“When Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt, Ahmed Helal was locked up four times in Tora prison, officials’ favorite detention facility for perceived enemies of the state. Each time, he was arrested in the middle of the night and thrown in with scores of others whose only offense, they believed, was being Shiite Muslims…………. In the year that recently ousted President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood held power, the threats grew graver. Brotherhood officials denounced Shiite practices and declared that the sect had no place in Egypt. Lawmakers pushed through a new constitution that made Sunni religious doctrine the basis for most laws. One young preacher who converted to Shiism was jailed on charges of insulting Islam. The trouble culminated in a gruesome lynching in a village outside Cairo in June, when a mob dragged the bloodied bodies of a prominent Shiite cleric and three others through the streets while police officers stood by……………….”

I am afraid this sectarian legacy built during the years of both Hosni Mubarak and Morsi will continue no matter who rules in Cairo. Under Mubarak Shi’as were persecuted, prevented from practicing their rites and often imprisoned for who they were. That was the effect of thirty years of continued Wahhabi influence over the once tolerant and accepting Egyptian society.
The Islamist regime that was freely elected brought to power a coalition of Muslim Brothers and Salafis, which institutionalized the persecution of Shi’as (and the Christian Copts and other minorities). It made it halal and kosher to openly spout sectarian hatred. Even some of Egypt’s self-proclaimed liberals got into the habit of doing so.
I suspect that the treatment of Shi’as will not get much better under any regime in Egypt in the near future. There are institutional and political factors now that will push for its continuation: from the Mubarak bureaucracy to the Al-Azhar bureaucracy to the influential Salafis to the Persian Gulf princes and potentates. It took thirty one years for Egypt to reach the stage where people got lynched in public for their faith while the police watched. It may take at least another generation to return Egypt to its tolerant past. Maybe.

Cheers
mhg