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Gama'at Islamiya Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya Gama'at Islamiya (also Gamaat Islamiya and Jamaat al Islamiya) is a radical Islamist movement in Egypt. Gama'at Islamiya began as an umbrella organization for militant student groups, formed, like the Islamic Jihad, after the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s. The group claims as its spiritual guide the blind cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, who fled Egypt for the United States, and is now serving a life sentence for his role in the first attack on the World Trade Center. In its early days, the Gama'at Islamiya was primarily active on university campuses, and was mainly composed of university students. Its membership has since become poorer, younger, and less well educated; its base of recruiting and support has moved away from universities to poor neighborhoods of cities, and to rural areas. Gama'at Islamiya may have been indirectly involved in the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and was implicated in a failed attempt on president Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. The 1990s saw the Gama'at Islamiya spiral into increasingly irrational and ultimately self-defeating violence, from the murders and attempted murders of prominent writers and intellectuals, to the repeated targeting of tourists and foreigners, who are an important part of the Egyptian economy, and thus of the livelihoods of the people the Gama'at Islamiya depends upon for support. The 1991 murder of the group's leader, Ala Mohieddin, presumably by security forces, led Gama'at Islamiya to murder the speaker of parliament in return. That, in turn, caused a major government crackdown, and the further radicalization of the group. Gama'at Islamiya militants carried out the November 17, 1997 attack at the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahri) in Luxor, Egypt, in which a band of six men machine gunned and hacked to death with knives 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians. The attack stunned Egyptian society, ruined the tourist industry, and consequently sapped popular support for violent Islamism in Egypt. While the combination of harsh government measures and self-defeating violence have not eliminated the Gama'at Islamiya, they have reduced the group's profile in recent years. External links *Article in the Economist about more recent developments
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