A fringe group so extreme that it worries even Egypt’s Muslim ultraconservatives is secretly reviving itself with greater firepower and followers in the country’s volatile Sinai Peninsula.

Followers of the group known as Takfir wil-Hijra, dubbed “Takfiris,” lead secretive, isolated lives where anything and anyone that does not adhere to their limited interpretation of the Quran is deemed heretical. They dream of a puritanical Islamic state in Sinai.

While not all Takfiris are militants fighting jihad, or holy war, their ideology makes them easy pool to draw from for the armed groups believed to be behind attacks against Israel and Egypt’s military in Sinai.

Takfir wil-Hijra has swelled in numbers in recent months, multiplying from a few hundred faithful in Sinai before last year’s popular uprising to at least 4,500, living in the impoverished small towns of northern Sinai, according to security officials and local Bedouin tribal leaders. Their rise underlines how lawlessness after security agencies fell apart with the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak last year have fueled the spread of more hardline ideologies in Egypt.

The long festering woes in Sinai have come to the forefront as the Egyptian military wages a week-old expanded operation in the peninsula aimed at uprooting Islamic militants. The operation was sparked by a surprise attack earlier this month in which gunmen killed 16 Egyptian soldiers at a checkpoint near the border, then attempted an attack into Israel.

Sinai’s arid land of rugged mountains and desert roads dotted by towns and villages has long been neglected by the government, with investments directed to just a few tourist-friendly cities along its southern Red Sea tip. Its northern territory, which borders the Mediterranean Sea, Israel and the Gaza Strip, remained largely desolate, subsisting mostly on illegal trafficking of migrants and drugs as well as trade through underground tunnels to Gaza, largely sealed off by Israel and Egypt since the militant group Hamas took power there in 2007.

The Bedouin tribes that dominate the area have always been religiously conservative and traditional. But stricter Islamic doctrines have been gaining influence. In particular, the ultraconservative Salafi movement has grown more overt in Sinai, advocating an austere, literal interpretation of Islam similar to Saudi Arabia’s, strict segregation of the sexes and a return to what it sees as the way of life of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Takfiris go much further, however, ready to shun even their own families who are not part of the movement, say other Bedouin. Efforts by The Associated Press to arrange interviews with members of the community through intermediaries were rejected.

“They don’t see people. They don’t even attend their own parents’ funerals and say their parents are infidels,” said Sheik Ouda Abolmalhous, a tribal elder in northern Sinai. Even tribal allegiances, which reign supreme in northern Sinai, come second to their loyalty to the group, he said.

If meat is not slaughtered at the hands of a Takfiri, the group’s followers won’t eat it, even if it’s at their parents’ table. Their children do not attend schools, whose system and teachings are seen as seditious.

The men do not attend traditional Friday prayers in mosques, whose preachers are seen as heretical. They do not support the Muslim Brotherhood or ultraconservative Salafis, whose participation in politics is seen as blasphemous.

The group’s name underlines their isolationist ideology. In Arabic, Takfir means to declare someone an infidel. Hijra refers to the 7th Century flight of the prophet from his enemies in Mecca to take refuge in the nearby city of Medina -- and thus metaphorically points to escaping a sinful world. Its original name was Jamaat al-Muslimeen, or “Society of the Muslims,” with the implication they were the true Muslims.

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