Its top ideologues, mostly now freed, have written 25 volumes of revisions in a series called Tashih al-Mafahim (Corrections of Concepts). These tackle key doctrinal issues such as the concept of takfir -- declaring a Muslim an apostate and therefore permissible to kill; attacks on civilians and foreign tourists; and waging jihad against a Muslim ruler who does not apply sharia law.
"If you want to rob these people of their cover you have to take away their legitimacy," says Ashraf Mohsin, an Egyptian diplomat dealing with counter-terrorism.
"The way to deprive them of their ability to recruit is to attack the message. If you take Islam out of the message all that is left is criminality," he said.
Like the Gama'a before them, Sharif and other Jihad prisoners have been allowed by the interior ministry and state security to meet and consult each other in prison and have held religious dialogues with clerics from al-Azhar, the fount of mainstream jurisprudence in the Sunni world.
"Of course the Egyptian government is benefiting from this," Zayyat agrees.
"But it's not done for their benefit, or for the Americans," he says.
Past "revisions" have included apologies to the victims of terror attacks, recognition of them as "martyrs", and the annulment of fatwas as misguided.
But these are not an Islamist version of The God That Failed -- the 1949 anthology written by disillusioned communists -- but rather a reasoned rejection of theological misinterpretations. Their authors are neither secular nor liberal: Their self-criticism includes observations that the wrong path to jihad benefits only the Jews, the US and the Christian minority in Egypt.
"The Egyptian state is holding all this out as a huge triumph," a foreign diplomat says. "But the views these people preach are still pretty sinister. The state has to some extent accommodated itself to the Islamists."
Yet for Rashwan, Egypt's de-radicalization work has helped keep violence at bay.
The proof, he suggests, is that there has not been a jihadi incident in the Nile Valley since Luxor.
"Now this is a global phenomenon," says Rashwan, suggesting that an effort that emerged from Egypt's own security needs could provide lessons for others waging the battle for Muslim hearts and minds -- as relevant in Luton and Lyon as in Casablanca and Kabul.
"Security measures alone cannot defeat terrorism," argues Fouad Allam, a former state security general -- the guards outside his Cairo home testimony to decades spent hunting down armed Islamists.
"Terrorism has to be fought with a broader strategy in which the political issues that fuel extremism are dealt with so that these sort of `revisions' will have some effect," Allam says.
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