"[11] Having once been favored by the Egyptian government of Anwar Sadat they now threatened it, passionately opposing what they believed was a "shameful peace with the Jews," aka the Camp David Accords with Israel.

[17] In other universities Jama'at also forbade the mixing of genders, films, concerts, and dances, and enforced their bans with clubs and iron bars.

[citation needed] In April 1981, the group became involved in what was probably started as a clan feud/vendetta about livestock or property lines between Coptic and Muslim Egyptians in the vicinity of Minya, Egypt.

[citation needed] "Men and women were slaughtered; babies thrown from windows, their bodies crushed on the pavement below; there was looting, killing and arson.

"[22] Islamic Group(s) were accused of participating in the incident and in September 1981, one month before the assassination of Sadat, the al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah were dissolved by the state (although they had never been legally registered in the first place), their infrastructure was destroyed and their leaders arrested.

While the Islamic group had originally been an amorphous movement of local groups centered in mosques without offices or membership roll, by the late 1980s it became more organized and "even adopted an official logo: an upright sword standing on an open Qur'an with an orange sun rising in the background," encircled by the Qur'anic verse that Abdel Rahman had quoted at his trials while trying to explain his interpretation of jihad to the judges: وَقَاتِلُوهُمْ حَتَّى لاَ تَكُونَ فِتْنَةٌ وَيَكُونَ الدِّينُ لِلّهِ فَإِنِ انتَهَواْ فَلاَ عُدْوَانَ إِلاَّ عَلَى الظَّالِمِينَ

Serious damage was done to the largest sector of Egypt's economy – tourism[25] – and in turn to the government, but it also devastated the livelihoods of many of the people on whom the group depends for support.

[28] The 1991 killing of the group's leader, Ala Mohieddin, presumably by security forces, led Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya to murder Egypt's speaker of parliament in retaliation.

In July of that year, Islamist lawyer Montassir al-Zayyat brokered a deal between the al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah and the Egyptian government, called the Nonviolence Initiative, whereby the movement formally renounced violence.

After the initiative was declared Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman also gave his approval from his prison cell in the United States, though he later withdrew it.

Leading the opposition was EIJ leader Ayman Zawahiri who termed it "surrender" in angry letters to the London newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

[31] Zawahiri enlisted Ahmed Refai Taha, both exiles in Afghanistan with him, to sabotage the initiative with a massive terrorism attack that would provoke the government into repression.

[32] So on 17 November 1997 al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah killing campaign climaxed with the attack at the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahri) in Luxor, in which a band of six men dressed in police uniforms machine-gunned and hacked to death with knives 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians.

The attack stunned Egyptian society, devastated the tourist industry for a number of years, and consequently sapped a large segment of popular support for violent Islamism in Egypt.

[33] When Refai Taha signed the al-Qaeda fatwa "International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" to kill Crusaders and Jews on behalf of the Islamic Group, he was "forced to withdraw his name" from the fatwa, explaining to fellow members ... than he had "only been asked over the telephone to join in a statement of support for the Iraqi people.

"[34] Major attacks by al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah: It was also responsible for a spate of tourist shootings (trains and cruise ships sprayed with bullets) in middle and upper Egypt during the early 1990s.

After spending more than two decades in prison and after intense debates and discussions with Al-Azhar scholars, most of the leaders of al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah have written several books renouncing their ideology of violence and some of them went as far as calling ex-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, whom they assassinated, a martyr.

al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah renounced bloodshed in 2003,[38] and in September 2003 Egypt freed more than 1,000 members, citing what Interior Minister Habib el-Adli called the group's stated "commitment to rejecting violence.

We believe that the suffering we endured during the past years was due to neglecting religion and putting those who don't fear [God] in power."

[46] There was a scant supply of any writing by the group's members, but some issues leading writer(s) of the Jama'at thought worth mentioning included: While secularist social analyses of Egypt's socioeconomic problems maintained that poverty was caused by overpopulation or high defense expenditures, al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīyah saw the cause in the populace's spiritual failures – laxness, secularism, and corruption.