Repentance, Retreat and Murder

Sheik Mohammed Hussein Zahaby, 64, was sleeping soundly at his home in Helwan, 15 miles south of Cairo, when four armed men in police uniforms burst in and dragged him away. They were not policemen. Sheik Zahaby, Egypt's former minister of religious affairs and a distinguished expert on Islam, was kidnaped by youthful Muslim extremists who threatened to execute him unless the government paid $300,000 and released 60 of their comrades from jail. Even while the government negotiated, the kidnapers last week carried out their threat. Three days after the sheik's disappearance, his body was discovered in a house near the pyramids at Giza. He had been tortured, strangled and shot through the eye.

Egypt has had its share of assassinations and random killings in the past, but there was something malevolently different about the Zahaby case. His alleged murderers were members of an extremist Muslim sect called Jamaat al Takfir wal Hijra (the Society for Repentance and Retreat), which has blended the urban terrorist tactics of West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang with something akin to the perverted zeal of Charles Manson's spiritual slaves. The society, which believes in repentance for sin and retreat from the evils of the modern world, is far more extreme than even the archconservative, fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. The movement is bitterly opposed to the government of President Anwar Sadat, which has supposedly corrupted the purity of Islam by, among other things, expanding the role of women in public life.

Directed by a self-styled "Commander of the Faithful" named Shukri Ahmed Moustafa, the society consists of perhaps 500 youths. Three years ago, in a clumsy attempt to overthrow Sadat's "atheistic" regime, Moustafa's followers attacked the Egyptian Technical Military Academy at Heliopolis and provoked a battle with guards in which eleven people died and 27 were wounded. A year later townsmen of the Nile Valley village of Minya complained that the group was brainwashing their daughters and carrying them off as concubines. One young girl was even persuaded by the group to commit suicide as an atonement for her alleged sins.

Religious Extremists. Sheik Zahaby was apparently chosen as the group's latest victim because of a recent book in which he attacked Islam's religious extremists. As Minister of Religious Endowments and Al Azhar affairs, Zahaby had also worked to eliminate the society. His murder provoked a religious and political storm. The council of ulama, or scholars, of Cairo's Al Azhar University, the most venerable group of theologians in Islam, solemnly denounced the extremists for "violating the teachings of Islam" by killing a brother Muslim. Police, meanwhile, launched a dragnet that hauled in 190 sect members. At week's end Moustafa was nabbed by police and reportedly confessed to having ordered the assassination. A young bricklayer has admitted he shot Zahaby. But three bombs believed to have been set by the group exploded in Cairo, one injuring four people, and officials were far from certain that the danger from repentance and retreat was over.

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