Lawyer Esam Sultan, member of the under-establishment Wasat Party, sent a warning yesterday to the members of the Islamic Research Academy demanding that Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi be expelled from the Academy itself after shaking hands with Peres. He also threatened to take legal measures against them if they refrained from doing this. In his warning, Sultan says Al-Azhar Sheikh has “adopted a conduct which belittles his standing as a Muslim scholar”, pointing out that this is one of the cases which makes it mandatory to remove the man from his post under the law organizing Al-Azhar. In the warning, Sultan also points out that the decision to remove the Sheikh from his post is in the hands of the members of the Academy and not in the hands of the President of the Republic, who appoints the Sheikh, as the members are more competent to judge the sheikh's conduct. For his part, the Secretary General of the Islamic Research Academy, Dr. Ali Abdel Baky, defended Dr. Tantawi saying to Al-Masry Al-Youm that we “will not heed any legal warnings regarding the removal of the sheikh even if these warnings are legal, as all members of the academy know that the handshake was accidental and unintentional as the Grand Imam himself said”. He considered that this handshake “does not at all reduce Al Azhar Sheikh's standing and, consequently, his membership in the Academy is out of question." "We all know that his eminence rejects the Israeli practices against the Palestinian people and has often denounced them in his talks” he went on to say. The Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Dr. Mohammed Al Shahat Al Gendy, who is also a member of the Academy, pointed out that the handshake with Shimon Peres had been made necessary by the conditions of the meeting, in which the Sheikh expressed the Islamic ethics in dealing with the others”. He went on to say that “had the Sheikh refused to shake hands, the media would have accused him of fanaticism and extremism and would have made this charge stick on Islam and Muslims. Moreover, the Sheikh would have violated the Islamic principle to reply kindly to any greetings.
