Counter Islamists and Islam: The new religious opposition

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A girl walks past a Muslim Brotherhood slogan "Islam is the solution" near a polling station during the second day of parliamentary elections at the village of Kafr el-Moseilha, the hometown former president Hosni Mubarak, in the Nile delta province of Menoufia 80 km (50 miles) north of Cairo December 14, 2011. (AMR ABDALLAH DALSH - REUTERS)

Posted at 10:54 PM ET, 05/06/2012
By H.A. Hellyer

“They can do good and they can do bad – but they’re just Muslims. They are not Islam.”

And with that, the man summed up his talk about the different Islamist movements in Egypt. His talk had been intense – perhaps better described as virulent. Such sentiments distinguishing Islamism from Islam is hardly unique – liberal and non-religious forces within predominantly religious conservative societies in the Muslim world have been making that argument for a while now.

But this man was hardly a secularist. He was a graduate of the Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the pre-eminent Islamic educational institution of the world – and he was delivering his talk as the Friday sermon in one of the most prestigious mosques of Cairo. In short, he was a counter-Islamist religious authority.

It was fascinating to listen to the talk for many reasons. For one, the preacher was very clear in his essentially political diatribe – something that could not have been thought of a little over a year ago in Cairo. But more than that – the preacher was evidently representative of a large swathe of the religious establishment in Egypt. That establishment that regards religious interpretation as being the domain of academic specialists, or ‘the learned’ (‘ulama), rather than put into the hands of political activists who would corrupt God’s religion for petty political gain.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/counter-islamists-and-islam-the-new-religious-opposition/2012/05/06/gIQABMzl6T_blog.html