Egypt’s Al-Azhar pressed to call Muslim Brotherhood terror group
Religious institutions in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have classified the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, increasing pressure on Al-Azhar to do likewise.
CAIRO — During an interview on the local Sada al-Balad satellite TV channel on Nov. 27, Egyptian Grand Mufti Shawki Allam presented testimonies of Al-Azhar scholars, reading from their books that the Muslim Brotherhood has “a deviant ideology” that led to the killing of innocent people, assassinations, acts of destruction and sedition.
Some observers see Allam’s statement as an attempt to show that the religious authorities in Egypt are in alignment with those of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which recently classified the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Al-Azhar did not follow suit.
Egypt declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and banned all of its activities in 2013. Saudi Arabia declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2014 and the UAE followed the same year.
On Nov. 10, for the first time in its history, the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars declared the Muslim Brotherhood a “deviant terrorist group” that does not represent Islam and hides under the cover of religion while engaging in practices that contradict Islam while inciting division, discord, violence and terrorism.
