Political violence in Egypt: A case study of the Islamist insurgency, 1992--1997

This dissertation uses a case-study method to explore to the episode of internal political violence occurring in Egypt from 1992 until 1997 led by the Islamist group, al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya. This work examines the confluence of factors leading to the group's emergence, peak, and ultimate decline in the late 1990s.; Ubiquitous accounts of Islamist violence are often reductive in nature, prompting fruitless debates about the nature of Islam itself. This dissertation is based upon the premise that religion, while crucially important, performs a largely mobilizing function in contexts where other methods of mobilization are precluded. Islam provides a deeply resonant idiom for processing and ultimately challenging the sociopolitical realities of the contemporary world. One need only consider the Islamist's appropriation of intellectually and emotionally charged concepts like jahiliyya and jihad to appreciate religio n's enormous potential for mobilization.; Violent Islamist movements represent a fractional percentage of the Islamist tendency. An attempt has been made here to understand what conspires to cause individuals---often young, educated ones---to take up arms against their co-religionists and their government. To do so requires a historical understanding of Islamism as a quintessentially 20th century phenomenon, rooted in the upheavals of colonialism and nationalism, disintegrative processes of modernization, and global Western economic and cultural dominance, among others. The breakdown of traditional structures occasioned by these crosscutting processes left a void that Islamism---in its varied manifestations---would attempt to fill.; This dissertation investigates the contextual background of Islamism in Egypt, charting its emergence from the formation of the Ikhwan al-Muslimiin in 1928 through its eventual fragmentation into violent factions. From this fragmentation al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya would arise.; Subsequent chapters scrutinize the political and economic contexts that fostered violence. Authoritarian politics coupled with social fissures between rich and poor, north and south, and traditional and Western-oriented social strata created an environment fertile to the rise of a violent challenger to the status quo. Structures and practices of the organization are examined, as is the government's multifaceted response to the Islamic Group's challenge to its legitimacy. The concluding segment assesses the conflict and makes predictions for future unrest in Egypt.