Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Narciso Contreras for The New York Times Supporters of Egypts ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, at Cairo University on Sunday. They pray day and night as Koranic verses echo on a loudspeaker system.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
CAIRO Among the muddy, crowded tents where tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members have been living for weeks in a vast sit-in protest, men in Islamic dress can still be seen carrying incongruous signs above the teeming crowd: Liberals for Morsi, Christians for Morsi, Actors for Morsi. It is the vestige of a plea for diverse allies in the Brotherhoods quest to reinstate President Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the military on July 3. But in the wake of the bloody street clashes that took place just outside the sit-in early on Saturday, leaving at least 72 Brotherhood supporters dead and hundreds wounded, another, more embattled language can be heard among the masses gathered around a large outdoor stage. Many Brotherhood members are enraged by the reaction of Christian leaders and the secular elite, who the Islamists say seemed to ignore or even endorse the killings while giving full-throated support to calls by Egypts defense minister, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, for a continued crackdown.