Al Jazeera is reporting that an Egyptian court is seeking the death for a group of Muslim Brotherhood leaders that includes not only the Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie but also the notorious anti-Semite and cleric Dr. Salah Sultan. According to the report:
March 17, 2015 An Egyptian court seeks the death penalty for the Muslim Brotherhood’s top leader Mohamed Badie and 13 other members of the group for inciting chaos and planning attacks on police and army institutions, according to judicial sources.
The court formally referred the case on Monday to the grand mufti, the country’s highest Islamic legal official, which is the first step towards imposing a death sentence. Egyptian law requires any capital sentence to be referred to the mufti for a religious opinion before any execution can take place, although the mufti’s ruling is not binding.
Once the court issues a final verdict, set for April 11, the defendants can appeal it.
The 14 include the Brotherhood’s Salah Soltan, a preacher, and Saad al-Hosseiny, former governor of Kafr el-Sheikh province.
Egypt has jailed thousands linked to the Muslim Brotherhood since the army removed Mohamed Morsi from power in July 2013, a year after the Muslim Brotherhood-backed politician was elected president, following mass protests against his rule.
As the supreme guide of the now-outlawed Brotherhood, Badie has already been sentenced to multiple life terms.
Read the rest here.
The GMBDW reported in August 2013 that Egyptian authorities had issued arrest warrants for a group of Muslim Brotherhood leaders that included Dr. Salah Sultan. We have also been reporting on Dr. Sultan’s son who has been detained an Egypt where he has reportedly been on a longer hunger strike. It is not clear whether Dr. Sultan himself has ever been detained in Egypt.
Dr. Salah Sultan (aka Salah Soltan) was educated at Dar al-Ulum in Egypt where Hasan El-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and key Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb also graduated. From 1998 until 2007, Dr. Sultan was resident in the US where he held several positions in US Muslim Brotherhood organizations including serving as a member of the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) and as founder and President of the Islamic American University (IAU) closely associated with the Muslim American Society (MAS). Dr. Sultan left the US following negative press reports about his extremist statements which led the authorities there to suspend his application for American citizenship. He relocated to Bahrain where he was appointed as adviser to the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. At some point, likely following the ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood, he relocated again, this time to Egypt where in October 2012, he was appointed Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (SCIF). When Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi visited Gaza in May 2013, Dr. Sultan was at his side when Qaradawi was greeted by the Hamas Prime Minister and called immediately for “Jihad to death” against Israel. Dr. Sultan’s resume has expressed his vision for himself as “To live happily. To die as a martyr.” Dr. Soltan is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), headed by Qaradawi.
Dr. Soltan’s virulent anti-Semitism was extensively covered in a post from July as part of a series on the visit of an IUMS member and associate of Qaradawi’s to the US White House.
