Jama'at al-Muslimin

Jama'at al-Muslimin (Society of Muslims), popularly known as Takfir wal-Hijra (Arabic تكفير والهجرة, English "Excommunication and Exodus", alternately "excommunication and emigration" or "anathema and exile"), was a radical Sunni Islamist group led by Shukri Mustafa, which emerged in Egypt in the 1960s as an offshoot of Muslim Brotherhood, inspired by Sayyid Qutb. The group was crushed by the Egyptian government after it kidnapped and murdered Muhammad al-Dhahabi, a former government minister and Muslim scholar. Despite this, some believe its ideology of separation from Muslim society, "Takfir wal-Hijra", lives on in other groups.

Jama'at al-Muslimin has its origins in the late 1960s in the Abu Za'bal concentration camp, where many Islamists had been imprisoned after a plot to assassinate secularist president Nasser. Shukri Mustafa, its future leader, was an agronomy student and was arrested in 1965 for distributing Muslim Brotherhood leaflets. In 1967 he was transferred to Abu Za'bal. Prisoners in Abu Za'bal were divided into two factions, each based on a different interpretation of the ideas of the recently executed Islamist author Sayyid Qutb. Qutb believed that Egyptians were no longer truly Muslims, as the contemporary Muslim community in Egypt and elsewhere had become Jahiliyyah, or reverted to pre-Islamic ignorance. One faction, led by Sheikh 'Ali 'Abduh Ismail and calling itself Jama'at al-Muslimin, believed that Qutb had called for total, not just spiritual, separation from jahiliyyah society.

Following Muslim Brotherhood General Leader Hassan al-Hudaybi's refutation of Qutb's ideas in 1969, Sheikh Ali renounced the ideology of Takfir and the sect soon fell apart, leaving Shukri Mustafa as its only member. He was released from prison in 1971 as part of the new president Anwar Sadat's rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood.

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