Al-Nas (TV station)

Al-Nas
Launched 2006
Country Egypt
Headquarters Cairo

Al-Nas (Arabic: قناة الناس‎) (meaning "The People Channel") was an Egyptian television station founded in January 2006 and broadcast from Cairo until Deposition of Mohammed Morsi.

Founded by Saudi Arabian investor Mansour bin Kadsa (alt. Mansur Bin Kadasah), Al-Nas began as a channel mostly for Arabic pop songs and dream interpretation shows. After a few months, its focus was shifted to an audience seeking religious knowledge by hosting well-known Islamic preachers regularly.[1][2]

Controversies

Innocence of Muslims movie

Al-Nas drew worldwide attention in September 2012, when host Sheikh Khalad Abdalla played a clip of Innocence of Muslims a few days prior to the 2012 diplomatic missions attacks.[3][4][5]

Female presenters and music

With supporting arguments from proper Islamic guidelines, scholars Muhammad Hussein Yacoub and Abu Ishaq Al Heweny (alt. Shaykh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni), both of whom appear on the channel, have worked to ban successfully all female presenters from the channel.[1][2] The latter person has also advocated with the removal of music from being played on Al-Nas.

Shia lynchings in Giza

After more than 3,000 mobsters surrounded and torched the houses of a small Shia community in a suburb of Giza in Egypt on 23 June 2013, and brutally lynched and subsequently desecrated the corpses of four Shia Moslem men, including the prominent cleric Sheikh Hassan Shehata, Al-Nas ran interviews with sympathisers and inciters of the shocking hate crime during which they justified the extreme violence on the basis of purely subjective and unverified claims that carried no criminal charge under the Egyptian law. In its report, Amnesty International noted that the most recent incitement of violence against the Shia Moslem minority in Egypt prior to the incident took place at a Muslim Brotherhood rally "in support of the Syrian uprising" a week earlier attended by extremist Salafi sheikhs as well as the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Commenting on the incident, Amnesty said "local residents had reported Salafi and other Islamist groups inciting hatred and violence against the Shi’a community over the past few weeks, including during Friday sermons, where they distributed pamphlets calling for their expulsion from the area" and criticised Morsi for “fail[ing] to disassociate himself and his government from the hatred and incitement against Shi’as.” During the conference held on 16 June, the report observed, top Salafi Sheikhs “used sectarian and inflammatory language to condemn attacks against Sunnis in Syria’s armed conflict.” In his own controversial condemnation of the attacks, Morsi had ignored the sectarian nature of the violence in Egypt, which has seen unprecedented levels of the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including Coptic Christians and Shia Moslems, after the Muslim Brotherhood took power in 2012.[6]

References

  1. 1 2 El-Sayed, Mohamed (4 March 2010). 'Screens to heaven' Archived 2012-09-17 at the Wayback Machine., Al-Ahram Weekly
  2. 1 2 (26 June 2007). Radical religious Al-Nas TV gains influence in Egypt, Arab Media & Society
  3. ↑ The Egyptian Outrage Peddler Who Sent an Anti-Islam YouTube Clip Viral The Wire. 13 September 2012. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
  4. ↑ Obscure Film Mocking Muslim Prophet Sparks Anti-U.S. Protests in Egypt and Libya The New York Times. 11 September 2012. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
  5. ↑ Bobby Ghosh. The Agents of Outrage Time. 13 September 2012. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
  6. ↑ Luis Sanchez.Authorities arrest eight after Shi’a lynching incident Daily News Egypt. 25 June 2013. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
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