At the same time that the Ministry of Religious Endowments has been clamping down on preachers delivering politically-tinged sermons on the grounds that religion should not used as a tool to justify political practices, not everyone in the military-backed regime seems to be abiding by the same rules. Segments of three controversial YouTube videos were released late last week, showing three popular religious figures delivering speeches to soldiers and policemen and triggering a wave of criticism and angry reactions as well as speculation about the messages the videos implied or were attempting to deliver. The figures included former mufti Ali Gomaa, also a member of the Al-Azhar Senior Scholars Board, former top cleric at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, Salem Abdel-Galil and popular preacher Amr Khaled. While the first two scholars openly sanctioned the killing of “armed rebels” in the videos, Khaled's words focussed on the issue of obedience to commanders. However, in all three cases the videos were edited in a way that delivered an intimidating message, seen by pro-Mohamed Morsi protesters as an attempt to provide religious justification for the killing of peaceful protesters against what they have described as a “military coup”. The same tactic was used by late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser in his clampdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954, they argue. According to a paper by analyst Ahmed Morsi, in the 1950s Al-Azhar seemed to toe the Nasser government's line, issuing “statements that portrayed the Brotherhood's ideology as a threat to social cohesion”. Many Brotherhood members have found this difficult to forget or have “never forgiven Al-Azhar for the betrayal or the way that Al-Azhar became a tool of subsequent regimes against the Brotherhood”, the researcher speculated. The fact that the three videos were filmed at the military's department of moral affairs further corroborated such fears. The timing of their release on YouTube has led to questions of whether they are a part of the military's war on terror in Sinai, or a signal that further hardline policies could be imposed on the Brotherhood and its supporters. A number of Brotherhood members have already been killed or jailed, and others are facing trial following the ouster of former Brotherhood president Morsi. Ousted former president Hosni Mubarak is also facing retrial on charges of killing protesters during the 25 January Revolution after he was released from custody last week. Gomaa, a Mubarak appointee, has perhaps borne the brunt of the criticism for his video, in which he likens the opposition to the current military-backed rule to “dissidents” and to a sect during the early Islamic period that was seen as made up of infidels and whose members it was possible to kill. In using this term, critics agreed, Gomaa had perhaps slipped into the same kind of religious discourse that some Islamists had earlier used to similarly lambast their own “infidel” opponents. “There are people who are trying to break the line, and the Prophet Mohamed said that in cases where all people, and I say all people not all members of a group, reach a consensus on a certain matter, as was the case in the 30 June Revolution when droves of protesters came out and were supported by the military, then it is permissible to kill those who divide the people, whoever they are,” Gomaa said, adding that “despite the sanctity and solemnity of bloodshed, the Prophet allowed us to fight dissidents.” In an interview with CBC, a television channel, Gomaa denied that his edict had meant that the dissidents were “disbelievers”, however. “Brotherhood leaders who manipulated the minds of young people should be considered to be ‘dissidents' and thus should be confronted. However, killing them should be avoided as much as possible, and we should ask God to forgive them and guide them to repentance.” In an e-mail statement, Gomaa denied what he called “rumours” that he had sanctioned the killing of peaceful protesters or Brotherhood members because this would be to contradict the principles of Islam. Gomaa made it clear that his video had concerned “armed rebels”, something that had not been clear in the short released segments of the video. “If a person wants to rebel by taking up arms against the military, what is the situation,” Gomaa asked soldiers in the video. “Kill that person. I say again: those who rebel against the Egyptian military or police deserve, according to the Sharia, to be killed.” Gomaa told CBC that the video had been shown to soldiers and police officers across the country to “keep up their spirits”, and he insisted that he respected peaceful protests as a means of political expression. However, despite Gomaa's statements, some remained sceptical about the true purposes behind the video. Gomaa had implicitly opposed the 25 January Revolution when he issued an edict barring Muslims from praying in mosques on the Friday of Departure, when demonstrators went out in their hundreds of thousands to put an end to the regime of former president Mubarak, critics say. Gomaa explained his opposition to the 25 January Revolution by saying that he had wanted to prevent bloodshed, but it remains questionable why he did not take a similar stance prior to the 30 June Revolution. Gomaa said he had condoned the protests against Morsi because the latter “had not lived up to his electoral promises and thus deserved to be removed”. However, according to researcher Ibrahim Al-Hodaibi this raises questions as to why Gomaa did not use the same standard in condoning the January protests against Mubarak's 30-year rule. Al-Hodaibi wrote on his Facebook account that Gomaa had contradicted himself when he said in a televised interview that the security forces, contrary to many witness statements, had not attacked first when they broke up the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in, killing hundreds of people. “Gomaa based his argument on the assumption that the security forces had had to receive orders from the higher ranks before they attacked, so how could he have suggested in the same interview that Mubarak had not known about the killing of the protesters in Tahrir Square during the 25 January Revolution? Did the security forces not need to receive orders from above at the time also,” he asked. “In both cases, Gomaa was neither a witness nor was he involved in the investigations.” Such apparent contradictions in Gomaa's statements have provided his critics with reasons to interpret his latest edict as meaning that he is “a Mubarak-loyalist”, “government mouthpiece” or “authority lover”. Gomaa was appointed under Mubarak when Al-Azhar was largely seen as being a tool used by the regime to justify and garner support for its autocratic policies. Such speculations aside, religious disagreements soon erupted over who should be described as a “dissident” after the release of Gomaa's video. Member of the Al-Azhar Senior Scholars Authority Sheikh Hassan Al-Shafie countered that the word “should be used to describe those who dissented against the rule of the president, who was elected by the people”, in other words Morsi. Al-Shafie is among those who believe that the 30 June Revolution was “a carefully plotted military coup under public cover that started a year ago when Morsi took over the presidency”, he said. Al-Azhar scholar and Morsi supporter Mohamed Emara concurred, adding that if the term “dissidents” was to be used for anyone in the modern period, it should be used to describe those who had ousted the elected president and not the other way around. Emara argued in an interview with Al-Jazeera that the grand imam of Al-Azhar had previously sanctioned peaceful protests and that “portraying those who were against the 30 June protests as dissenting against the majority of Muslims is an act of blasphemy.” Emara said that the current crisis should be viewed as a purely political matter that had nothing to do with religion. “No one who speaks in the name of religion has the right to excommunicate a faction of those battling in Egypt today,” he told Al-Jazeera. “Excluding others is not the right stance to take.” The meddling of religion in politics has been viewed with much suspicion abroad. In an article entitled “Egypt Military Enlists Religion to Quell Ranks,” the New York Times suggested that the videos were part of a military “propaganda campaign” in which a number of scholars had been mandated to “persuade soldiers and policemen that they have a religious duty to obey orders to use deadly force against supporters of the ousted president Morsi.” The paper speculated that “the effort is a signal that the generals are worried about insubordination in the ranks, after security forces have killed hundreds of their fellow Egyptians who were protesting against the military's removal of the elected president in violence of the Armed Forces against civilians that is without precedent in the country's modern history.” It suggested that “more than 1,100 civilians have been killed in the crackdown since 14 August, and many of the conscripts are likely to have lost a cousin or relative, or heard stories of the carnage.” Popular preacher Amr Khaled asked soldiers whether they “obeyed your commander while performing a great task” in his video. “You conscripts in the Egyptian military are performing a task for Almighty God,” he told them. “Don't let anybody make you question your faith.” In the face of subsequent criticism, Khaled remained adamant about what he had said, being quoted as saying that it was “a national duty” to raise the spirits of the army and security forces in their “fight against militancy in Sinai”. Khaled insisted, however, that his speech had not made any mention of peaceful protesters, though critics said his statements could easily be misunderstood. In the same vein, Abdel-Galil's video could be seen as even more intimidating, when the preacher described rebels as “aggressors who have to repent before God” and said that “using weapons against them is thus a national duty”. “They [pro-Morsi Islamists, whom he called “preachers of strife”] speak of a coup. What coup? This is the will of the people,” Abdel-Galil said. “They are criminals; they are aggressors; and the state needs to take the necessary measures to eradicate them.” However, he later explained on his Facebook account that the statements had been in response to a question about “terrorists who attack the military” and that he had not meant pro-Morsi protesters. He said that “the video released to the public was edited to distort the meaning” of it. It is not known who posted the videos on YouTube. In a country suffering from a high rate of illiteracy and an unprecedentedly deep state of polarisation, it remains questionable whether the videos will be allowed to pass without inciting more hatred and bloodshed. Many would perhaps agree with the New York Times that this apparent “recourse to religion to justify the killing is also a new measure of the depth of the military's determination to break down the main pillar of Morsi's support, the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood.” “Indeed, after ousting Morsi in the name of tolerance, inclusiveness and an end to religious rule, the military is now sending religious messages to its troops that sound surprisingly similar to the arguments of the radical militants who call for violence against political opponents whom they deem to be non-believers,” the paper lamented.
