CAIRO — Egypt’s Islamist president appointed a new governor of Luxor on Sunday who comes from the political arm of an Islamist group that once carried out terrorist attacks that killed dozens of tourists, soldiers and police officers in the same city.

Leaders of the group, the Gamaa al-Islamiyya, who were held in Egyptian prisons renounced violence in 1997, a few months before members carried out a terrorist attack near Luxor, in central Egypt, that killed 58 tourists and four Egyptians. In 2003, the Egyptian government permitted the group to publish its revised, nonviolent ideology.

But its partisans hold ultraconservative views on matters like sunbathing, women wearing shorts, the consumption of alcohol and other things that many tourists consider necessary components of vacations to see the country’s Pharaonic sites. Luxor is a major attraction, and tourism has been vital to the Egyptian economy.

Many people were shocked by the appointment.

“It is amazingly tone-deaf to symbolism,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an analyst at the Century Foundation. “Everybody is interested in the process of normalization of these former militant groups into politics, but I think it is pretty audacious to appoint a Gamaa member to be governor of Luxor, of all places.”