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Within a few years, Gamaa was powerful enough to force colleges to adopt Islamist curricula, segregate classes by sex, and silence heretical professors. Eventually, Gamaa expanded its work beyond universities and became more critical of government repression and corruption, thereby earning a more diverse, less educated membership. After Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak imprisoned so many Gamaa militants that it took the group most of a decade to rebuild. When it did, the fire of the prisons was inside it.
    In 1992 Gamaa began a campaign of terror against the godless, bombing liquor stores, video stores, and discos and murdering Jews, Copts (the Christians of Egypt), anti-Islamist intellectuals, policemen, mayors, judges, and, most spectacularly, the speaker of Parliament and the head of the counterterror police. In 1995, working with Jihad, Gamaa nearly killed President Mubarak in Ethiopia. In five years in the 1990s, Gamaa and its allies killed more than 1,200 people. Egypt was terrorized.
    Mubarak’s trouble in stopping Gamaa was that it consisted of hundreds of unhierarchical cells, one of which was no sooner undone than another struck. His eventual solution was to kill whom he could and terrorize everyone else. When his security services learned a terrorist was in a certain house, they might assault the whole block. When a terrorist wasn’t found, his family might be tortured. After Mubarak’s near assassination in Ethiopia, his security services kidnapped the thirteen-year-old son of a Jihad leader, sodomized him on camera, then blackmailed him to spy on Islamists by threatening to show photos of the sodomy to his family. He was made to recruit another child, who was abused in the same way. (When Islamists discovered their spying, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Jihad’s leader and soon to be second-in-command of al-Qaeda, had the boys executed on videotape and distributed copies as a warning to would-be traitors.) In his crackdown, Mubarak killed at least several hundred people and probably thousands. His interior minister, Zaki Badr, said that if he had his way, he would kill every Islamist militant in Egypt. “I only want to kill one percent of the population,” he explained moderately.
    By 1997, Mubarak had crippled Gamaa, and a large faction of its leaders struck the same deal with him that the Muslim Brotherhood had with Sadat—renouncing violence for parole. Not all of Gamaa’s leaders supported the accord. In particular those who had fled Egypt urged their brothers not to surrender, then condemned them when they did and thereafter saw themselves as the last repository of resistance to Mubarak. In November of 1997, several months after the accord, exiles of Gamaa and Jihad organized the slaughter of fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor. As the terrorists had intended, Egyptian tourism was devastated for years. As they had not intended, Egyptian opinion turned on them for good. What little popular support Gamaa had retained through the years of bombings and murder evaporated, and terrorism as a political solution was thoroughly discredited. In 2003 another set of imprisoned Gamaa leaders would be persuaded to renounce violence, and Mubarak, for the moment at least, could claim to have won the fight against terrorism. But for an Egyptian set on violence, there were other places to practice it.
    THE ALEXANDRIA to which Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr was born in 1963 was in some respects unrecognizable even from the Alexandria of nine years earlier, when the attempt on President Nasser was made there. The Muslim Brotherhood had thrived in Alexandria—an equal and opposite reaction to the city’s extreme Westernization—and when Westerners were banished from Alexandrian society in the late 1950s and Nasser failed to fill their place, Islamists did. There followed several merciful changes, like the closing of child brothels and the extension of aid to the poor. But there were less