Arabic media is reporting that Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figure Zaghloul el-Naggar has appeared on Egyptian TV where he recommended the consumption of camel urine as a remedy for incurable diseases. According to the report:
CAIRO, Oct 10, (RTRS): When Islamic scholar Zaghloul el-Naggar recommended the consumption of camel urine, describing it as an Islamic remedy for incurable diseases on a television show last month, the channel’s switchboard was bombarded with angry phone calls within minutes. ‘Medicine is based on evidence … Surely I don’t need to be teaching you this?’ well-known doctor Khaled Montassir told Naggar on the show, barely concealing his frustration. ‘I am not happy with what’s happening to Muslims because of your ideas.’ Egypt’s media, once tightly controlled by the state, has become a free-for-all platform for ideas, theories and advice, which can range from the ignorant to the bizarre and to what some see as outright dangerous. Much of the talk is the largely innocuous and inevitable product of democratic reforms promoted by the revolutionary movement of the Arab Spring, opening up space to new voices.
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Dr. El-Naggar is most famous in the Islamic world as a proponent of “Bucailleism”, a kind of Islamic creationism that sees in the Koran signs of future scientific breakthroughs. According to a 2002 WSJ article, Dr. El-Naggar is also the mentor of Sheikh Abdul Majeed Zindani who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States in connection with his support of Al Qaeda in Yemen and is also said to be the “spiritual mentor” to Osama Bin Laden. Dr. El-Naggar was extensively profiled in a 2008 post which details both his long background in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as well as his history of anti-Semitism. A post from November 2009 reported on further anti-Semitic comments made by Dr. El-Naggar. An earlier post discussed Dr. El-Naggar’s talk at a Dubai cultural forum attended by a member of the Dubai ruling family.
A post from last month reported that al-Zindani had claimed to have obtained some kind of patent for his alleged cure for AIDS that was first announced in 2007.