This post is basically a continuation of this story, about Salafists in Tunisia raided an exhibit and destroyed artwork.
As the city of Tunis recovers amid tensions from the wave of Salafi violence of the past days, a video is doing the rounds of the web in which Cheich Houcine Laabidi, the Imam of the Zitouna mosque, the most important mosque in the Maghreb, states that artist who create blasphemous works are “infidel” and therefore should “be killed and their blood be spilled”.
The wave of Salafi violence was triggered by an exhibition in an art gallery in Marsa (a municipality in the North of the capital), of works considered to be insulting of Islam and an attack on correct behaviour. The request to kill the artists involved was reiterated three times by Mr Laabidi during a sermon he delivered yesterday.
The mosque of Zitouna has only recently been authorised to recommence its teaching activities, after its school was marginalised first by Bourghiba and then by Ben Ali.(ANSAmed).
Did you catch that last part? The dictator Tunisians ran out of the country kept this mosque shut down. Once again, the broken record gets played. Leftists align with Islamists to overthrow dictators who are replaced by Islamists who discard the leftists.
As for the part about this Imam belonging to the most important mosque in all of the Maghreb, what’s the Maghreb, you ask? Here is a map of it, via Middle East Studies Online Journal. Note that Maghreb includes Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. By advancing the ‘Arab Spring’ CNN and its liberal media colleagues are helping to facilitate the extinguishing of religious freedoms, as well as freedom of expression all over the Middle East.
