Religion

Mohamed Tantawi, the sheikh of Al-Azhar University, passed away from a heart attack (عربي) in Riyadh this morning while boarding an airplane.

Tantawi was in Saudi Arabia for the King Faisal Awards;Al-Jazeera reports that he looked fine during the ceremony; an adviser to Tantawi says the sheikh was in "excellent health" before the trip.

Tantawi made headlines most recently for his edict against the niqab, in which he declared the full-face veil a "tradition" with no basis in Islam, and for an incident in which he lifted a young girl's niqab. His legacy includes a number of other controversial decisions -- rulings on banking reforms, for example, and a meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Issandr El Amrani has a detailed obituary with a lot of interesting detail about Tantawi's place in Egyptian society. His immediate verdict:

... he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows.

Tantawi's body will be buried in Medina, according to the BBC.

Is Fethullah Gulen pulling the strings behind the Turkish coup investigation?

Gulen -- a Turkish preacher who heads the eponymous Fethullah Gulen Movement -- has long been a bogeyman to many American (and Turkish) conservatives, who view him as a sort of Turkish Ayatollah Khomeini, waiting in exile to swoop in and topple the Kemalist republic.

I've only been to Hebron once. It was one of the stranger experiences in my travels in the Middle East -- the overwhelming military presence to protect a few hundred settlers, the settler-only road, the grave of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein. The tension is palpable.

The city is a flashpoint again this week, after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to add two West Bank religious sites -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem -- to a national heritage plan. The list includes other religious sites and "historic sites in Zionist history"; the Israeli government has earmarked NIS400 million (US$106 million) to refurbish the sites.

Today is Valentine's Day, which means it's time for the media to resurrect a favorite theme: Saudi Arabia doesn't like hearts, or flowers, or the color red!

It isn't often that cynical singles and religious police find themselves on the same side, but in Saudi Arabia they are standing united against a common threat: Valentine's Day.

It's the same story every year: A dire lede about how the strange foreign peoples of Saudi Arabia disapprove of Valentine's Day. A sentence about the all-encompassing ban on gifts and chocolates and roses -- about the holiday's incompatibility with Islam and traditional culture.

Egyptian police arrested 13 members of the Muslim Brotherhood (عربي) -- including Mahmoud Ezzat, the organization's deputy leader -- in overnight raids in six provinces.

The raids targeted homes in Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Assiut, Sharqiyya and Gharbiyya governorates. In addition to Ezzat, police also arrested two members of the Brotherhood's guidance council, Essam el-Erian and Abdul-Rahman el-Bir; three members of the Brotherhood's administrative office in Alexandria; and several writers and professors with ties to the group.

A couple of weeks ago I promised to write about Muhammad Badie's election as the Muslim Brotherhood's new supreme guide. I never did, mostly because I didn't have anything interesting to say; Evan has already written about the internal drama that surrounded the vote, and I don't think the election has much external significance, despite widely-publicized concerns that Badie (a conservative) will push the group to the right.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

The Egyptian parliament convened on Sunday (عربي) to discuss three issues: weapons smuggling on the Sinai, a health ministry scandal, and the recent sectarian shootings in Nag Hammadi.

But MPs can't agree on whether the shootings really were sectarian violence or merely a criminal act. The ruling National Democratic Party has adopted the latter position: President Hosni Mubarak said allegations of sectarianism would "sow discord" in Egyptian society. Other high-level NDP members have issued similar statements.

Nearly 2,000 Egyptian Copts rallied inside the Church of Abbasiyya in Cairo this afternoon, chanting anti-government slogans and complaining about unequal treatment.

Church officials locked the demonstrators inside the building, to prevent them from getting into the street; 500 men from the state security services also formed a cordon around the church. 

"Mubarak, why are you silent? Are you with them?" the protesters chanted.

The demonstrators were angry about the government's response to a drive-by shooting outside a Nag Hammadi church last week. Seven people were killed in the gunfire, including one church official. Copts say the government knew about anti-Christian threats for weeks before the shooting, and failed to protect the church.

Back in December, after the Swiss voted to ban the construction of minarets, Gregg expressed wry surprise when Ha'aretz wrote a story calling European rabbis' opposition to the ban "unexpected." As Gregg noted then, not all Jews and Muslims hate each other, surprising as it may seem.

A new poll on the ban conducted by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding seems to back up that sentiment, according to Yedioth Ahronoth. Less than one-third of Israeli Jews surveyed would support such a ban, according to the poll, while the large plurality -- 43 percent -- said they would oppose it.

Coptic-Muslim violence continues to flare around Nag Hammadi, the site of Wednesday's Christmas Eve drive-by shooting. Reuters reports that Muslims and Copts have set fire to each others' stores and homes in the villages surrounding Nag Hammadi. The fires injured six people, and police have questioned more than 40 in connection with the arsons.

The Jordanian newspaper ad-Dustour reports (عربي) that thousands of Egyptian soldiers have been deployed in Qena province to try to keep the peace.

Al-Jazeera's Mohamed Vall, who recently arrived in Sana'a, has a notable report today on a Friday prayer sermon delivered by Yemeni cleric Abdul Majeed Zandani. Zandani warns worshipers that the upcoming Yemen conference in London is a precursor to a United Nations resolution approving a U.S. occupation of the country.

Video clip -- plus a note about Zandani, and a few words from me -- after the jump.

Egyptian police have arrested three men suspected of carrying out a drive-by shooting on Tuesday night outside a church in Nag Hammadi.

The men reportedly surrendered after nearly two days on the run. All of them have prior criminal records, according to the Egyptian interior ministry. One of them was identified as Mohammed Ahmed Hussein, a 43-year-old man; the others have not been named.

Pope Shenouda III, the head of the Coptic church in Egypt, has not yet responded (عربي) to the shooting, according to a report in Al-Masry Al-Youm. Shenouda met today with Mohamed Tantawi, the sheikh of Al-Azhar University, and Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Nazif.

The Arabist rounded up a few good links to English-language coverage of the shooting, and background on the position of Copts within Egyptian society.

Thousands of Coptic Christians clashed with police overnight in Upper Egypt, following a drive-by shooting outside a church in Nag Hammadi that killed seven people.

The riot erupted outside of a morgue, where the bodies were being kept. Protesters demanded that the government take action to find the killers; police responded by spraying tear gas and water cannons at them, according to Al-Jazeera.

Seven people were killed tonight in a drive-by shooting outside a church in Nag Hammadi, an Egyptian town about 450km south of Cairo.

Three men opened fire on a crowd of worshipers leaving the Virgin Mary church after a mass marking the eve of Coptic Christmas. The men opened fire with machine guns, according to Egypt's interior ministry, and then sped away; police say witnesses identified one of the gunmen.

Officials told Al-Jazeera the attack was retaliation for the November rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man.

Copts make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population, and tensions with the Muslim community are all too common. In February, for example, two Coptic men were arrested for handing out Bibles at a book fair in Cairo; anti-Coptic riots in 2005 killed three people in Alexandria.

Egyptian newspapers haven't updated their Web sites with news of this shooting yet (owing more to their slow update cycles, and the late hour, than their interest in the story); we'll update you tomorrow with any details from local media.

Late last month, Gregg interviewed three Iranian opposition activists who told him of an emerging crack in the nascent Green Movement between the group's mainstream and those who had become more radicalized by the Iranian government's brutal crackdown. The movement had entered a crucial stage and needed a defined leadership and philosophy, they told him.

Robin Wright, a Washington Post reporter-turned-think tanker, believes the movement has remedied that problem, she writes in an op-ed today.

The release of an opposition "manifesto" - actually three statements from separate groups - signals the coalescence of the movement's philosophy, Wright says.

The Cairo Administrative Court ruled today in favor of the government's decision to ban Egyptian women from wearing the niqab during university exams.

Back in October, you'll remember, Al-Azhar University banned the niqab in all-female classrooms, dormitories and exam rooms. The rule fell short of the complete ban sought by Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, the dean of the school, but it still prompted outrage from many Egyptian women, who called it an infringement of their rights.

Update (1/3/09 7:55 p.m.): The New York Times has rounded out the list of the 14 countries that have earned special scrutiny under the new travel rules that will be instituted at midnight tonight. All but two are in the Middle East, and all but one have a majority Muslim population.

Original post: The Obama administration is instituting new rules for the Transportation Security Administration that will require pat-downs and bag searches for every passenger flying into the United States from 14 "terrorism-prone" countries, Politico reports. The 14 countries of origin that have been singled out for extra scrutiny are: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria - the State Department's four "state sponsors of terrorism" - as well as Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria.

The British Daily Telegraph claims to have an account from an Iranian defector that details both amusing and disturbing personal anecdotes about Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man at the top of the often paranoid clerical regime.

Among the alleged revelations: Khamenei lives an "imperial" lifestyle among six palaces, including one former residence of the Shah and two with "reinforced concrete nuclear bunkers said to be capable of withstanding nuclear attack." He also suffers "regular bouts" of depression that he remedies, in part, by calling in a "mid-ranking mullah" for regular sessions of vulgar joke-telling.

We've been focused on the Ashura protests in Iran -- and the regime's violent crackdown -- but the Shi'ite holiday has been marked by bloody incidents in several other countries, as well.

A bomb killed at least 20 people, and injured scores more, during the Ashura procession in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Police aren't sure if it was a suicide bomber or a timed bomb hidden along the route.