Word: cairo
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...surface, at least, Cairo was getting back to normal, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak settled into his second week in office since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Following the detention of suspected Muslim radicals, said by the government to number 350 but unofficially estimated at 1,500, Egypt's universities reopened without incident. Troops continued to guard government offices and other public buildings, but there was no repetition of the strife that broke out in the southern Egyptian city of Asyut two days after Sadat's death...
Haig described the U.S. supply buildup as merely a "sign of reassurance," adding: "There are indications of increasing Libyan activity and threats to peaceful nations in the region." Haig also talked in Cairo with Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiri, whose border villages have been strafed by Libyan planes. Nimeiri says he fears a Libyan invasion, although some European diplomats in Khartoum believe the situation is not as serious as he has portrayed...
Takfir wa Hijra is only one of an unknown number of fanatical Islamic groups that permeate wide sections of Egyptian society. Says Political Scientist Ali E. Hillal Dessouki of Cairo University: "My hunch is that there are many groups of ten or 15 people, organized into very small cells. They are clandestine, secretive, underground and not public. They are certainly amassing weapons...
Arabist John Williams of the American University of Cairo: "These groups appeal to those who don't think they are getting their fair share of the benefits of modernization." Fundamentalist tendencies are most entrenched in the lower middle class and in Egypt's universities, where they have mushroomed over the past four or five years. Says Dessouki of the converts: "These are people who are neither urban nor rural, who are overwhelmed by city life and feel alien to it. They are a very precarious class...
Reported by Jack E. White and Robert C. Wurmstedt/ Cairo...