Africa

Africa

Egyptian presidency condemns cleric speech okaying killing opposition leaders

08 February 2013 00:12 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Egyptian presidency on Thursday denounced a cleric's speech that okays killing of opposition members who seek to topple elected leaders, APA reports quoting official news agency MENA.

In the statement, the presidency invited all national forces, religious institutions and intellectual leaders to stand against such provoking calls. "Such an inciting language is unacceptable, as it represents deviation from the tolerance enjoined by all religions."

The condemnation came one day after al-Azhar professor Mahmoud Shabaan made the religious speech, "fatwa," where he said "The Islamic punishment for the opposition National Salvation Front ( NSF) and its leaders who obviously seek power is death."

Also on Thursday, Prime Minister Hesham Qandil condemned the speech as directly inciting murder and raising dissent and unrest in the country.

The interior ministry dispatched security members to parole the residences of opposition leaders after Shabaan made the speech, according to official reports.

The fatwa triggered a wave of denouncement by all Egyptian parties, including the NSF and the Islamists themselves, the most prominent of whom are the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Salafist al-Nour party.

"When Muslim clerics give fatwas urging killing in the name of religion without being arrested, then the regime and its state are useless," ElBaradei, a NSF leader, wrote Wednesday on his Twitter page.

The Salafist al-Nour Party called on al-Azhar, which is world's most prestigious Sunni institution and where Shabaan belongs, to take a deterrent action against the cleric who "cannot be made a professor of Islamic Sharia (Law)."

"Al-Azhar should not be silent to such practices that can post a threat to social peace in Egypt," al-Nour party spokesman Nader Bakkar said Wednesday.

Likewise, the MB issued an official statement Thursday denouncing Shabaan's fatwa as "a call allowing bloodshed and provoking murder."

"We are against violence, and we reject accusing others of disbelief and inciting bloodshed," Mohsen Radi, member of the higher committee of the MB's Freedom and Justice party (FJP), told Xinhua.

Radi added that Islam teaches tolerance and prohibits such hate invitations. "We believe that disagreement does not mean hatred," he said.