LONDON, Nov. 17— Even after years of harsh Government repression, even with 15,000 sympathizers imprisoned and its top leaders in jail, exile or both, the militant movement thought to have killed scores of foreign tourists in Luxor remains Egypt's most active Islamic fundamentalist organization.
In recent months, the Egyptian Government has been claiming success at bringing the Islamic Group -- Al Gamaa al Islamiya in Arabic -- under tighter control.
But that is not the same thing as eradicating it. Instead, the struggle seems to have merely transformed the Islamic Group from a highly disciplined organization that assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 into a far more loosely knit group of cells.
While these cells have become less and less effective in Egypt's cities, today's attack shows that they are still able to wreak havoc in sporadic attacks on tourists or in the countryside.
The damage this can do to a country where poverty is deep and tourism is enormously important was evident in the shock expressed here today by Mamdouh el-Beltagui, Egypt's Tourism Minister. Here for the first day of the London Travel Fair, a major event for tourist operators, he found himself unable to boast that Egypt had conquered terrorism and its threat to travelers.
''I can't predict at this stage what is going to happen about tourism to the country,'' Mr. Beltagui said.
In Egypt, Nabil Osman, the Government's spokesman, said, ''We have never said we stopped these groups but that we had contained them.'' He added that terrorism was ''an international phenomenon.''
What he did not say was that Egypt had largely succeeded in recapturing an enormous flow of tourism, which had sharply fallen in 1993 and 1994 during a previous wave of attacks on tourists, and now will probably have to start again.
The Islamic Group was founded in the late 1970's by a band of radical Muslim theologians, led by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and former army intelligence officers and lawyers. The sheik was later exiled and is now serving a life prison sentence in New York for his role in inspiring the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the former army officers and lawyers are all now serving life sentences in Egypt.
The group's most spectacular attack was the assassination of President Sadat while he was reviewing a military parade in 1981, and in subsequent years it staged attacks on prime ministers, cabinet ministers, ranking police officers, secularists and intellectuals, including the Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed in an assassination attempt in 1994, when he was 82.
In the last five years, however, its status and tactics have changed. President Hosni Mubarak and a succession of interior ministers have claimed, with some justification, to have broken the framework in which fundamentalist terror had operated in Egypt. This was accomplished with a ruthless and highly effective security campaign, and with a diplomatic offensive that cut off funds for the militants from rich supporters in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Egyptian officials estimate that the movement now has at most a few hundred operatives, who are hounded by security forces. Having been chased out of big cities, they typically hide out now in a few villages and towns in southern Egypt. Their targets tend to be foreign tourists or the largely defenseless 10 percent of Egyptians who are Christians.
The attacks on tourists are a threat to Egypt because of its economic vulnerability; the tourist industry brings in a desperately needed $3 billion a year. Beyond that, the Islamic Group's very survival erodes Egypt's efforts to portray itself as a dominant Arab nation with a future based on democracy and economic ties to the wider world.
Today's attack came after the top six jailed leaders of the Islamic Group made repeated appeals, starting in July, for a cessation of violence ''for the sake of Islam and Muslims.''
They seem to have concluded that the battle to convert society by force has been lost, even though the basic political environment in which they recruit converts remains the same: the Government resists democratization while endemic corruption and vast disparities of wealth continue.
