“(The Muslim Brotherhood) allege that they do not seek power but in reality they use religion as a cover for their agenda and say that they want to serve Islam,” Dakhil said.ĭespite the ban, Saudi Arabia has unofficially tolerated informal meetings of the Muslim Brotherhood so long as they avoid any discussion of politics.īut concern about the movement’s influence has grown more pointed since the Saudi royal family backed Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s overthrow of Mursi in July. Khalid al-Dakhil, a Saudi political analyst, said he believes many of the outspoken imams in the kingdom who worry the authorities are influenced by the Brotherhood. That flies in the face of traditional Gulf theology, particularly the Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which preaches that good Muslims should obey their rulers in most circumstances. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia will continue to be “fairly uncompromising of perceived Muslim Brotherhood activities and anyone perceived to be supporting them”. “There is a more heightened sensitivity to the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and of political activity in general,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, a Middle East research group. Both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have pledged to support the new Egyptian government. The Egyptian army angered some influential clerics and ordinary citizens in the region in July and August when it overthrew the then president, Mohammad Mursi, a Brotherhood member who remains in prison, and clamped down on his supporters, killing hundreds of people. The developments in the two monarchies follow the dramatic rise and fall in Egypt of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which offers a populist religious alternative to dynastic rule and has supporters in the Gulf. In Kuwait, which has a relatively open political system compared to other Gulf Arab states, the authorities have resumed the monitoring of sermons, pulled a television preacher off the air and deported a foreign imam. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/FilesĪuthorities in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to a powerful conservative clergy, have declined to respond to local media reports in recent months which said nearly 20 clerics had been sacked or suspended. Muslim pilgrims pray after casting pebbles at a wall that symbolizes Satan during the annual haj pilgrimage, as part of a haj pilgrimage rite, on the second day of Eid al-Adha in Mina, near the holy city of Mecca in this Octofile photo.
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