Egypt’s al-Azhar Grand Sheikh, Ahmed el-Tayeb, a top authority for many of the world’s Sunni Muslims, said that the Arab Spring is a plot to “destroy and divide countries.”
“Some Arab spring revolutions brought benefits but others were planned to destroy and divide countries,” Tayeb said in an interview on Sunday on Al-Hayat TV and reported by Ahram Online.
“The West presented the clash of civilizations theory in order to provoke a clash with Islamic civilization,” he said, referring to the theory by former political scientist Samuel Huntington, who published an article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in 1993 in Foreign Affairs, and later a book expanding on his idea.
The West invented “corrupted” theories so it could steal the wealth of the East, Tayeb said, going on to point out that the West is in a state of extreme moral, spiritual, and religious poverty.
“There are non-Western nations with old civilizations that are capable of leading the world in a more reasonable way than the West,” he asserted according to the report.
But, he explained, “The history of Islamic civilization is full of examples of respect for and recognition of the other.”
The Grand Sheikh was invited to speak at the opening ceremonies of the World Cup in Brazil this year, Egyptian media reported last month.
In a sermon posted online on April 17, fellow Egyptian cleric Mustafa Al-Aqsari said that historian Bernard Lewis is behind a US plan to divide the Islamic world.
“[The Jews are] our eternal enemies. Dear brothers, never talk about eternal peace with the Jews. ‘Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews.’ From the day the Prophet Muhammad was sent and until Judgment Day, our war with the Jews rages,” said Aqsari according to a report by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute).
The cleric went on to refer to Lewis: “This man, my brothers, is a British national. He is Jewish by religion, the son of two Jewish parents. He is ideologically Zionist, and he is an American citizen. He combines all that is evil. He was born in 1916. This man was an advisor to U.S. Presidents Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.”
“He is responsible for the most dangerous enterprise in history – the plan to divide the Islamic world into mini-states. All you need to do is to type on the Internet: ‘Bernard Lewis, the plot to divide the Islamic world,’” he said as reported by MEMRI.
“This is not, my brothers in faith, what some people call ‘a conspiracy theory.’ This is what we believe according to our religion.”
He went on to add that this plot was known to US authorities and “published in the journal of the US Department of Defense” and “unanimously ratified” by congress in 1993.
