Dispatches from Cairo #4: Islamist Protests and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman

This is the fourth installment of my Dispatches From Cairo series in The Daily Organ. 

The protests that continue to flare up around the capital are not solely the handiwork of left-leaning secularists. Protesting has become the weapon of choice for any group with something to say, and after 30 years of not being able to say anything, people have a lot of bottled up anger to express.

In recent months there have been a spate of protests by Islamists groups calling for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a fervently anti-Semitic and anti-Western Egyptian Muslim spiritual leader currently serving a life sentence in the U.S.. 

Sheikh Rahman was convicted of seditious conspiracy  - where a crime need only be planned, not necessarily attempted - for his involvement in a plan to bomb New York City landmarks in 1993. The protests are organised by his son, Sheikh Mohammed Omar Abdel Rahman, a career jihadist who believes that 9/11 paved the way for the Arab Spring.

The other day I found myself caught up in one such protest on my way home from work, when walking past the US embassy. The demonstration, flanked by photographers, and even accompanied by a man playing a piano on the back of a trailer, was entirely peaceful, and consisted of only a few hundred people, mostly Salafis. It is evidence that Salafis, who have many times criticised the Muslim Brotherhood for their political agenda, are becoming more politically engaged

Sheikh Rahman is accused of being the leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, an extremist Islamist terrorist group-turned political organisation, responsible for a massacre in Luxor in 1997 which killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians. The group has since renounced violence, and agreed to a Nonviolence Initiative with the Egyptian government, also in 1997, which led to the release of 2,000 of its imprisoned members. 

Followers of Salafism do not consider themselves to be members of an organisation, but adherents of a school of thought. In contrast to al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, they have always been non-violent, excepting a minority sub-section known as Jihadi Salafis. In Mubarak’s Egypt they were for the most part apolitical, an irony considering that one of the key facets of their belief system is the indivisibility of politics and religion. They believe in a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and seek to practice the purest form of Islam through emulation of the life of the Prophet Mohammed, and the two earliest generations of Muslims following.

Despite their differing stance on violence, both Salafis and al-Gamaa al-Islamiya take an ultra-religious and ultra-conservative stance on the future of the country and envision a constitution grounded in Shari’a law. Protesters claims that Sheikh Rahman was one of the first to oppose the old regime, and is a victim of Mubarak’s policy of co-operation with American security agencies. They claim he is being ill-treated by the American judicial system and want to have him either freed, or at least repatriated and imprisoned in Egypt. 

They seek to persuade the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to put pressure on the American government to adhere to their demands. However, despite the fact that the time is ripe for rallying support for any anti-American movement, the likelihood that they will persuade the interim government to issue a request is extremely low and the likelihood of the American government acceding to it, lower still.