Al khuruj min bawabat al jah'eem (Exiting the Doors of Hell) by Maher Farghali, Beirut: Al-Intishar Al-Arabi Institution, 2012. 352pp.

Publishing houses compete lately, especially after Egypt's revolution, to release books related to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Many other political Islam movements remain in the shadows, however.

It is less common for the reader to stumble across books that deal with jihadist organisations, for example, that have come out of their hiding since the revolution and established political parties, catching up with the new reality that appeared while members of these organisations were detained in prisons for over 20 years.

To this rare genre the book by Maher Farghali belongs and his lively testimony is a true and shocking account of a member of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya that assassinated president Sadat in 1981 before it splintered into other groups, including the Jihadist group.

Farghali started writing this testimony from inside his prison cell. He describes the internal structure of Al-Gamaa, combining storytelling of the experience and all its details with an academic documentation of the beginnings of Al-Gamaa in the late '70s. He also details his activities within the organisation throughout 20 years (mostly spent in prison) and witnessing the initiative to stop violence that allowed most members of Al-Gamaa to be released from prison.

The first scene in the book is one that suits a tragic end to a lengthy, tiring journey, when Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya gives up all its doctrines related to armed resistance, for which it had killed hundreds of innocent people and for which all its members spent their youth and even old age in detention and imprisonment.

The story is thus told from the end and then flashes back to the beginning. Farghali was imprisoned in Al-Wadi Al-Gadid and taken out of his cell together with a number of his inmates to meet Al-Gamaa leaders who were also imprisoned elsewhere.

Those leaders included the big names of Al-Gamaa and they simply announced, in lengthy articulate sermons, the end of the violence between Al-Gamaa and the state in response to the 'stop the violence' initiative.

They implied, in the presence of State Security and prison officers, that all that past was deception and that the years of imprisonment and torture were without cause; that the violence and killing adopted by Al-Gamaa was all a killer mistake.

From this scene, Farghali goes back to the early days when he joined Al-Gamaa in one of the cities in Upper Egypt as a boy, describing details about the secret world of an organisation that believed that violence is the only way to "promote virtue and prevent vice."

The author confirms that the Muslim Brotherhood were considered their worst enemy and even more dangerous than the state. He documents how Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, now imprisoned in the US, became the leader of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya and how it worked using mosques as military barracks, controlling entire cities in the south of Egypt.

According to Farghali, Al-Gamaa was the first to establish the "change via violence" model that was later taken up by other organisations throughout the world.

He says it continued through establishing links with the Jihadists, later known as Salafist Jihadists, and entered the armed conflict during the late 1980s and throughout the '90s, and ended up with most of its members and leaders in prisons for over two decades.

Farghali finished the first draft of the book before the revolution, but added a few pages after the revolution, describing his fear and worry about the new political parties formed by the remaining Jihadists, since most of its members were in prison when the revolution ignited, spending most of their lives behind bars, and, therefore, are totally distant from reality.

In addition, the 'stop violence' initiative that began when they were behind bars is no longer needed, to the extent that one of its leaders, Nageh Ibrahim, called for respecting long-time Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and not participating in a revolution against him.