The Salafi's are a virulent brand of Islam, akin to Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia. They have kept in the background until now, although the US has had their finger on them for a while and are aware of their jihadist leanings. They are vying for their share of the pie and as a group with not a lot of political clout they must find a companion on which they can ride to victory. That horse is the Muslim Brotherhood.
The protesters who gathered together to demand democracy, freedom and justice are now realizing that their cries for a secular Egypt have been crushed, their breath of fresh democracy replaced with Islamic purity and sharia for all.
From the
tricityherald.com April 13 by Hannah Allam
Egypt's hard-line Islamists speak up, creating unease
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt At 2 a.m. on a tense night just before Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak was toppled, Yehia el-Sherif and other members of his ad-hoc neighborhood watch group noticed a car carrying two men with long beards approach their checkpoint in the port city of Alexandria.
The watchmen didn't order the car to stop - the men inside turned off the engine, offered a vehicle search and presented their ID cards without prompting, Sherif, a 21-year-old college student, recalled. After the search, the bearded men passed out pamphlets espousing the rigid ideology of the Salafis, an ultraconservative branch of Islam whose literalist interpretations are anathema to Muslim moderates and liberals.
The car sped off into the night, leaving Sherif and his neighbors slack-jawed as they realized the Salafis had engineered the episode as a chance to proselytize - they were driving the dark and menacing streets to spread the message that Islam was the only way out of Egypt's political crisis.
"They knew they'd be stopped and searched and that would allow them to give out the pamphlets, which were all about strict and stern Sharia law," Sherif said. "That's when we thought, 'Yeah, maybe we should be concerned.'"
Ya think?
Now the possibility that Salafis may enter Egypt's mainstream politics is raising concern that their beliefs could one day become a dominating force in life here - something that U.S. diplomats have been concerned about for at least two years.
"Increasingly, Egyptian political elites are uneasy about the rising popular resonance of Salafis, concerned that, although the Egyptian groups do not currently advocate violence, their extreme interpretation of Islam creates an environment where susceptibility to radicalism and jihadi ideas is heightened," a U.S. diplomat wrote in a cable to the State Department that's among the cache obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
Until the movement that toppled Mubarak, Salafis assiduously avoided involvement in the world of secular politics. But as the anti-Mubarak demonstrations unfolded, young Salafis, with their bushy beards and full facial veils, became conspicuous among other activists in Cairo's Tahrir Square, despite the reluctance of their clerics to support the protests.
Then last month, a Salafi umbrella group in Alexandria, a stronghold of Islamists from all ideologies, sent shockwaves throughout Egypt with the announcement that Salafis would enter the political arena - an abrupt reversal of the faction's longtime stance of boycotting elections to focus on religious outreach.
Whether pulpit or soapbox, the message is the same: Islam is the answer.
(.)The Salafis campaigned in tandem with the Muslim Brotherhood in poor neighborhoods with religious populations, pitching a "yes" vote for hastily drafted constitutional amendments that the pro-democracy movement opposed.
The amendments passed with 77 percent of the vote - a victory that one popular Salafi sheikh controversially gloated about as a "conquest of the ballot boxes."
The YouTube video of Sheikh Mohamed Hussein Yaqoub's remarks went viral, setting off online battles between the cleric's Salafi supporters and Egyptian moderates who took the video as proof that Islamists were trying to take over Egypt.
One of Yaqoub's students, Sheikh Ali Nasr, said a Saudi-style theocracy isn't the goal. He challenged critics to listen to Salafi preachers, promising they'd hear nothing about violence or forcing their austere brand of Islam on other Egyptians.
"We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and say that we want a religious state, but I do call for a president that respects religious freedom and, more importantly, I want the president to respect and protect our resources and confront corruption," Nasr said.
Sounds good on paper...wait for it....
"Islam is in the souls of the people and will be here before and after elections, so we're not looking for a religious state as much as a just and fair state."
Translation: Islam is already here, we just need to impliment it fully in order to have a "just and fair" state.
Just ducky.
Read it all
No comments:
Post a Comment