Word: takfir
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...experts in terrorism, such incidents are suggestive. In Egypt in the 1960s, the Islamic ideology Takfir wal Hijra began to win adherents among extremist groups. One of them, the Society of Muslims, was led by Shukri Mustafa, an agricultural engineer. Mustafa denounced other Muslims as unbelievers and preached a "withdrawal" into a purity of the kind practiced by the Prophet Muhammad when he withdrew from Mecca to Medina. The ideology is particularly dangerous because it provides a religious justification for slaughtering not just unbelievers but also those who think of themselves as Muslim. Intensely undemocratic-for to accept the authority...
...Zubaydah did. Many of the new fighters were born and raised not in the Arab lands but in the Muslim communities of Europe, around which they travel with ease. And there is a growing sense that a number of them are "Takfiris," followers of an extremist Islamic ideology called Takfir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile). That's bad news: by blending into host communities, Takfiris attempt to avoid suspicion. A French official says they come across as "regular, fun-loving guys-but they'd slit your throat or bomb your building in a second...
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...
...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...