Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi recently appointed 17 new local governors this weekend, seven of them from his party, and one from a decidedly problematic one: The new governor of Luxor belongs to the political wing of Gamaa al-Islamiyya, which is not only a terrorist group but the organization that perpetrated one of the worst terrorist attacks in Egyptian history in Luxor, where they slaughtered four Egyptians and 58 foreign tourists in 1997. (The Blind Sheikh, who orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was a member of the terrorist group, too.)
Gamaa al-Islamiyya now has a radically Islamist political party associated with it that, while it’s renounced terror and violence, still wants to turn Egypt into a theocratic state — which would, among other things, mean destroying all the “pagan” monuments that pay the bills in Egypt, banning alcohol, etc.
Morsi’s appointments were distributed in a way that seems intended to shore up his position and play down concerns that he’s consolidating a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship — he picked a number of military officers and members of other political parties. His selecting a member of Gamaa al-Islamiyaa’s party to represent Luxor, then, is offensive and stupid, but also represents Morsi’s efforts to deal with the fact that there are a lot of ultra-Islamist Egyptians who supported the idea of overthrowing the Egyptian state and replacing it with an Islamic one, and basically still do. Witness the fruits of Muslim (quasi-)democracy.
Gamaa al-Islamiyya and other groups’ campaign of Islamist terror in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s was more than just deadly — at times it pretty much crippled the Egyptian economy, too, because the country relies so heavily on tourism. Mubarak’s government made fighting these groups a priority and eventually broke the back of this Islamist insurgency; that made the place a good deal safer for tourists (whether the AK-armed “Tourist Police” that blanket popular sites are security theater or not is sort of unclear), though the attacks haven’t stopped entirely. Unrest in the Sinai since the Muslim Brotherhood government took over has raised concerns over how willing and capable Morsi’s government is with regards to fighting terrorism, and their decision to appease one such group with a governorship doesn’t seem like a good sign.