the Brotherhood and its affiliate, Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, terrorists. Anyone supporting them amounted to supporting terrorism. Even journalists who reported on events in Egypt were blamed for aiding and abetting terrorists, and incarcerated. Three Al-Jazeera journalists, including an Australian – Peter Greste – had to spend 400 days in jail before his release on the intervention of the Australian foreign office. The Qatar based Al-Jazeera network incurred Sisi’s special wrath for supporting the Morsi regime.
Sentencing Morsi and scores others to death on trumped-up charges, the Egyptian judiciary earned for itself the notoriety of Kangaroo courts subservient to the Egyptian military. The order of the death sentence has been referred to the country’s top clergy, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, for opinion. (Recall Sheikhul Islam Prof Dr Tahirul Qadri during his famous dharnas in Islmabad dressed like the Chief Mufti of Egypt).
Morsi is no bigoted and conservative religious leader – as the west portrays him. A metallurgical engineer by profession, he graduated from Cairo University and went on to earn his PhD in material sciences from the University of Southern California. It’s another matter that the western-educated and enlightened Morsi considered 9/11 an inside job and felt that the Arabs had no role in it. With this mindset, he could have never survived in Israel’s neighbourhood.
However, among Muslim leaders, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the only one who unequivocally condemned Morsi’s death sentence. An official of US state department also criticised the decision – only as part of the diplomatic niceties reserved for such occasions.
We remember how John Kerry was deeply concerned when Gen Sisi overthrew Morsi but the US military aid of $1.3 billion to Egyptian army was restored rather quickly. It only meant: keep marching, general. General Sisi, young as he is, will likely outlast most Egypt watchers. The Egyptian people are in for a long, hot summer
The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.
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