Word: takfir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to the government, the plan that the conspirators eventually put into effect was the work of an electrical engineer named Abdel Sallam Sallah Farag. He suggested having First Lieut. Khaled Ahmed Shawki el-Istambuli , a member of the Takfir wa Hijra (Atonement and Holy Flight) group, and three others shoot Sadat at the military-day parade. This plan was approved by Abboud Zomor in his hideout near the pyramids of Giza. It was also sanctioned by a fundamentalist group in the southern city of Asyut, which had launched attacks on police stations in Asyut soon after Sadat was killed...
...week passed, precious few additional details came to light concerning the Sadat assassination. One theory remained unchanged: that the assassins were members of a small, violent Islamic fundamentalist group, Takfir wa Hijra (Atonement and Holy Flight). An outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, Takfir wa Hijra was responsible for the abduction and murder of one of Sadat's former Cabinet ministers in 1977; now it is implicated not only in the killing of Sadat but in the rioting later that week in Asyut...
...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...
Many of the Islamic groups have at their center a powerful leader. In the case of Takfir wa Hijra, it was Shukri Ahmed Mustafa, who was hanged by the Sadat government in 1978 for planning the murder of the former Religious Affairs Minister. To his followers, the charismatic Mustafa was an almost omnipotent authority on religious as well as personal matters. "Even after the death sentence had been handed out," wrote Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim in a study of the group, "Mustafa's followers would not believe that the government could take his life." Like many other fanatical Muslims...
...small, violent Muslim fundamentalist sect known as Takfir wa Hijra (Atonement and Holy Flight) may have been involved. This group, a band of urban guerrillas seeking to transform Egypt into a rigid Islamic state, exhorts its members to use "sacred terror" to achieve its objectives and is known to have built cell groups within the armed forces...