Shiite Leaders in Iraq, Iran React to Egypt Killings
The killing of Egyptian Shiite preacher Hassan Shehata has led many Shiite leaders in Iraq and Iran to call for adherents to tone down sectarian rhetoric.
While Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was very eagerly interpreting Sayyid Qutb’s radical and fundamentalist ideas and dreaming of building his Islamic regime on the basis of these ideas, he could not have imagined that these same ideas would lead to a bloody sectarian conflict in which Shiites were massacred, as happened to Hassan Shehata in Egypt.
When fundamentalist Shiite parties, such as the Islamic Dawa party, based their ideas on the ideology of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, they never imagined that they would stir up the anger of Egyptian Salafists to the point where the latter would go so far as to call them pigs.
When the Egyptian intellectual Hassan Hanafi was drafting the introduction and preparing the translation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s book Velayat-e faqih (Governance of the jurist) he did not imagine that the revolutionary theology to which he aspired would result in opposing and fighting parties accusing each other of apostasy.
The killing of the Egyptian Shiite preacher Shehata incited the ire of large swaths of the Middle East: Shiites, moderate Sunnis, liberals and other Egyptian religious minorities such as the Coptic Christians.
