Via Mail And Guardian:
When President Mohamed Morsi made Adel al-Khayat, a hardline Islamist, the governor of Luxor, it seemed his latest folly to many in this city and across Egypt, who depend on tourists already scared off by unrest since the revolution.
Yet nominating a member of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, remembered for a 1997 massacre of visitors in Luxor that some call “Egypt’s 9/11”, showed the growing importance to the beleaguered Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood of a group whose leadership includes at least one unrepentant former associate of Osama bin Laden.
Al-Khayat, cleric Refai Taha, and other leaders of al-Gamaa and its parliamentary wing in Luxor told Reuters they renounced violence because Islamist rule had now been achieved, through elections – but they would take up arms again to defend Morsi and were committed eventually to establishing full Islamic law.
“There is freedom now, so violence is not necessary,” Taha (58) said in an interview last week at a hotel on the Nile. “The revolution changed the situation in Egypt in ways we wanted.”
But like other senior figures in al-Gamaa he warned that anyone trying to force Morsi out – referring to the military that oppressed the Islamists for decades, or liberal opponents planning mass protests next Sunday – would be met with force.
“Violence begets violence,” said Taha, recalling attacks on the old regime and its tourist industry which he, unlike others in al-Gamaa, went on advocating until Hosni Mubarak was ousted. […]
Al-Gamaa supporters formed a vocal contingent at a rally in Cairo on Friday, organised by the Brotherhood to show Islamist strength ahead of protests the hitherto divided opposition plans on June 30, the first anniversary of Morsi’s inauguration.
Al-Gamaa leaders were among those giving veiled warnings of a violent response to any move against the elected leader; they included Tarek al-Zumar, jailed for life over the 1981 assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor Anwar Sadat, and Assem Abdel Maged, who once shared a cell with Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian who has led al-Qaeda since bin Laden was killed.