(Egyptian Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayeb in Cairo January 2, 2011. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El-Ghany)

Egypt’s leading Islamic authority Al-Azhar said on Thursday its clerics must be consulted on a law allowing the state to issue Islamic bonds, setting it at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood which drove the legislation through parliament last week.

It marks the first time Al-Azhar, a thousand-year-old seat of Islamic learning, has said its Senior Scholars Authority should be consulted on issues pertaining to Islamic law as set out in Egypt’s new, Islamist-tinged constitution.

Al-Azhar’s intervention could set a precedent for clerical oversight of other affairs of state. The Salafi Nour Party has said Al-Azhar must also approve an agreement Egypt is seeking with the International Monetary Fund because it includes a loan upon which Egypt will pay interest.

The Islamic bond, or sukuk law, will allow Egypt to issue debt compliant with Islamic principles, allowing the state to tap a new area of finance as President Mohamed Mursi’s administration grapples with an unaffordable budget deficit.

The sukuk law has been a source of friction between the Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice Party leads the upper house of parliament, and more hardline Islamists who say it should first have been approved by Al-Azhar.
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Muslim Brotherhood's president-elect Mohamed Mursi speaks during his first televised address to the nation at the Egyptian Television headquarters in Cairo June 24, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer

Mohamed Mursi’s victory in Egypt’s presidential election takes the Muslim Brotherhood’s long power struggle with the military into a new round that will be fought inside the institutions of state themselves and may force new compromises on the Islamists.

Stripped of many of its powers in the past week by the generals, the presidency Mursi is set to assume bears little resemblance to the one that Hosni Mubarak was forced to give up 16 months ago after three decades in charge. That, together with a host of other factors, will put a break on how much Mursi, 60, will be able do in office.

Despite the historic magnitude of his victory – Mursi is Egypt’s first freely elected leader and comes from a group outlawed for most of its 84-year existence – the chances of rapid changes in domestic or foreign policies appear faint.

Some of Mursi’s more ambitious campaign pledges – his promise to implement Islamic sharia, for example – could well be shelved as the realities of office bite in a country that is deeply divided by the idea of Brotherhood rule.

As things stand now, Mursi does not even have a parliament to pass such legislation, even if he wanted to, although he will form both a presidential administration and appoint a prime minister and government. But the Brotherhood-led legislature, elected in January, was dissolved by the generals who have given themselves the power over legislation in its absence.

A constant theme of Egyptian history since army officers overthrew the king in 1952, the old rivalry between the Islamists and the military looks set to continue.

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(Egyptian presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh speaks during an interview with Reuters in Cairo April 24, 2012. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany)

Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh was jailed by Hosni Mubarak but has emerged as a front-runner for his old job as president of Egypt, staking claim to the political centre in this nascent democracy with a moderate Islamist platform that has found broad appeal.

A senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood until he parted ways with the group last year, he is part of the generation of Islamist activists that spawned al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Both doctors, they spent time in adjoining jail cells in 1981. For the most part, that’s where the similarities end.

Abol Fotouh presents himself as a champion of moderate Islam, yet he has been able to win the backing of hardliners thanks partly to a political brain which many say sets him apart from the Brotherhood. Even some liberals, impressed by his reformist zeal, say they could vote for the bespectacled 60-year old.

With his presidential bid, he is charting new waters for the Islamist mainstream, reaching out to the tens of millions of Egyptians who played no role in politics in Mubarak’s days but are expected to flock to the polls for the May 23-24 vote.

“It’s the Egyptian mainstream I am banking on, the ones I have been working to win over since I started my campaign, who make up more than 90 percent of Egyptians … who understand (Islamic) sharia law correctly,” he said in an April 23 television interview. “Wherever we look out for people’s interests, we serve them, we are implementing God’s law.”

If the sketchy opinion polls that are available are anything to go by, Abol Fotouh is doing well. A poll published on Monday by a state-run research centre showed him second to ex-Arab League chief Amr Moussa and polling well ahead of Mohamed Mursi, the candidate fielded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Read the full story here. See also Brotherhood on back foot on eve of Egypt campaign.
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Newly elected speaker of the Egyptian parliament Mohamed Saad al-Katatni of the Muslim Brotherhood speaks during the first session of the newly-elected assembly in Cairo January 23, 2012. REUTERS/Khaled Elfiqi/Pool

At the end of January, a guest speaker drew an unusually large audience of diplomats to the 33rd floor auditorium at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry headquarters in Cairo. For latecomers, there was standing room only.

What made the event unique wasn’t the turnout, but the speaker: Mohamed Morsy, a leading figure in the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, had come to outline his group’s vision of Egypt’s place in the world.

“One year ago, it was unthinkable. But a lot of things were unthinkable in Egypt one year ago,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Amr Roshdy, recounting Morsy’s address in the Foreign Ministry tower on the banks of the river Nile.

Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr did not have time to attend – he was busy with a foreign dignitary. But he caught Morsy on his way out of the building and invited him to his office for a coffee. They chatted for an hour.

Under President Hosni Mubarak, Morsy’s political views could have landed him in jail. But today he heads the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, the biggest party in parliament, which has started to make its voice heard in the corridors of power even before it has assumed any executive office.

There have been some results: the group says its lobbying led the Foreign Ministry to toughen Egypt’s stance towards President Bashar al-Assad over his attempts to crush the uprising in Syria – a tangible impact on an area of policy that was once the personal realm of Mubarak.

“If you want to influence the next government’s policy, you need to talk to the Brotherhood, and you need to talk to them in depth,” a Western diplomat based in Cairo, who declined to be named, said.

Read the full story by Tom Perry and Edmund Blair here.
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(Salafi members of parliament are seen during the first Egyptian parliament session, after a revolution ousted former President Hosni Mubarak, in Cairo January 23, 2012. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih)

The Islamist speaker in Egypt’s parliament has reprimanded a hardline Salafi for reciting the call to prayer during a legislative session, telling him “you are no more of a Muslim than I am”. In an angry exchange broadcast on live TV, parliament speaker and Muslim Brotherhood member Saad al-Katatni told Mamdouh Ismail he had violated protocol by interrupting the session to recite the call for afternoon prayer.

The argument laid bare tensions among the Islamist groups that won 70 percent of the seats in the first parliament elected since Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power a year ago. Belonging to a school of Islamist thought calling for a strict application of Islamic law, the Salafis have emerged as a major rival to the long-established Brotherhood in the last year. The Muslim Brotherhood has the biggest parliamentary bloc.

“There is a mosque where you can make the call to prayer. This chamber is for discussion,” Katatni shouted on Tuesday at Ismail, a member of the Asala Party, one of the smaller Salafi groups represented in the new parliament.

The biggest Salafi group is the Nour Party, which won over a fifth of the seats, making it the second largest force in the chamber after the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which won more than 43 percent.

Katatni accused Ismail of grandstanding. “You are a respected lawyer Mr. Mamdouh. Do you need a media show? Who are you addressing?” he said to applause from sympathetic MPs.

Ismail’s visibly angry response was not audible in the broadcast. The bearded fundamentalist caused controversy in parliament last month during his swearing in by adding the words “so long as it does not oppose God’s law” to the standard oath.

via Islamist MPs clash in Egypt over call to prayer.

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(Naguib Sawiris speaks during a conference in Beirut June 2, 2010. REUTERS/Cynthia Karam)

Egyptian telecom tycoon and political liberal Naguib Sawiris will face trial on a charge of showing contempt for religion, judicial sources and Mamdouh Ismail, the Islamist lawyer who brought the case, said on Monday. Sawiris, a prominent figure in Egypt’s Coptic Christian community, was accused by a group of about 20 lawyers of showing contempt by tweeting a cartoon seen as insulting to Islam. According to the daily Al Masry Al Youm,  “In June, Sawiris posted a picture depicting Mickey Mouse wearing a beard and Minnie Mouse wearing a face veil on his Twitter account, a cartoon that many Muslims considered offensive.”

A Cairo prosecutor referred the case to trial on Monday. Sawiris, chairman of the mobile phone operator MobilNil , could not immediately be reached for comment. The cartoon incident in June triggered a boycott by some Mobinil customers, though Sawiris said the impact had eased by October.

Sawiris is a vocal critic of Islamist parties which have emerged in Egypt since Hosni Mubarak was ousted last February. He is a co-founder of the Free Egyptians (Al-Masryeen Al-Ahrar), a liberal party advocating separation of state and religion.

Like other liberal groups, the party has struggled to make an impact in parliamentary elections underway since late November and which have been dominated by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Nour Party, a more hardline Salafi group.

Ismail, a member of another Salafi party, said the prosecutor’s decision to put Sawiris on trial showed that the law applied to all. “It’s a decision showing that there is justice in Egypt,” he told Reuters. via Egypt’s Sawiris faces trial for insulting religion | News by Country | Reuters.

For more, see: Coptic businessman on trial over cartoon (Egypt Independent/Al-Masry Al-Youm) and the Sawiris page on the Egypt news aggregator Bikya Masr.

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(A woman walks under an electoral banner for the Al-Nour (the largest Salafi political party) ahead of Monday's parliamentary election in Cairo November 27, 2011.REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

The Salafi movement wants to model Egypt’s future on Islam’s past. If the first results of the country’s parliamentary elections are anything to go by, many Egyptians agree with them.

Ultra-conservative Islamists may have won 20 to 30 percent of the vote in the first leg of Egypt’s three-stage parliamentary vote, an outcome that has surprised and alarmed many Egyptians. They are worried about what this might mean for freedoms and tolerance in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Salafis look certain to emerge as a vocal bloc in the first legislature since Hosni Mubarak was deposed, confirming the historic changes under way since the removal from power of a man who dealt with Islamists mostly as enemies of the state.

Their influence over officialdom could reach further still, depending on cooperation with other Islamists also doing well in the election, namely the long-established Muslim Brotherhood which looks set to win more seats than any other group.

Their role will also hinge on the system of government that emerges from a transitional period steered by the army generals who took over from Mubarak. The military has been silent on the election result, urging Egyptians to vote but not taking sides.

Though official results give little to go on — the final picture will not be totally clear until January — both the Salafis and others following the count say they are doing well.

The indications so far are heartening for Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a Salafi planning to run for the presidency in a June election. He sees the results as “a map” of how young Egyptians going to the polls for the first time had voted.

“There’s no doubt this is pleasing,” said the softly-spoken lawyer-and-politician with a long, grey beard, wearing a suit and tie in an interview on Egyptian television on Thursday.

via ANALYSIS-Salafis sense best is yet to come in Egypt vote | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters.

(Supporters of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood 'The Freedom and Justice Party' participate in a march in support of the party ahead of parliamentary elections, in Cairo November 16, 2011. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El-Ghany)

After waiting 83 years, the Muslim Brotherhood finally senses a chance to be at the centre of how Egypt is governed and the Islamists hope to lead the renaissance of a nation which has suffered a steep economic and political decline.

That ambition above all else will define the next steps of a group which owes its survival to pragmatism. The Brotherhood will likely carry on treading lightly, hoping to ease fears at home and abroad over its vision for the new Egypt.

A strong Brotherhood showing in elections which began this week has brought the country closer to a prospect unthinkable just a year ago: a government influenced and possibly even led by a group outlawed under ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Headed by doctors, engineers and teachers, the Brotherhood’s slogan is “Islam is the solution”. Yet it talks the same language as other reformists when it comes to the need for democracy, an independent judiciary and social justice in Egypt.

Its critics say such language masks their goals of turning Egypt into an Islamic state by stealth, curbing freedoms for 80 million people who include some eight million Christian Copts.

At the group’s office, a simple apartment building in a residential district on the Nile, one of the group’s leaders outlines a political programme that has triggered comparisons with moderate Islamist groups elsewhere in the region.

“Now is the time for us to build a modern country, a modern state of law, a democratic state,” said Essam al-Erian, a doctor who was a political prisoner when Mubarak was deposed in February, and who is also a leader of the Brotherhood’s newly-founded political party.

He rejected a comparison between his movement and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, which has Islamist roots. “I hope we can give a different model,” Erian told Reuters in an interview.

“We hope that when we build a modern democratic country in Egypt this will be a good example, inspiring others to build democracy,” he added.

via Egypt’s Brotherhood feels its time has come | Reuters.

(Women walk beside an election poster by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood "The Freedom and Justice Party'" outside a polling station in Cairo November 28, 2011. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

The Muslim Brotherhood believes a majority in the new parliament should form a new government, the head of the group’s political party said on Tuesday, a position that could set the Islamists on course for a row with Egypt’s military rulers.

Mohamed Mursi, leader of the group’s Freedom and Justice Party, said a cabinet not backed by a parliamentary majority could not govern in practice. The Freedom and Justice Party is widely expected to do well in a three-stage legislative election that began on Monday and concludes in January.

“A government that is not based on a parliamentary majority cannot conduct its work in practice,” Mursi said to reporters during a tour of polling stations in the working class district of Shubra in Cairo. “Therefore we see that it is natural that the parliamentary majority in the coming parliament will be the one that forms the government,” added Mursi, whose group was banned under the deposed President Hosni Mubarak.

“We see that it is better for it to be a coalition government built on a majority coalition in the parliament,” Mursi added.

The military council last week appointed a new prime minister to form a government following the resignation of the previous cabinet in the face of street protests demanding an immediate end to army rule. Though a member of the military council has said the new parliament will not have the power to dismiss the cabinet or form a new one, observers question whether the generals will be able to resist the will of a chamber elected in a fair vote.

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(Tourists walk outside the Church of the Nativity, the site revered as the birthplace of Jesus, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem October 10, 2011/Ammar Awad)

The Palestinians will seek World Heritage status for the birthplace of Jesus once the U.N. cultural agency admits them as a full member, and will then nominate other sites on Israeli-occupied land for the same standing, an official said. Hamdan Taha, a Palestinian Authority minister who deals with antiquities and culture, said UNESCO membership was the Palestinians’ natural right. He described as “regrettable” the objections of some governments including the United States.

UNESCO’s board decided last week to let member states vote on a Palestinian application for full membership, seen as part of a Palestinian drive opposed by Israel and the United States for recognition as a state in the U.N. system.

“UNESCO membership carries a message of justice and rights. Why must the Palestinians be left outside the international system?” Taha said. “I see it as crowning long efforts over the past 20 years.”

He said that after gaining full UNESCO membership, the Palestinians will revive their bid to secure World Heritage status for Bethlehem and its Church of the Nativity, revered as the birthplace of Jesus. The nomination was rejected this year because the Palestinians were not a full UNESCO member. “This is a simple example of how Palestine has not been able to preserve its cultural heritage through the tools granted to every state in the world,” Taha said.

“We will call on the World Heritage Committee to activate this application,” said Taha. “We expect that after Bethlehem, other sites will follow.” These are likely to include Hebron, an ancient city home to a shrine holy to Jews and Muslims, which is one of the most volatile spots in the West Bank.

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