WATANI International
4 June 2011
A number of Shia and Sufi leaders last week submitted a complaint to the attorney general, accusing Salafi leaders of inciting sectarian sedition by burning down churches and the Sufi shrines of saints.
With the complaint, they handed in a CD which included recordings of sermons by Salafi leaders inciting sedition. Copies of the CDs, the complaint declared, had been distributed to Egyptians living in Saudi Arabia.
The complaint demanded that legal action should be taken against all the Salafi sheikhs who had delivered the sermons on the CD, including Mohamed Hassaan, Yasser Burhami, Mohammed al-Zughbi and Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud.
“We shall hold demonstrations and resort to international courts if our complaint is ignored,” said Shia leader Mohamed al-Dereini. “Those people want to destroy our national unity; those Salafis even insulted the Grand Imam of al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb and Pope Shenouda III.” Dereini said he would present to the legal authorities evidence and documents which reveal that Saudi Arabia is financing Salafi currents in Egypt with the aim of propagating Wahabi thought.
For his part, Salafi spokesman Khaled al-Saeed accused the Shia of being financed by Iran to fight the Sunnis in Egypt.
Amin Iskandar, one of the co-founders of al-Karama (Dignity) political party, told the Egyptian media that the Wahhabis in Egypt were behind the sectarian attacks against Copts. The general mood in Egypt, he said, is teeming with religiosity and lack of respect for the ‘other’.
Emad Gad of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies said that sectarian sedition is a domestic industry that goes some 40 years back to the days of Anwar al-Sadat. “Today,” he said, “there are common interests between some Arab countries including Saudi Arabia on one hand, and certain parties in Egypt on the other, to brainwash Egyptians into Wahabism. As to Egyptian-Wahabi hostility, it is a historical problem since the Wahabis were defeated at the hands of the Egyptian Ibrahim Bin Mohamed Ali Pasha, the viceroy of the Ottoman sultan in Egypt in the 1830s.”
For his part, Nabil Abdel-Fattah, an expert on Islamist groups at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said that some regional powers which have interests with Islamists in Egypt are joining forces against the democrats, leftists, and intellectuals in Egypt, exploiting hardline Islamic thought to brand them all as “atheists”.
