Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (C), the spiritual leader of Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya, surrounded by followers, leaves the Abu Bakr Mosque in Brooklyn to surrender to US immigration officials in July, 1993. HELAYNE SEIDMAN/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]
Since the fall of the Mubarak government, there has been much opportunity to reconsider and revise narratives of Egypt's history. For instance, observers have had to reconsider the political potency and identity of the Salafi movement. Previous to the 2011 uprisings, this Islamist trend was on the whole politically quietist, but attained surprising success in the legislative elections of 2011/12. The Mubarak government never rewrote history as much as its predecessors—the regimes of Sadat and Nasser—but there were nonetheless “red lines” that could not be breached by certain groups when writing their version of history. The Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya, once a notorious terrorist group and now a player in the political process, is one of these groups that have taken advantage of a new, post-revolutionary era of historiographical permissiveness. Stepping out of the shadow of Mubarak, the group has been busy revising its history.
This is not the first time the Gama'a has re-evaluated its past. The story of Gama'a's evolving historiography leads us back through the last twenty years, a period in which it has undergone great transformations. Through the late 1990s, the group was suppressed by the state on account of its violent activities, and by 2000 thousands of its members and most of its leadership were in prison. In March 2011, the Gama'a estimated the number of its imprisoned members at 50,000, although this is probably an overestimate. However, in the late 1990s, the Gama'a's leadership made a deal with the state whereby they would tour prisons and re-educate members, aiming for de-radicalization and eventual release.
The leadership of the Gama'a—among them Nagih Ibrahim, Karam Zuhdi, Essam abd Al-Meguid, Usama Ibrahim Hafez, and Essam Darbalah—co-authored a series called Silsilat Tashih Al-Mafahim (The Series of Correcting Conceptions). The Silsilat provided the jurisprudential logic for the group's peace-making with the state, its de-radicalization, and the relinquishment of violence. Significantly, this literature had to deal with the group's past, including its suspected involvement in the assassination of President Sadat, and its participation in what Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges calls the “low-level war of attrition” with the state in which hundreds of civilians, security officers and Gama'a members were killed.
Important in understanding the historiography of the Silsilat is the fact that its authors were stuck between two audiences: first, the state, which had almost complete power over their freedom, health and lives, and, second, the group’s own membership. So, while it had to convince the state that its violent stage was over and that it was a veritable candidate for rehabilitation, it also had to maintain a modicum of its historical identity as an organization to preserve the loyalty of its members.
The Silsilat seemed to condemn the violence of the 1990s as misguided, blaming it on youthful exuberance, and emphasized the group's non-violent activities. Some critics portrayed this rejection of violence as merely strategic, rather than doctrinal.
Since 2011, the Gama'a has effected wholesale reorganization and re-politicization—as well as a provisional revision of its history. It held its first internal elections shortly after the January 2011 uprisings and created its formal political wing, the Building and Development Party (BDP), in June 2011.
However, the shadow of the Gama'a's violent past still hangs over it. The group's application to register the Building and Development Party was dogged by objections. Initially, the Committee for Party Affairs denied the application on the grounds that the BDP was formed on a religious basis, which was unconstitutional. More significant than this was an obstacle other Islamist parties also had to overcome: the dozens of private, civil suits brought against its formation. Indeed, it was not only the state that objected to the Gama'a's violent politics. The group is responsible for the 1997 massacre at Luxor, which killed over sixty people and hardened the hostility felt by much of the public towards the Gama'a.
And so, like the Silsilat, the Gama'a's new historical revision has to walk the line between contrition and reclamation of its history. As a vote-seeking organization, it cannot alienate the public, but at the same time it intends to redress official narratives that condemned it as a terrorist organization. A constant refrain of the group since January 2011 has been the promise that it will not return to violence—between March and September 2011, it made at least seven statements that recidivism is not a danger. However, this guarantee has been undermined at points by more bellicose statements of the Gama'a, such as Mohamed Salih's avowal in October 2012 that the group “will fight for the application of God's law, even if that requires bloodshed.”
The Gama'a and the BDP's active participation in the political arena also brings to light the tensions of this revisionist history. Attending the commemoration of the October 1973 War in 2012, the Gama'a leader Tariq Al-Zummur was faced with a quandary over the extent to which he commemorated a war in which one of the Gama'a's arch-enemies—former Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat—is the official hero. Zummur stated: “This victory [in the October War] cannot be attributed to any single president, no matter how important he is…. We have not honored Mubarak for his airstrike, because he turned into a dictator who took his people lightly, rigged the elections and stole the country’s resources.”
Clearly, the Gama'a is more comfortable vilifying a less controversial enemy—Hosni Mubarak—than attempting a complete overhaul of the last thirty years of Egyptian history. Indeed its role in official events ties it to a certain degree to the official historical narratives, the very history that it seeks to refute.
Yet the Gama'a's version of history has become bolder, and it has sought to merge its story into the general discourse of the injustice of the Mubarak regime. At the founding of the BDP, Zummur answered a question about whether the BDP would give a guarantee against the exclusion of other parties (read: secular parties). He gave the BDP's guarantee to this effect by referring to the notion that, under the Mubarak regime, the Islamic current had experienced the greatest degree of exclusion, repression and torture. Thus, the Gama'a is attempting, by venturing a counter-narrative of its history, to turn vice into virtue. Instead of the Gama'a's history as an illustration of its moral turpitude, which makes it unfit to participate in politics after January 2011, the Gama'a's suffering under the security apparatus gives it legitimacy to take part in governing Egypt.
Indeed, in January 2012, Tariq Al-Zummur attempted the Gama'a's boldest historical revisionism so far, by stating at a joint conference between the Gama'a and the Nour Party that the assassination of Sadat was a preamble to the January 25 revolution. In this historical revision, the Gama'a becomes the pioneer of the Arab Spring in Egypt, its “50,000 imprisoned members” predecessors of the imprisoned protestors, and its slain members the first martyrs of Tahrir Square. This is quite a contrast to the Silsilat’s rejection of violence, whether it was strategic or doctrinal.
This bold claim has not been repeated, and the Gama'a's confidence in the persuasiveness of its new history is difficult to gauge at this stage. As the revolutionaries say, “al-thawra mustamira”—the revolution continues—and so does the battle of narratives explaining what the revolution meant, who led it, and where it is heading.
The debate over how to portray the Gama'a’s history continues, too. The biography of ex-Gama'a member Khalid Al-Birri, Al-Dunya Ajmal min al-Janna (Life is more beautiful than Paradise, trans. Humphrey Davies), is to be made into a film directed by Magdi Ahmed Ali. This is more than likely to clash with the Gama'a's forthcoming book on its own history, which was announced in October 2012. The latter should give us an even clearer idea of the extent to which the Gama'a is attempting to (re-)revise its own place in Egyptian history.
