Is Yasser Borhamy the new Interior Minister? This question came to my mind when I read that the police had arrested Quranists. Have the police turned into a Mutawa (Saudi Arabia’s religious police)? Has the ministry changed its name and place a sign on its entrance gate reading: The Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Authority, Tora Bora Branch?
The terrible charge leveled at those Quranists, who do not posses Molotov cocktails or Kalashnikovs, nor think for a moment of forming a militant organization or a terrorist cell, is that they contacted Ahmed Sobhy Mansour, the al-Azhar scholar who lives in exile only because he thinks differently. He does not believe in the Hadith, which he thinks is inconsistent with the Quran.
Whether we agree or disagree with him, the man has the right to believe in whatever he likes as long as he does not impose his opinion by force, with arms and car bombs like the extremists do.
We can address his thoughts with logic and argument, not with raiding homes at dawn and arresting people who adopt his thoughts, treating them as if they were drug dealers.
This is but intellectual squint and political astigmatism, practiced by a state institution that aims its arms at the wrong target – which is actually fighting the same battle the State is fighting.
The real battle is with terrorist organizations like ISIS, al-Qaida, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the Sinai Province and Boko Haram, who recruit young people and brainwash them with certain selected Hadiths that incite murder, hatred, holding women captive and other such types of Hadiths that we thought ISIS has fabricated. These Hadiths are their intellectual feed that justifies their savage terrorism.
All what the Quranists do is screen and filter the Hadith, a task the Al-Azhar ostensibly claims is working on, but in reality works in the opposite direction.
Look at the official Al-Azhar magazine, which is edited by an old Wahhabi, and you will find that it contains those hateful thoughts, which also many of Al-Azhar scholars believe in.
Who is more dangerous, Ahmed Sobhy Mansour, who merely posts writings on the Internet, or the mufti of the Brotherhood, who was a faculty dean at Al-Azhar University, and who, during the Rabaa sit-in, was spreading false news of the US fleet invading Egypt?
Who is the more dangerous, al-Qaradawi, the Al-Azhar scholar who incites hatred against Egypt and its army, or Reda, the young man who was arrested in his village on charges of being a Quranist and calling his father’s cousin, Ahmed Sobhy Mansour?
Who is the more dangerous, the Quranists who reject the Hadiths that talk about breastfeeding adults and stoning adulterous monkeys, or those who burn churches and destroy statues?
We have not forgotten how the Endowments Ministry once launched a campaign against the Baha’is, among them the famous artist Bikar whose only weapon was a feather he painted with, or how the police arrested youngsters for eating in public during the fasting hours of Ramadan.
Sometimes I think the State is delusional and does not see the real enemy.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
