Egyptian government introduces unified Friday prayer guidelines
In an effort to root out Muslim Brotherhood influence from Egypt’s 150,000 mosques, the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments is imposing a unified Friday sermon for mosques throughout Egypt.
The Egyptian authorities and the Muslim Brotherhood are parties to the ongoing conflict on many tracks — in the streets, in universities, in the courts, in some state agencies — and now the conflict has moved to houses of worship.
The country’s mosques are the scene of one of the episodes of the conflict between the Ministry of Religious Endowments, which represents the state, and some clerics who represent the Muslim Brotherhood’s position of opposing “the coup and defending legitimacy.”
The Brotherhood’s tools inside the mosques do not differ from their tools outside: a harsh discourse that incites the masses against the current regime and that also calls on crowds to gather. Mosques sometimes act as outposts for Muslim Brotherhood snipers. Some have said that this is what happened to the Fatah Mosque when the Rabia al-Adawiya Square sit-in was broken up on Aug. 14, 2013.
The tools of the regime, on the other hand, are represented by the decision to enforce the laws, after they were amended to impose stiffer penalties. The authorities have dispatched clerics from the Ministry of Religious Endowments to the mosques that slipped from government control. Lately, the ministry has imposed harsh penalties for whoever deviates from its religious discourse.
