27 ISSN 2334-3745 February 2015 PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume 9, Issue 1 Straight From the Horse’s Mouth: Exploring De-radicalization Claims of Former Egyptian Militant Leaders by Dina Al Raie Abstract Towards the end of the 1990s, leading igures from two of Egypt’s most prominent Islamist militant movements began releasing a series of documents that expressed seeming ideological revisions, culminating in a re- evaluation of perspectives and a cessation of violence. Conventional wisdom since the publication of these revisions maintains that the groups have “deradicalized”.[1] In the atermath of the January 25th, 2011 Egyptian revolution, many of these re-visionary authors were released from jail, and appeared on national television for the irst time. Analyzing select interviews of these authors, as well as content from their re-visionist writings, this article re-examines the conventional wisdom of deradicalization. Contrary to previous indings that deradicalization has indeed occurred, it is argued that there is little evidence of real ideological deradicalization. Indeed, two of the four examples cited provide evidence of signiicant ideological recidivism as measured by both implicit and explicit calls to violence. Keywords : Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Islamic Group; Islamism; narratives; deradicalization. Introduction In Omar Ashour’s (2009) seminal study [2] on former militant groups in Egypt and Algeria, [3] Ashour concludes that Egyptian groups have substantially deradicalized, albeit to varying degrees. Ashour’s assessment is based on a deinition of deradicalization that emphasizes a group’s position on violence while slighting a group’s shit (or lack thereof) in worldview pertaining to its Islamist ideology. Deradicalization, as deined by Ashour, is ‘…primarily concerned with changing the attitudes of armed Islamist movements toward violence, rather than toward democracy.’[4] It does not matter if the content of these groups’ ideologies remain ‘…misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-democratic…’ so long as they agree to erase violence from their rhetoric and political agendas. [5]Ashour considers groups ideologically moderate if they accept the electoral element of the democratic process. Moderates ‘…accept the Schumpetarian deinition of democracy, tend to emphasize majoritarianism, and are reluctant to accept minority rights in general and those they consider to be “illegitimate” minorities in particular.’[6] Importantly, Ashour acknowledges the limits of his own terminology in accounting for real ideological deradicalization. In cases where Islamists alter their agendas to accommodate liberal democratic values, as well as accept ‘constitutional liberalism and provisions for protecting minority rights,’[7] they should be considered “liberal Islamists.”[8] However, as Ashour contended back in 2009 (a view that arguably still holds true today), ‘Within the largest Islamist movement, liberal Islamists are a very rare breed, and indeed could even be perceived as a theoretical extreme with little or no concrete instantiations.”[9] Since Ashour’s study, there have been few follow up studies carried out on the Egyptian Islamist militants of old. he sincerity of the leaders’ proclamations have not been analyzed and, save for a number of terrorist attacks on tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt witnessed relative calm up until the January 25 th , 2011 revolution. However, following the revolution, a signiicant number of Islamists – including former militants – were broken out of prison and granted oicial pardons by the Brotherhood-led government. A number of these