“Supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a “religious obligation” of all Muslims, whether they live inside or outside of Syria, the country’s supreme religious ruling body said Monday. The state television quoted Grand Mufti Shiekh Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun as urging all Arabs and Muslims to fight so called “enemies of Syria.” The Assad government had recently claimed in an interview with The Sunday Time that it was the last “secular” state in the Middle East, reiterating that radical Islamists would come into power if the Alawite president was overthrown…………”

This from the Sunni Mufti of Syria, for what it is worth. Which prompted a prominent Saudi cleric to respond by calling him ‘evil’ and calling on ALL Muslim clerics to issue a common fatwa against the Al-Assad regime (but not against any other repressive Arab regime).
Each of these sides, these schools of thought of (Sunni) Islam, the Syrian Mufti and the Al-Saud Wahhabi Mufti and ulema, supports its own regime. They are truly alike and consistent and similar. The Saudi ulema now claim the Syrian Mufti is ‘evil’. Yet he is saying exactly what the Saudi Mufti Shaikh Al Al Shaikh always says: going against the regime is un-Islamic and evil. He is saying what the Egyptian Muftis and the Shaikh of Al-Azhar said about the Tahrir protests two years ago: that they were un-Islamic.
In Egypt the dust has not settled yet, but it is a homogeneous society and it has not gone through a civil war: not yet, hopefully never. Syria is another issue: Jihadist militias dominate the battlefield on the opposition side: maybe not just a straw that the regime clings to, more like an oar.

Cheers
mhg