Cairo's University of al-Azhar - the highest seat of Sunni learning - will send a group of researchers to Tehran to look at setting up a Sunni theological faculty there, al-Azhar's imam Mohammed Sayyed al-Tantawi said, after a meeting with the cultural attache of Iran's commercial office in Cairo, Mohammad Zamani. The initiative would be a significant step forward in the normalisation of relations between the two countries, at a moment in which the governments of Cairo and Tehran are tentatively seeking to resume relations broken off nearly 30 years ago."The decision to set up a theological faculty in Tehran addresses the need to bring Sunnis and Shiites closer together and contrast the forces that are compromising the unity of the Islamic world and of the ummah [community of the Muslim faithful]" Tantawi said. The majority of Iran's population is Muslim, with an overwhelming 89 percent Shiites and 9 percent Sunnis. "Between Sunnis and Shiites there is a unity of vision because they both pray to the same and only God, believe in the five pillars of the faith and both look towards Mecca" said Tantawi.
For his part Zamani highlighted the prestige of the al-Azhar university in the Islamic world and said he hoped for an exchange of teaching staff, texts and students from the two countries.
The current drive to renew relations, which were severed in 1979 after the Islamic revolution in Iran, apparently results from the recent thaw between the US and the Islamic Republic.
| George Bush the uniter. Sheesh. |