Egypt's Islamist Dilemma

In his downtown Cairo law office, Montasser al-Zayat is fielding phone calls on his land and mobile lines, answering e-mails, checking the website of a local soccer team and meeting with the press--all while he's tending to his clients. These are women, mostly, who have come on behalf of sons, brothers and husbands imprisoned for their involvement in Egypt's armed Islamist movement. Zayat is the man to see, a celebrity of sorts, famous as the lawyer and de facto spokesman for al-Gama'a al-Islameya, once one of the world's most notoriously violent Islamist groups.

Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Gama'a sat in judgment over Egyptian society, targeting politicians, policemen, intellectuals, foreign tourists and the Coptic Christian minority for assassination. And for their involvement in a war that left more than 1,300 dead in the 1990s alone, thousands of Gama'a members are still lingering in the country's brutal prison system. Many of them are being detained illegally, even though their bloody engagement with the state officially ended with Gama'a's unilateral truce in 1997. Indeed, this past summer several imprisoned Gama'a leaders went so far as to repudiate a key part of their historical legacy when they apologized for the 1981 assassination of Anwar el-Sadat. The Egyptian president they killed for making peace with Israel, they now say, was a martyr. Militants from other Islamist groups have criticized Gama'a for its change of heart, but Montasser al-Zayat says it's none of their business.

"Our fight now is not to be excluded from society," says Zayat. "Our aim is to get back to our original message of peace and preaching, and to reconcile with the Egyptian people."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.