Takfir wa al-Hijrah

Takfir wa al-Hijrah

(Arabic; “Excommunication and [Holy] Flight”)

Name given by Egyptian authorities to a radical Islamic group calling itself the Society of Muslims. It was founded in 1971 by a young agronomist, Shukri Mustafa, who had been arrested in 1965 for distributing Muslim Brotherhood leaflets and was released from prison in 1971. Appealing to those who saw mainstream society—from which the group sought to flee (see Hijrah)—as weak, corrupt, and un-Islamic, it engaged in acts of terrorism and was initially thought to be behind the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat. The group soon dissolved, partly because of the extreme rigour of its doctrine, and is noteworthy because its actions initiated the repression of fundamentalist groups by security services in Egypt in the late 1970s.