Expressing solidarity: Jamaat-e-Islami rally slams Morsi’s ouster

Party chief Munawar Hasan accuses the West of hypocrisy over the matter.

KARACHI: Activists of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) staged a rally on Sunday against the military coup in Egypt that resulted in the ouster of Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first ever elected president.

Carrying posters of Morsi, the participants burnt effigies of General Abdel Fattah el Sisi, the supreme commander of the Egyptian armed forces, and Adly Mansour, the acting president.



Addressing the rally, JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan declared that overthrow of a democratically elected leader by the military was unacceptable and demanded Morsi’s release from house arrest.

“The best option for the civilised world is to adhere to their much trumpeted core principles,” he said. “This was a military coup and must be recognised as such no matter what the reason was or else Muslims across the world should not be blamed for seeking alternatives, even violent ones, for democracy.”



Hasan said that it was hypocrisy on the part of Western world that it let it happen. “This hypocrisy will not be lost on Egyptians in particular and Muslims around the world in general,” he continued. “Muslims cannot ignore the fact that the Western world tends to establish cordial ties with dictatorships and lends tacit support to those who topple democracies.”

The JI enjoys an extraordinary rapport with the Muslim Brotherhood ever since the former’s formation in 1941.

“I believe Muslim Brotherhood leader, Essam el-Haddad, summed it up correctly before his arrest when he said that democracy was not for Muslims,” remarked a 25-year-old participant Abdul Muqeet, a geologist. “Muslims across the world share Haddad’s feelings and we are very pessimistic about the future of democracy.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2013.