Daesh threatens Egypt Sufis after claiming cleric murders
Many Egyptians and other Muslims consider Sufism as part of the mainstream, which Daesh sees as heretical
Cairo: The Daesh terror group has threatened Egyptian followers of the mystical Sufi strand of Islam after claiming it beheaded two of their clerics in its Sinai Peninsula stronghold.
The group’s affiliate in Egypt released pictures last month of a scimitar-wielding executioner beheading two elderly men it accused of “divination,” a practice traditional Islam forbids.
Relatives identified one of the two men as Sulaiman Abu Heraz, a Sufi shaikh in his late 90s. The second man was identified as one of his disciples.
Their bodies have not been found.
In the latest edition of the Daesh weekly newsletter Al Nabaa issued on Thursday, a militant identified as the head of the militants’ “morality police” in the Sinai warned Sufis to renounce their beliefs.
He said Abu Heraz and fellow cleric Qatifan Breik Eid Mansour were executed for “professing knowledge of the occult”.
“We tell all Sufi lodges, shaikhs and followers inside Sinai and outside that we will not allow the presence of Sufi orders in the Sinai or Egypt,” he was quoted as saying.
Reports of Abu Heraz’s murder drew condemnation from Muslim clerics in Egypt and abroad.
Egypt’s top Sunni authority, Al Azhar, denounced his killing as “an ugly crime.”
Daesh follows the puritanical Salafist school of thought which views some Sufi practices as heretical.
Salafists accuse the Sufis of polytheism — the greatest sin in Islam — for seeking the intercession of saints and visiting their graves.
Terrorists have blown up Sufi mausoleums across the Islamic world from Afghanistan to Mali.
Many Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere regard the Sufis as part of the mainstream.
The head of Al Azhar, Ahmed Al Tayeb, practises Sufism, as have many leading Sunni Muslim clerics over the centuries.
Meanwhile, at least six policemen were killed and six others injured on Friday when a bomb placed in a garbage bin at a checkpoint near Egypt’s Great Pyramids went off.
Egypt’s state-run news agency Mena said the blast occurred near a mosque on Pyramids road which leads from city centre to the Giza pyramids.
