Dictatorship of the Pious

More than four decades before the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the seeds of militant Muslim extremism were being germinated in the torture chambers and prisons of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egypt. The suffering, humiliation, imprisonment and torture endured by Egyptian Islamists under Nasser’s rule created a burning rage and insatiable appetite for revenge. This anger would be directed at both the repressive Egyptian regime - which was directly responsible for their suffering - and the West, which was seen as an entity that was largely responsible for the grievous state of affairs in the Muslim World. The tortured Islamists would turn to their faith to try and come to terms with their circumstances and use religion to justify what they believed to be the ultimate solution to their grievances. This book explores how Egypt’s extremists used theological sources and the methodology of Islamic juridical-religious thought as instruments of legitimization for acts of political violence; examinining the discourse of Egypt's radical thinkers and tracing the development of extremist thought from its inception in the 1950s to its relative decline in Egypt in the late 1990s.