Leaders of Muslim communities around the Arab world today repeated their condemnation of the terror attacks on US trade and military landmarks as brutal and un-Islamic.
Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed al-Tantawi of Al-Azhar, the highest institution in Sunni Islam, warned that those who attack innocent people will be punished by Allah, in his weekly sermon to thousands of worshippers in Cairo.
"Attacking innocent people is not courageous, it is stupid and will be punished on the day of judgement," the moderate Sheikh Tantawi said at Al-Azhar mosque.
"It's not courageous to attack innocent children, women and civilians. It is courageous to protect freedom, it is courageous to defend oneself and not to attack," he said.
In Lebanon the spiritual guide of pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim extremists, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, said the "barbaric" attacks were un-Islamic.
Sheikh Fadlallah said the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington were "acts of suicide which are not rewarded [by Islam] because they are crimes.
"These are not operations of martyrdom which are carried out with the aim of jihad [Muslim holy war] with legitimate means and in circumstances which justify those means," he told the press.
Sheikh Fadlallah, who earlier said he was "horrified" by the attacks, said they would not serve the interests of Muslims and Arabs, particularly the Palestinians.
"Beside the fact that they are forbidden by Islam, these acts do not serve those who carried them out but their victims, who will reap the sympathy of the whole world," he said.
"Islamists who live according to the human values of Islam could not commit such crimes," the sheikh, who is considered close to the liberal movement of moderate Iranian President Mohammed Khatami.
"It's a horrible massacre on every level with no positive results for the basic causes of Islam, such as the Palestinian cause which now risks suffering a serious setback". He said that as Muslims and Islamists "we are opposed to the American government" because of its "absolute support for the Zionist enemy [Israel]."
"But we want to be friends with the American people and we can by no means blame the American people and carry out such barbaric acts," he said.
AFP