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al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya ("The Islamic Group") was a Sunni Islamist terrorist group active in Egypt. From 1992 to 1998, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya waged an insurgency against the Egyptian government, leaving 796 policemen, soldiers, terrorists, and civilians dead. al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya was given support by the Iranian and Sudanese governments, as well as from al-Qaeda, while Egypt was supported by the United States. al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya's imprisoned leadership renounced bloodshed in 2003, and several high-ranking members were released, and the group resumed its semi-legal peaceful activities. After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya formed the Building and Development Party and supported President Mohamed Morsi's Islamist government until its overthrow in a 2013 coup.

While the Nasserist regime believed that the Islamist movement had received a fatal blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, Qutb's views formed the nucleus of a growing Islamic vanguard movement. The same year as Qutb's death, the 15-year-old Ayman al-Zawahiri and a group of students from Maadi High School and other schools formed an Islamist cell that met at each other's homes and other private spaces with the objective of creating a movement that would bring about the downfall of the secular regime and the rise of an Islamic state. Clandestine groups such as Zawahiri's began to spring up all over the country, made up mostly of restless and alienated students. These groups were small, disorganized, and largely unaware of each other. However, the swiftness of Israel's victory over the secular regimes of its Arab neighbors in the 1967 Six-Day War proved to be a psychological turning point for the Middle East, as Muslims' belief that God had favored their cause was shattered, as was their faith in their leaders and countries. The appeal of Islamic fundamentalism was born, and imams preached that the Arabs had been abandoned by God, and that they had to return to Islam to win God's support. Anti-Semitism warped the politics of the region in the years after World War II, as Nazi propaganda on Arab shortwave radio and slander spread by Christian missionaries in the region infected the Middle East with anti-Semitic prejudices. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, where Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime had recruited Nazi advisors.

The priority of the new jihadist movement was to defeat the "impure" in Muslim society - namely the secular regimes in the Middle East - and to impose sharia law in Egypt to reform the faith before fighting against the Jews and Christians. Zawahiri supported the re-establishment of the caliphate and the rule of Muslim clerics, after which the caliphate would wage jihad against the West. After Nasser's death in 1970, his successor Anwar Sadat called himself "the Believer President" and "the First Man of Islam" in a bid to win the Islamists' support against the Nasserists and leftists. Sadat emptied the prisons of Islamists, especially the younger Muslim Brothers who had been inspired by Sayyid Qutb, and he allowed the Islamists to preach openly in exchange for their rejection of armed violence. The 1973 Yom Kippur War was seen as an Egyptian victory due to Egypt's initial successes in its surprise attack on Israel. At the same time, Zawahiri's cell came to have 40 members by 1974. Cairo University's medical school was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, and Zawahiri preached against revolution and instead called for a sudden coup to seize control of government. During the 1970s, young Islamic activists were appearing in campuses first in Upper Egypt, and then in Cairo, calling themselves al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya. Sadat's government covertly provided these groups with arms so that they could defend themselves from Marxists and Nasserists, and the Islamic Groups radicalized most of Egypt's universities and organized their mass movement into cells. By 1977, the Islamic Group completely dominated Egypt's campuses, with male students ceasing quitting their beards and female students beginning to don the veil; leftist organizations were driven underground. Zawahiri found most of his success in recruiting students in Cairo University's medical and engineering schools, which had previously been bastions of Marxism; to journalist Abdallah Schleifer, it appeared that Islamism, like Marxism, was just the latest trend for rebellious youths. al-Zawahiri's cell and three others merged to form al-Jihad, which opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Gama'a's willingness to compromise with the existing system.

The 1979 Camp David Accords with Israel caused al-Gama'a to turn against Sadat's government. In 1979, Sadat enacted a law transferring most of the authority of the student unions to professors and administrators, but, during the 1980s, Islamists gradually penetrated college faculties. The Islamist students preached in poor urban neighborhoods, rural areas, and even inmates of jails, spreading the Islamist movement even further. In 1980, al-Jihad and al-Gama'a formed a coalition under the guidance of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who would later be imprisoned by the United States for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Sheikh Omar issued fatwas countenancing the murder of Christians and the plundering of their jewelry stores, and Islamists went from shaking down Coptic shopkeepers to engaging in anti-Coptic pogroms.

During the 1990s, al-Gama'a engaged in an extended campaign of violence against the Egyptian government, targeting prominent writers, intellectuals, tourists, and foreigners to devastate the Egyptian tourist economy. More than 1,200 people were killed during the violence from 1992 to 1997. In 1995, the group attempted to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, who escaped unharmed and oversaw a massive crackdown on GI members and their families. By 1997, 20,000 Islamists were in custody in Egypt and thousands more had been killed by the security forces. In July 1997, al-Gama'a renounced violence in exchange for the release of 2,000 of its imprisoned members. Zawahiri saw this move as a "surrender", and he arranged for al-Gama'a dissidents to carry out the Luxor massacre to derail the peace initiative; 58 foreign tourists and 4 Egyptians were massacred by 6 terrorists. In 2003, al-Gama'a formally renounced bloodshed, as the killing of tourists had proved unpopular.

Following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, al-Gama'a established the Building and Development Party, which called for the implementation of sharia law now that the secular regime had been overthrown. President Mohamed Morsi appointed GI member Adel el-Khayat as Governor of Luxor in June 2013, but he resigned a week later due to public unrest related to GI's responsibility for the Luxor massacre. al-Gama'a is still recognized as a terrorist organization by Britain and the European Union, while the United States removed al-Gama'a from its list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2022.

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