time and never consented to the central authority of the Umayyads in Damascus or the Abbasid in Baghdad. The mainstream Sunni establishment consider the Kharajites heretics. The term has now come to be used in describing any group that the established political and religious authority perceives as threatening the “unity” of society by rebelling. For a concise account of the evolution of Kharajites in history see Fazhur Rahaman, Islam (London: Weidenfeld & Nicol-son, 1966), pp. 167-80.
13. See articles already cited: Mitchell, Husayni, Humphreys, Altman, and Dekmejian.
14. See Sadat's speech in Egypt's People's Assembly Al-Ahram, 16 May 1980, in which he proposed a constitutional amendment to appease the Muslim groups but in which he insisted on separation of religion and state.
15. Husain Al-Dhahaby, who was kidnapped and assassinated by the RHF group, was a typical example of the establishmentarian ulama of Al-Azhar. While a Minister of Religious Endowments and Religious Affairs he mounted blistering attacks on militant groups, calling them misguided. In that he echoed the line of the ruling elite toward these groups.
16. Sheikh Ali ‘Abd al-Razik especially was condemned by the militants for his famous book, al-lslam w'usul al-Hukm (Islam and Foundations of Governance), in which he advocated a secular theory of state.
17. See Al-Ahram, 7 July 1977. For more details about those arrested and their backgrounds see Al-Ahram, 7-20 July 1977.
18. This kind of proposition is to be found, for example, in Eric HofFer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper, 1951); The Ordeal of Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Reflections on the Human Condition (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). An exponent of similar arguments is Hadley Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements (New York: Wiley, 1941); The Politics of Despair (New York: Basic Books, 1958).
19. For details on this early period of Islam, consult any of the standard references on history of Islam, the Arabs, or the Middle East. See for example, Fazlur Rahman, Islam (London: Weiden-feld & Nicolson, 1966); S. C. Coon, Caravan: The Story of the Middle East (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958); Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1950). The flight from Mecca to Medina marks the first day of the first year of the Islamic calendar.
20. This strategy by the Prophet Muhammad is explicitly discussed by Fazlur Rahman in Islam, pp. 18-29.
21. As those RHF members reported it to the research team, “The group debated several places to start its new community of believers.” The sites included Yemen, Libya, the Sudan, and several spots in Egypt. Two sites were actually used by RHF. One was in Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt. The second and more important was in the desert strip between Maadi, Ma'asarah, and Helwan, south of Cairo. The group however, never moved entirely to either site.
22. Three MA leaders (Salih Siriyya, Karem al-Anadoli, and Tallal al-Ansari) and five RHF leaders (Shukry Mustafa, Maher A. Bakri Zanati, Ahmed Tariq Abdel-Alim, Anwar Maamoun Saqr, and Mustafa A. Ghazi) were sentenced to death. All but one (Tallal al-Ansari, whose sentence was reduced to life imprisonment) were actually executed on 9 November 1976 and 19 March 1978. Of the other 92 MA members tried by the state security court, 29 were found guilty and sentenced to varying penalties (eight years to life imprisonment, seven to fifteen years, eight to ten years, and six to four years). Of the 204 RHF members who were tried, 36 were found guilty (12 received life sentences, 6 got ten years with hard labor, and the remainder received sentences varying from five to ten years), Al-Ahram, 1 December 1977.
23. MA members who held this contention claimed that one member of the group who was part of the plan betrayed them by informing the state security forces of the intended plot to overthrow the regime. Curiously enough the informant was not taken seriously for several hours, and that enabled the MA to implement the first part of its plan successfully - that is, the occupation of the Technical Military Academy. By the time they were to move on to the Arab Socialist Union building to carry out the second part of the plan, the authorities had already acted on the information and had started a siege and a counterattack on the academy, Al-Goumhouriyya, 21 April 1974.
24. A typical example of this was reported in Al-Ahram, 1 April 1980, quoting the minister of the interior's account to the People's Assembly of a student conference that began in a mosque in Asyut, then was converted into a march across the city protesting Sadat's invitation to the Shah to reside in Egypt and also protesting the peace treaty with Israel. Islamic groups in other universities staged similar demonstrations.
25. For an account of these movements see Fazlur Rahman, Islam, pp. 193-254; and Zeinab al-Bakry, Mahdiyya Movement in the Sudan with a Comparison of Wahhabis and Samtsiyya. The American University in Cairo, 1977, unpublished M.A. thesis in sociology.
26. For the meaning of “puritanical,” “fundamental,” and “neotraditionalist” see John A. Williams, “A Return to the Veil in Egypt,” Middle East Review, XI, 3 (Spring, 1978), 51-55; Stephen Humphreys, “Islam and Political Values in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria,” Middle East Journal, XII, 1 (Winter, 1979), 1-19; Ali Dessouki, “The Resurgence of Islamic Movements in Egypt,” mem.; Nazih Ayubi, “The Political Revival of Islam,” mem. In oral remarks to the author Professor Nikki Keddie suggested that the term “neo-traditionalists” describes most of the militant Islamic movements of recent times (e.g., Wahhabis and the Iranian Revolution).
27. Muhammad ‘Abduh (1854-1905),an Egyptian religious thinker, was a disciple of Jamal al-Din Afghani, but he was significantly less militant in the latter part of his life. He is credited with serious attempts to modernize Islamic thought by showing that Islam is consistent with reason, science, and adoption of modern technology. Among his famous writings is Rasael al-Ghufran [Messages of Atonement]. For more on Muhammad ‘Abduh see Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform; the Political and.Legal Theories of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
28. Al-Shtibban at-Muslimin, literally Muslim Youth, was established in 1927 in emulation of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). The founders, headed by a retired army general, Salih Harb, meant it to be a nonpolitical, social and athletic organization.
29. This typology is an adaptation of that proposed by David F. Alberle in The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (Chicago: Aldine, 1966). Alberle's typology entails only four types (two by two) along the two axes of locus and amount of change.
30. The Kharajites (al-Khawarij) were the first dissident group in Islam; see note 18. One fundamental tenet of the Kharajites is insistence on the unity of faith and deeds. Thus a tyrant ruler is not to be obeyed, nor can there be obedience to a sinful command. This goes against the mainstream Sunni doctrine, which would tolerate a tyrant for the sake of preserving the unity of the Umma. See Fazlur Rahman, Islam, pp. 168-70.
31. Other militant Islamic movements in premodem times include the Shi'a, on and off from the end of the first Islamic century to the present. One of the Shi'a subsects, the Isma'ilis, staged a revolt and a socioreligious campaign under the leadership of Hamdan Qarmat, after whom they came to be called Qarmatias (al-Qaramitah). He established a post near Kufa (890 a.d.) in Iraq and levied taxes on his followers. This process of taxation was soon replaced by a communist-type society (common ownership of all objects of general utility in the name of the Imam). See Fazlur Rahman, Islam, p. 176. Bernard Lewis surveys many modem militant Islamic movements and argues that some 200 such cases were primarily resistance movements against foreign intrusion, The Return of Islam, pp. 17-20.
32. The Wahhabi movement began in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Its founder, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, a puritanical fundamentalist, allied himself politically with the house of Al-Saud of Najd in central Arabia. Together they began to drive to unite Arabia and to institute fundamentalist Islamic institutions. Despite the ups and downs of this alliance, via-S-vis the outside world, it persisted and finally triumphed politically in the early decades of the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia today is a culmination of this effort. For more details on the Wahhabis, see John S. Habib, The Ikhwan Movement in the Najd: Its Rise, Development and Decline (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970); Harry S. Philiby, Saudi Arabia (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968).
33. The data on the Muslim Brotherhood are derived from R. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brotherhood; I. M. Husayni, The Moslem Brethren; and Christina Harris, Nationalism and Revolution in Egypt: The Role of the Muslim Brotherhood (The Hague: Mouton, 1964).
34. Our data on the Mujahidin in Iran are derived from Ervand Abrahamian, “The Guerrilla Movements in Iran 1963-1977,” in MERIP Reports, 86 (March-April, 1980), 3-15. The social profile of the Mujahidin could be inferred from the characteristics of those who died during the struggle against the Shah's regime. Of some 80 known cases: 30 were college students, 5 teachers, 14 engineers, 10 professionals and office workers, 10 women (including housewives), 2 shopkeepers, 2 workers, 1 clergyman, and 6 of unknown occupational background.
35. The concept of the new middle class has come to refer to modem-educated university graduates, professionals, or salaried employees. For a full discussion of this social formation see Hal-pern, Politics of Social Change, 51-78.
36. For substantiation and elaboration of this point (i.e., the appeal of the Brotherhood to the lower middle class in Egypt) see Mitchell, Brotherhood and Ayubi, “Political Revival.”
37. On this point see R. S. Humphreys, “Islam and Political Values.”
38. See Janet Abu-Lughod, “Migrant Adjustment to City Life: The Egyptian Case,” American Journal of Sociology, 67:1 (July, 1961), 22-32.