Those who favor jihad and Sharia are just a tiny minority of extremists, right?
“If he were a bad man, people from all over the country wouldn’t have came to attend his funeral.”
Exactly so.
“Thousands mourn ‘blind sheikh’ convicted in 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” by Amina Ismail and Arwa Gaballa, Reuters, February 22, 2017:
Thousands of mourners gathered in a small Egyptian town on Wednesday for the funeral of the Muslim cleric known as “the blind sheikh” who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.
Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was also convicted of planning a broader “war of urban terrorism” in the United States, died on Saturday in a North Carolina prison aged 78.
Movements across the Islamist spectrum from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda issued statements mourning him, and several leaders from Egypt’s Islamic Group, which views the sheikh as a spiritual leader and renounced violence in 1997, attended.
Carrying signs that read “we will meet in heaven” and chanting “we will defend you with blood and soul, Islam,” hundreds of mourners gathered at Al-Gamaliya, his hometown in Egypt’s Nile Delta province of Dakahlia, to wait for Abdel-Rahman’s body as it made its way back from the U.S. via Cairo.
The Egyptian-born Abdel-Rahman, who lost his eyesight due to childhood diabetes and grew up studying a Braille version of the Koran, remained a spiritual leader for radical Muslims even after more than 20 years in prison.
As an adult he became associated with the fundamentalist Islamic Group and was imprisoned and accused of issuing a fatwa leading to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, against whom he had railed for years.
Abdel-Rahman was still an important figure in radical Islam even after years in prison. A year before his al Qaeda followers pulled off the most destructive assault on U.S. soil, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden had pledged a jihad to free Abdel-Rahman from prison.
When Mohammed Mursi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his short-lived presidency of Egypt in 2012, he said winning the sheikh’s freedom would be a priority. The jihadists who attacked an Algerian oilfield and took hostages in 2013 also demanded his release.
Yet supporters paint him as a revered scholar who faced injustice and torture at the hands of the Egyptian and U.S. governments for sticking by his principles.
Mourners chanted “God is great” and cheered as his body, draped in a brown blanket inside a wooden coffin, was brought out to be washed at his brother’s house before the burial.
“If he were a bad man, people from all over the country wouldn’t have came to attend his funeral,” said Mostafa al-Wakeel, a 40-year-old lawyer who traveled around 175 kilometers (110 miles) from Cairo….