Al Azhar Promotes Abuse of and Discrimination for Christians

Ahmed ‘Abdu Maher

During a televised Egyptian talk show thataired on January 18, lawyer Ahmed ‘Abdu Maher called for the “punishment of those who author books that promote strange and perverse ideas in Al Azhar.”

As with many others before him, the lawyer denounced the Islamic world’s oldest and most prestigious university for continuing to radicalize its students, who go on to see the world the same way ISIS does.

By way of example, he said: “There is a book in Al Azhar that calls for the forceful shaving of the heads of the Copts [Egypt’s indigenous Christians], placing a sign on their homes [so Muslims know where the “infidels” reside], and refusing to shake hands with them.”

As it happens, the Islamic State and similar Muslim groups all make it a point not to shake hands with “unclean” Christians—here’s another Egyptian cleric saying he finds Christians utterly “disgusting”—and to distinguish Christian homes with signs, as ISIS did when it placed the “N” (nun) letter on their homes in Mosul and elsewhere.

But even the forceful head shaving is being practiced: back in 2013, jihadi groups in Libya abducted around 100 Copts and abused them—including by shaving all their heads.

All this indicates that the worst of the worse behavior being committed by ISIS traces all the way back to Al Azhar and other mainstream schools of Muslim learning, as growing numbers of human rights activists in Egypt claim.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

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Egypt Anti-Christianism

Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.