Al-Azhar Fatwa - Peaceful Protests against Mursi are Halal

mAd_ScIeNtIsT · June 20, 2013, 1:32pm

Egypt’s government is going to have a tough time on June 30th. They had been declaring that protesting against the government was heresy, but a fatwa from the most respected Islamic institution in Egypt has now undermined that and granted peaceful protests religious legitimacy.

Egypt top cleric: Protests against Morsi permitted

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s top Muslim cleric declared Wednesday that peaceful protests against the president are permitted, in a snub to hard-line Islamist backers of Mohammed Morsi who declared that those behind opposition protests planned for June 30 are heretics.
In a statement, Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of the Al-Azhar mosque, stuck strictly to the question of whether Islam allows the protests — while underlining that they must remain peaceful — without weighing in one way or another on their political substance.
In his statement Wednesday, el-Tayeb said that “peaceful opposition to the legitimate leader is religiously permissible and accepted.” Those who commit violence in the protests commit “a grave sin,” he said, but even that does not make them heretics who have broken with Islam.
He said Al-Azhar was obliged to speak out after the issuing of fatwas, or religious edicts, “attributed to random arrivals in the field of edicts and jurisprudence,” in an implicit jab at hard-line clerics.

Ali_Syed · June 20, 2013, 1:36pm