Takfir wal-Hijra (Jama'at al-Muslimin)

Shukri Mustafa, an agronomy student arrested in the 1965 roundup of Muslim Brothers, radicalised in the prison camps where Sayyid Qutb's doctrine of jahiliyya — the reversion of nominally Muslim society to pre-Islamic ignorance — was hardening into programme. Where mainstream Brothers read Qutb metaphorically, Shukri drew the total conclusion: a society of apostates could not be reformed from within, only abandoned and ultimately conquered. Released in 1971, he built the Society of Muslims on that conclusion.

The group's practice matched the doctrine's totality. Members — estimated in the low thousands at peak, many of them students and recent graduates — withdrew from apostate society: some to camps in the Minya desert hills, most into collective apartments in Cairo's poorer quarters. The community organised its own economy (members worked, often in Gulf labour stints, remitting to the collective), its own marriages (Shukri arranged and dissolved unions inside the group; members were required to sever ties with unbelieving families, and couples where one spouse left were dissolved by doctrine), and its own justice — defection was apostasy, and defectors were pursued, in several documented cases violently. Prayer behind outside imams was forbidden; state education, employment, and courts were shunned as institutions of unbelief.

The confrontation came in stages: clashes with rival Islamist students, then arrests of members in 1976, then the act that made the group notorious — in July 1977, seeking leverage for imprisoned members, the group kidnapped Sheikh Muhammad al-Dhahabi, a former minister of religious endowments who had written against it, and murdered him when the state refused its demands. The manhunt that followed broke the organisation: hundreds arrested, a military tribunal, and in March 1978 the execution of Shukri and four lieutenants. Remnants scattered into exile and later movements.

The group's significance outlived it doubly. Juridically, the al-Dhahabi murder and trial forced Egypt's religious establishment into its landmark refutations of takfirist doctrine. Genealogically, the package Shukri assembled — total takfir of society, the elect's withdrawal, violence licensed against everyone outside — became a recurring strand (usually via veterans and texts rather than organisation) in the jihadist current documented elsewhere in this catalogue, where 'takfiri' names precisely the mechanism this site scores at its maximum: the dispensing-of-existence doctrine in its most literal form.