Egypt Clamps Down on the Breeding Ground of Unrest and Extremism

.. Mosques and those preaching in them:

In his weekly sermon, Muslim cleric Ali Abdel-Moati preached to his congregation in a southern Egyptian city about the evils of making hasty judgments. That prompted a complaint to authorities from a judge, who accused him of criticizing a recent mass death sentence issued against supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Days later, Abdel-Moati was suspended from the mosque in Assiut, replaced by a new preacher, and put under investigation by the Religious Endowments Ministry. 

Egyptian authorities are tightening control on mosques around the country, purging preachers and seeking to control the message, as the military-backed government cracks down on Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood following his ouster last summer.

Some 12,000 freelance preachers have been barred from delivering sermons. The Religious Endowments Ministry, or Awqaf in Arabic, now sets strict guidelines for sermons, and anyone who strays from them in Egypt's more than 100,000 mosques risks removal. 

The aim, officials say, is to prevent mosques from spreading extremism and becoming a platform for political groups, after widespread criticism that the Brotherhood and its more ultraconservative allies used them to build support, recruit new followers and sway voters. During elections the past three years, Islamist clerics would often tout a vote in the Brotherhood's favor as a vote for Islam or supported by God.

General Al Sisi presidential campaign official banner

But the result is silencing any sort of critical voice and making the minbar — the name for the pulpit in a mosque — apolitical, bringing no potential challenge to authorities and delivering a single shade of Islam to the public. 

"The aim is to prevent mosques from serving agendas of political parties or being used as propaganda machine for any ideology either those with the government or not," Sheik Ahmed Turk, director of the Grand Mosques in Egypt, the Awqaf department that oversees the largest mosques, told The Associated Press. "Now we push our own preachers and clerics to give apolitical message to normal people."

Read the rest of the story HERE.

BRAVO! This has General Al-Sisi writen all over it. Strike the extremist SOB's down at the source before they can brainwash/breed any more of them. BRILLIANT!

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