Source: Carnegie Endowment
Author(s): Nathan J. Brown, Mariam Ghanem
Original Link: http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/68001
On July 3, 2013, General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, surrounded by a group of national figures, announced the deposition of Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt and a “road map” to a new political order in Egypt. Conspicuous among his backers was Grand Imam Ahmad al-Tayyib, the sheikh of Al-Azhar, the center of religious learning in Egypt.
Yet in the subsequent three and a half years the relationship between the president and the sheikh, while outwardly correct generally, has sometimes seemed testy, with the two directing oblique and sometimes direct criticism at each other. A series of tense public exchanges began two years ago with a presidential speech instructing Al-Azhar to take responsibility for a “renewal of religious discourse” and continued with a series of presidential statements suggesting that Al-Azhar was falling short of that role. ..
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