In Egypt, tensions between Muslims and Copts increased to the point where, in June of 1981an especially gruesome round of violence erupted in the overcrowded Cairo slum of al-Zawiyya al-Hamra, fanned by the intense summer heat aggravated by frequent cutoffs in the water supply. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. Some babies were thrown from windows to their deaths in the streets below.
The country recoiled in horror. Tensions continued to mount as Muslims and Christians blamed one another in diatribe after diatribe published in the press. In September, Sadat cracked down hard on both sides. There were mass arrests (nearly 1,600 were detained). The powerful Islamic student associations (Jama'at Islamiyya ), which had started up after the 1967 war and which had enjoyed government favor throughout much of the 1970s, were banned on September 3. (The leader of one of these student groups at Asyut University, Muhammad Islambouli, was arrested and roughed up. It was his brother, Khalid, who assassinated Sadat the following month.) The head of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenuda III, was banished to a monastery in the Wadi Natrun.
Among the Muslim detainees was the popular and, by virtue of his status as a graduate of al-Azhar, influential Muslim preacher, Sheikh 'Abd al-Hamid Kishk. He had alienated the regime by demanding that it restore al-Azhar to its pre-1961 status: that is, independent of all official ties to the government. While he did not explicitly call for the overthrow of the secular Sadat regime, radicals interpreted his remarks on the reform of al-Azhar as a green light to do so.
On October 6 during the annual holiday parade, Sadat was assassinated by radical Muslim fundamentalist army regulars led by army First Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli. Sadat was succeeded by his Vice President, Hosni Mubarak, an air force pilot.
In the subsequent trial in December, it was revealed that the conspirators, members of a militant group called Jama'at al-Jihad ("Organization for Jihad") had obtained a fatwa (religious legal opinion) from a blind sheikh at Asyut university, Dr. Umar abd-al-Rahman, to the effect that killing Christians and stealing gold from Christian jewelry shops to finance jihad were permissible since a technical state of war exists between Muslims and non-Muslims rendering the property "spoils of war" rather than stolen goods.
Two days later, fifty men attacked the police station in Asyut, 250 miles south of Cairo. The death toll from the subsequent gun battle was 87, sixty six of whom were police.
See also Key Events in Modern Egyptian History