Pour replacer ces infos très intéressantes dans un contexte historique plus large de la politisation de la question chiite à al-Azhar et en Egypte, depuis l’époque de Nasser jusqu’à nos jours, voici un intéressant article d’al-Ahram. Les critiques sur les qualités de l’article - qui dépasse mes connaissances limitées - sont plus que bienvenues :
Identity-politics , Egypt and the Shia / al-Ahram weekly 2013
▻http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/2376/21/Identity-politics,-Egypt-and-the-Shia.aspx
Sur la fatwa de Shaltoot en 1959 (grand imam d’al-Azhar) qui reconnaît la doctrine jaafarite (chiite duodécimaine), fatwa récusée en 2012 :
In 1959, the sheikh of Al-Azhar Mahmoud Shaltout, who had established that office, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, sanctioning worship in accordance with the rights of the Jaafari school of religious jurisprudence, to which the majority of Shia subscribe. His fatwa stated, “It is legally permissible to worship in accordance with the Jaafari doctrine, which is known to be the doctrine of the Twelver Shiites, as is the case with the Sunni doctrines. The Muslim people should know this and shed unwarranted bigotry against certain creeds. The religion of God and His Sharia have never been affiliated with or restricted to any one doctrinal order. All who strive to perfect their faith are acceptable to Almighty God, and those who are not qualified to engage in the disciplines of theological and jurisprudential inquiry may emulate and follow the rulings of those that are. There is no difference[between Muslims] in the [basic tenets of] worship and interaction.”
Une note dans wikipedia cite la biographie de Nasser par Said Aburish pour expliquer l’aspect politique de cette fatwa, Nasser espérait affaiblir l’alliance du général Qassem et des communistes en rendant la RAU et le nationalisme arabe plus atttractif pour les chiites irakiens :
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Azhar_Shia_Fatwa
Aburish, Saïd K. (2004). Nasser: the last Arab (illustrated ed.). Duckworth. pp. 200–201. ISBN 9780715633007. “But perhaps the most far reaching change [initiated by Nasser’s guidance] was the fatwa commanding the readmission to mainstream Islam of the Shia, Alawis, and Druze. They had been considered heretics and idolaters for hundreds of years, but Nasser put an end to this for once and for all. While endearing himself to the majority Shia of Iraq and undermining Kassem [the communist ruler of Iraq at the time] might have played a part in that decision, there is no doubting the liberalism of the man in this regard.”
Il me semble avoir lu (est-ce dans la biographie de Saddam Hussein par le même Aburish ?) que Saddam Hussein (alors réfugié en Egypte) avait joué un rôle pour l’édiction de cette fatwa. J’avais souvenir aussi que le grand mufti d’Arabie saoudite s’était opposé à cette fatwa. Si des seenthissiens éclairés ont des infos et des sources...
A l’époque de Sadate et dans le cadre de son opposition à la révolution iranienne puis de son engagement auprès de l’Irak contre l’Iran :
President Sadat, who had opposed the Iranian Revolution, hosted the deposed Shah in Egypt, initiating a decades-long rupture in relations between Cairo and Tehran. Yet, in that very year, he closed down the Society of the Ahl Al-Bayt (the House of the Prophet Mohamed), the main Shia institute in Egypt. Henceforward, the Egyptian-Iranian conflict would acquire a salient sectarian dimension. This development was aggravated by the Shia insularism that had begun to permeate Iran’s theocratic regime under the system of vilayet-e faqih (rule by clergy) and that rendered the Shia affiliation virtually synonymous with Iranian identity. When Egypt became involved on the Iraqi side of the Iraq-Iran war, Egyptian security services became acutely sensitive to this identity and began to clamp down on all forms of Shia associations in Egypt, regardless of the fact that this community exists on the margins of society which, in turn, was geographically and emotionally remote from that conflict. At the same time, the state had begun to allow the Salafist tide to penetrate society, giving rise to the spread of ultraconservative doctrinal rigidity and the onset of mounting sectarian tensions between Muslims and Copts.
Après la victoire du Hezbollah en 2006 et l’enthousiasme qu’elle génère y compris dans les masses sunnites arabes, qui mettent en difficulté les alliances de Moubarak, les salafistes égyptiens relancent le discours sectaire sur le « danger » de la pénétration chiite en Egypte, tout cela en lien avec les pétromonarchies du Golfe :
Although initially the Shia question had not featured strongly in Salafist rhetoric, it was not remote. When Egyptians rejoiced at the Hizbullah victory over the Israeli army in 2006, Salafi sheikhs moved to avert the perceived threat to Sunni Egypt from the admiration of the victory, and produced a battery of recordings and lectures warning of the looming Shia tide. This drive coincided with an official rhetoric on the part of the Egyptian government, which at the time was engaged in a war of strategic balances against Iran and its allies, in alliance with the governments of the Gulf that are the chief sponsors of the Salafist movements in the Arab world.
Après la chute de Moubarak et dans le cadre de la rivalité FM/salafistes les FM et le pouvoir de Morsi ne sont pas en reste selon l’auteur - je me demande si ce passage ne manque pas un peu de nuance car l’attitude de Morsi face à l’Iran fut très ambivalente et versatile :
The decision to restore relations with Iran was taken by the regime that the Muslim Brotherhood now controls. In view of its totalitarian nature and the fact that it is an expression of the religious characteristics of Egyptian society, the Muslim Brotherhood did not originally define itself on the basis of Muslim doctrinal divides. Nevertheless, since the 1970s when it found itself in competition with the Salafis over the apportionment of the Egyptian societal pie, it also began to veer toward Salafism. The sensitivity of the doctrinal conflict with the Shia was one of the reasons it had severed connections with the Iranian regime with which it had initially established ties immediately following the victory of the Iranian Revolution. The speech that Morsi delivered in Tehran last August and that alluded heavily to the Sunni-Shia divide was clearly intended to outbid the Salafis at home by playing on the mounting sectarian sensitivities in Egyptian society.
