You’re an Infidel
In one of the hundreds of demonstrations demanding the restoration of President Morsi’s presidency, Omar was arrested. After four years in pre-trial detention spent in Tora Reception Prison, his father noticed changes in his son's ideas and his appearance. He grew a beard.
Omar was accused of joining an illegal group, and providing it with weapons, in addition to participating in a gathering intended to attack Christians, media, and opponents of this gathering.
The pro-Morsi demonstrations ushered in a time of frequent terrorist attacks against the army and police forces. Thousands of all political stripes were arrested.
Human rights advocates estimate that 60,000 political prisoners were in custody by August 2016, an increase in prisoners that prompted the state to establish 20 new prisons starting in August 2013.
Former Assistant Minister of Interior for Prisons Najib believes that more prisons were needed to relieve overcrowding and congestion, not to mention to slow the spread of disease and to make prisoners and their families visiting more comfortable.
&Najib, put in charge of Egypt's prisons after the Jan. 25 revolution, says the distribution of prisoners to multiple prisons reduced the risks during transferring them to trials.
Omar, who opposed removing Morsi, turned into someone, according to what he told his father, who believed that the ex-president deserved what happened to him. He had not ruled by God’s law, and resorted to infidel democracy, he now said.
Discussion about the "need to rule by the Islamic law and not resort to the positive law, which the state follows" is widespread among young men inside the Tora Prison complex, according to a former jihadist leader who asked not to be named here but who was imprisoned for about a year in a case related to the so-called “Coalition for the Support of Legitimacy". He was imprisoned in “Tora Maximum Security Prison 992” which is known as “Al-Aqrab” (the Scorpion). Here numerous young men were indoctrinated into the "Takfiri Ideology". This prison has a bad reputation as a place of indefinite detention place, according to Human Rights Watch which issued a 2014 report, titled, " We Are in Tombs: Abuses in Egypt’s Scorpion Prison".
According to Habib, the expert in Islamic movements, the regime’s increased repression of opponents is directly proportional to the tendency of the opposition to resist through Takfiri and other violent ideas.
The crisis is intensifying in the Egyptian prisons, which don’t know how to deal with political prisoners. The former jihadist said that based on his prison experience, the primacy of security handling and the absence of classification has helped Takfiri groups recruit in prisons.
Prison recruitment is not new in Egypt. Power struggles between presidents of Egypt and Islamists have produced three generations of extremists and radicals imbued with "The Extremist Ideology" and "The Violent Extremist", according to Habib.
The first generation was connected to and emerged from the crisis between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of the revolution of July 1952, in the mid-60s, and was pioneered by Shukri Mostafa, who was arrested in 1966, at the age of 23.
Shukri, studying at the Faculty of Agriculture, found himself in a cell with Azhari Sheikh Ali Abdo Ismail, the brother of Muslim Brotherhood leader Abd El-Fattah Ismail, who was executed along with Sayed Qutob and four others in 1966, according to Habib.
After six years in prison, Shukri established the "Muslim Group" known as the “Al-Takfir wa Al-Hijra” which began operations against the Egyptian government. The most prominent was kidnapping and killing the former minister of Awqaf and Al-Azhar Affairs in May 1977.
The group ended with the execution of Shukri Mostafa and three assistants, on March 30, 1978, and the sentence to life imprisonment on a number of its members.
A second generation of prison recruits - according to the former leader of the Islamic Group, Dr. Najah Ibrahim- formed the core of what is now known as the Sinai Province, which pledged allegiance to ISIS.
Following the bombings of Israeli tourists in South Sinai in Taba, Dahab and Sharm El-Sheikh between 2004 and 2005, security forces randomly arrested many Sinai residents. Some met Habib in Damanhour Prison where he was lecturing between 2005 and 2006. A number of them met Majdi Al-Safti, the main thinker of the “Survivors of Fire” Group, while he was serving a 25-year sentence.
For more than two years, Al-Safti spread the Takfiri ideology among them, until the revolution, and the group fled the prison on Jan. 29, 2011.
The conditions of pre-trial and post-trial detention - including prohibitions on visits and workouts and confinement for months within four walls - contributed to increasing anger against authority. The jihadi leader said that the prison administrators would sometimes discipline prisoners by putting them in ISIS wards.
For a year, the jihadi leader watched as terrible living conditions and mingling with the “Al-Dawaesh” (ISIS members) spread Takfiri ideology through the prison. Many prisoners after getting out confirm this, including a former political prisoner who served his sentence in a Cairo prison.
Omar's verbal violence grew from mere discussions to decisions, his lawyer explained. "After feeling sad when I couldn’t attend the prosecutor's renewals of imprisonment or visit him in prison, I began to notice that he no longer cared, and then he told me he didn’t want a lawyer." This coincided with him telling his father that he would not sign a request to appeal his life sentence in February 2018.
Omar was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and that made him stick even more so to his ideas. His father said, "I started discussing with him in his words, trying to keep him away from these ideas, till I was surprised when he told me ‘You should be asked to repent because you are an infidel.’
The father was shocked. He saw his son’s condemnation of him as the natural consequence of his "spending 24 hours eating and drinking extremist ideas in prison."
A prisoner’s refusal to appear before the prosecution and the judiciary is key in his transformation into extremist. Many lawyers have faced this, including Khalid Al-Masri, who has defended members of the Islamic Group.
Al-Masri remembers one prisoner, though he will not disclose his name, who was arrested days after his wedding. After many months in Scorpion Prison, he turned into another person completely, malcontent about everything, and calling anyone he saw an infidel. Al-Masri said, "Before the hearing for renewing his imprisonment in the Criminal Court, he told me “Mr. Khalid, please don’t come in with me, and if you do, then you will hear from me what hurts you.” At the start of the hearing, the prisoner started calling the judges, “You an infidels, you apostates.”
The lawyer blames the lack of classification and screening that results in the unemployed being thrown together with extremists for the radicalization going on.
Indoctrination is also helped by the fact that prisoners likely feel “heartbreak and a sense of humiliation and insult", according to Al-Masri, who defends many of the accused in Sinai Province. He said, "The young man goes to the prison after the torture he faced, to meet those with the Takfiri ideology. They help and talk to him, telling him ‘The officer who blasphemed your religion is not Muslim. The one who tortured you is infidel.’
Many in the prisons of Tora, Wadi Al-Natroun, Burj El-Arab, and El-Minya Maximum Security respond to such treatment, Al-Masri said.
The father's attempts to keep his son away from ISIS ideology -as he calls it- were met by more violent attacks “The violence started to grow more until he said to me ‘What’s between me and you is a bullet in your head. You think that when I get out of here I will return to you?’”
Omar built his death threat against his father on their some religious texts he studied in prison that made him see himself as part of the believing class. Whoever disagrees with people in that group is "hostile to Allah and His Messenger," his father said.
The father visiting every other week for four years bringing his son money and trying to talk to him. Things fell apart. At the end, the father said, he allowed the visit and took the money, but didn’t speak. "He considered it as halal for him, because he believes that my blood and money are halal because I am an infidel. But I am with him till the end, even if I’m a skeleton."
Following sentencing and after three and a half years in Tora Prison, Omar was transferred to Wadi Al-Natroun Prison. At that time, another young man who’d been there as long, Mostafa, was leaving Tora Prison for El-Minya Maximum Security Prison, According to his father, his son too had been in Tora long enough to be brainwashed and converted to Takfiri ideas.
