LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

      As a child, Najeh Ibrahim loved his president. “We all loved Nasser,” he recalls. “He emphasized our country.” However, Ibrahim’s positive attitude toward the leader of his country changed as he grew older. Observing waves of arrests of Muslim Brothers and other political opponents, he began to resent the state. “We were seeing them come out of prison with marks of torture.” When he was seventeen, Ibrahim founded a small group, which quickly spread all over Egypt and soon posed a serious threat to the state: al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya. In 1981, this group changed the history of the country: it participated in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat. Ibrahim was among the leaders who decided to kill the president. He says the decision was made to resist state repression, by “young and strong” men who had alternatives: “Of course I had an alternative. I am a doctor. Look at bin Laden: He is a millionaire but lives like a beggar.” Had the state not engaged in repression, Ibrahim believes, “Sadat would not have been dead.”

      Ahmad Saif al-Islam Hassan al-Banna did not love his president as a child. His father was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and assassinated in 1949. When Saif al-Islam became politically active himself, he had bitter experiences. “I tried to oppose parliament twice,” he recalls his time in the People’s Assembly. “They threatened to kill me …. They also threatened my family.” He says he refused to give in and went to court instead—but nothing happened. In spite of such experiences, he did not lose hope and continued to believe that the Muslim Brothers’ participation in politics could change the state. “It is better to succeed. Someone else replaced me,” he comments on his forced withdrawal from elections. “I left, and I understand it is not only me who is treated like that.” Saif al-Islam says he never considered the use of physical force to confront the state: “I will not use violence. I am a judge, and I studied law. My mind does not accept a violation of the law. If I use violence, I will lose. The state will kill us all. Now the state has no reason to do anything against us.”

      The difference in the behavior of Saif al-Islam and Najeh Ibrahim could not be larger, but the two individuals have some basic commonalities. They believe in the same religion; they lived in the same country during the same time; and they resented the government enough to become politically active against it—even though this exposed them and their families to state repression. These similarities make the difference in the behavior of Saif al-Islam and Najeh Ibrahim puzzling and raise the following research question: Why do some individuals (like Najeh Ibrahim) take up arms, while others who live under the same conditions (like Saif al-Islam) conduct nonviolent activities instead?

      This book is dedicated to investigating this question. Focusing on the individuals who take up arms, this question explores areas that may have been overlooked by the large body of literature on violent groups. Specifically, focusing on groups cannot explain why certain individuals but not others form or join violent groups, carry out particular attacks, or sometimes break away from their groups.

      The central argument in my investigation of this question is that, contrary to widespread assumptions, both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response to the belief that the state is aggressive. Unlike what is widely believed, I also find that violent individuals do not act in response to beliefs in Islam. Instead, I argue that the motivations of violent

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