22 June 2013

CAIRO: Millions of supporters of Egypt’s president gathered yesterday for a huge rally that filled part of a main boulevard near Cairo’s presidential palace in a show of force against opponents demanding his ouster, signs of increasing tension and polarization.

With pictures of President Muhammad Mursi, Qur’anic chants over loudspeakers and shouts of “Islamic, Islamic in the eye of the secularists,” the rally indicated that Mursi’s backers and his Muslim Brotherhood appeared to be an attempt to give a religious flavor to the nation’s deep political differences.

Yesterday’s pro-Mursi rally was meant to counter plans by his opponents to stage mass demonstrations on June 30, the anniversary of his coming to power in 2012, demanding that he step down. He was elected after a popular uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The demonstration yesterday was called “1 million people rally against violence.” Even so, the anti-violence rally was accompanied by religious edicts from pro-Brotherhood clerics who gave the green light to fighting Mursi’s opponents, describing their planned June 30 protests as “religious war.”

On Thursday a Gamaa Islamiya leader, Assem Abdel-Maged, told a gathering in southern city of Minya, a stronghold of his group, “Those conspiring against Mursi and want his ouster are the Coptic (Christian) extremists, the Communists and the remnants” of the Mubarak regime. He added, “our deaths are in heaven, and their deaths are in hell.”

A member of pro-Mursi umbrella called Religious Legal Commission for Rights and Reform said that killing those who take up arms against Muslims on June 30 is permissible.

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