Fight Erupts in Saudi Mosque After Preacher Curses el-Sisi

A fight broke out in a Riyadh mosque between Saudis and Egyptians after a Saudi clergyman cursed Egyptian Defence Minister General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during today's Friday prayers sermon. The fight, uploaded on to YouTube, has gone viral and the tug-of-words continues online.

The 46-second video, uploaded on several accounts on YouTube, has been the talk of the Saudi blogosphere today. One version, uploaded today by umum0707, has been watched more than 750,000 times at the time of writing this post. It shows a man in Saudi garb taking off his headgear, the agal, and hitting another man, an Egyptian, inside Al Ferdous Mosque, after the latter objected to el-Sisi being cursed. A commotion follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_l5tvTNe8

el-Sisi, who is also the First Deputy Prime Minister of Egypt now, played a leading role in the ousting of former President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member.

Mohamed Al Omar posts a link to the video on Twitter and quips [ar]:

@MdAlomar: هذا العراك هو الدليل الأول على الفوضى التي قد تحدث في حال نزل الخلاف من تويتر للشارع http://youtu.be/un_l5tvTNe8 #عراك_جامع_الفردوس

This fight is proof of the chaos that will happen if squabbles on Twitter are taken to the street

Ibrahim Al Rasheed said the preacher had no business butting into Egyptian affairs:

The people of Egypt are more knowledgeable of their affairs and it is of bad taste for this preacher to employ himself as a guardian over Egyptians

Others provide suggestions of how to deal with such clergymen in the future.

Yazeed Al-Mogren writes:

Next time, those praying should break the preacher's jaw so that he learns his lesson and stops including his political opinion in sermons

And he adds:

They say the clergyman has been arrested. What about the cattle who disrupted the sanctity of the mosque and hit the Egyptians there? When will they be arrested and put on trial?

Activist Waleed Sulais sees no reason for aggressive behaviour.

No to violence. Political differences should be peaceful, and resorting to violence and excusing it, by any side, is unacceptable

He adds:

Cursing others is unacceptable and beating up whoever objects to that is vile. People have dignity.

Aziz notes:

And Mazeed Bandar connects the dots. The clergyman is said to have cursed both el-Sisi and Syrian president Bashar Al Assad. He tweets:

This clergyman doesn't realise that Bashar kills using Russian arms while Al Sisi kills using American weapons

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