Shi'a and Sunni in Egypt

Interesting piece in Egypt's Al-Ahram English-language weekly online edition about Sunni-Shi'a relations in majority-Sunni Egypt:  Labyrinths of the sect by Rasha Saad , 10/19 - 25/06 edition

Saad argues that the Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Egypt has been generally muted in recent decades, thought recent events have created a different atmosphere:

But Egyptian freedom from sectarianism has more recently been challenged, partly as a result of regional politics: the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq, Hizbullah's controversial victory over Israel, Iran's defiant pursuit of nuclear power. Whether in the media or among members of the Muslim community, the Shia are increasingly the object of attention and, in some mosques, of outright attack.

Egyptian family law is governed by Sunni versions of Islāmic law (sharia) - the Maliki school in southern Egypt and the Shafii school in the north.  Saad reports that some Egyptian Sunnis convert to Shi'a Islam because Shi'a sharia is more equitable and thus serves as a protest against Egypt's Sunni sharia.  He writes that "unlike its Sunni counterpart, for example, Shia inheritance law grants a brotherless woman as much as half the inheritance of her father". 

He discusses some of the popular prejudices among Sunnis against the Shi'a in Egypt:

Among Sunnis the Shia are beset with misconceptions, one of which is that they have a different Qur'an; this resulted from the fact that the Shia discovered and kept for a while copies a mosshaf (book) belonging to each of Ali and Fatmah - a personal Qur'an; the confusion resulted from the fact that, in Egyptian Arabic, the word mosshaf is the most common term for the Qur'an.  Another misconception centres around the alleged claim that the Angel Gabriel mistakenly relayed God's message to Mohamed, whereas in fact he was meant to submit it to Ali instead; in reality no true Shia would ever make the claim that the angel stayed mistaken for 23 years or that he was unable to tell a 40-year-old man apart from a seven-year-old boy.  Another misconception still is that the Shia call to prayers, while including a testimony to Ali being the ally of God, actually omits the testimony to Mohamed being His messenger.  Analysts say that the psychological barrier was deliberately cultivated by the authorities - particularly in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which threatened to spread throughout the region.  In the Iran-Iraq war, too, Egypt sided with the Arab, Sunni Iraqis; and misconceptions were further developed and spread.  It was a period when conspiracy theories about Iran emerged in abundance. According to El-Ghomi, this was a grave mistake: "Political differences fade away, but when authorities play the sectarian card, then they are planting the roots of something deeper and almost impossible to eradicate." Recent history has in fact revealed the Shia-Sunni dispute to be political rather than confessional. Most of the literature in this category dates from after 1601, when Iran was unified by the Shia Safavids, in the face of their Sunni Ottoman rivals. The same thing is said to have happened after the Islamic Revolution, at which point the average Egyptian was so clueless they could hardly differentiate shi'i from shiyou'i (communist) - something the government reportedly exploited. The political atmosphere of the time is best summarised in a poem by the vernacular, oppositional poet Ahmed Fouad Negm: "They are Shia/ We are Sunni/ How to reconcile them with Egypt?/ Scared of another revolution/ They drive us/ Through a labyrinth/Saying it's a shiyou'i / Posing as a shi'i... If it's that confusing/ To hell with both sects... Now you are kings/ Though you're apostates/ And being despicable/ You made two Islams/ So that the Imam can be called an apostate."  (my emphasis in bold)

He also mentions an important ruling in the context of discussing a controversy in which a Shi'a leader demands that the Al-Azhar theological school should be turned over the Shi'a control:

Originally established by the Fatimids as a bastion of Shia jurisprudence, converted under Salaheddin Al-Ayoubi in 1171, Al-Azhar has been for centuries among the Sunni world's best established theological authorities.  But as the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, in the early 1960s, Shaltout went down in Islamic history for delivering a fatwa to the effect that Sunnis and Shias were equal in the eye of Islam; both, he insisted, are fully in keeping with both creed and law; soon afterwards Al-Azhar introduced Jaafari jurisprudence into its curriculum, to be taught on an equal footing with the four Sunni schools [of sharia]. Mahmoud Ashour, former secretary of Al-Azhar, puts it simply: so long as they believe in Allah and that Mohamed is His messenger, the Shias are Muslims.