Cairo-Tehran ties still not thawed
By HAMZA HENDAWI
June 8, CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Only a handful of the hundreds of tourists
who flock daily to the 19th century Al-Rifa'i mosque in the Medieval part
of Cairo bother to step inside the remote room housing the tomb of Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi.
The scarcely visited white marble tomb, the final resting place of the
deposed shah of Iran , also is a monument to two decades of the poisoned
relations between Egypt and Iran .
On Wednesday, the two Middle East powerhouses set their differences
aside and spoke in a language that most of their combined 170 million peoples
understand well: soccer.
In their first encounter, their national sides met in Tehran in a match
which left millions in both nations glued to their television sets. Egypt
won after a thrilling 9-8 penalty shootout.
If they could overcome their differences, Egypt would gain crucial support
to counter Israeli power in the region. For its part, Shiite Muslim Iran
could broaden its appeal as a Muslim power.
"Shiites are only 10 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.
So, for Iran to have legitimacy as a Muslim power it must have good relations
with Sunni powers Egypt and Saudi Arabia," said Egyptian Islamic writer
and Iran expert Fahmi Howeidi.
But few entertain hopes that sports, or the Iranian -Egyptian friendship
society recently set up in Tehran or last November's visit to Egypt by
300 Iranian businessmen, can end years of animosity and distrust.
Egypt's late President Anwar Sadat granted asylum to the shah following
his ouster in the 1979 Islamic revolution despite protests from Tehran's
new clerical rulers. When the shah later died, Sadat allowed his family
to bury him in Cairo.
Iran opposes the 1979 peace with Israel Sadat signed. Egypt objects
to Iran 's naming a street in Tehran after Khaled al-Islambouli, the Muslim
militant army officer who assassinated Sadat in 1981.
Tension was fed by Egypt's support for Iraq in its 1980-88 war against
Iran and Cairo's suspicions that Tehran supported Muslim militant groups
that battled its government in the 1990s.
"The problem is that, in some peculiar way, the legacy of the past
20 years is still with us," said Shireen Hunter of the Washington-based
Center for Strategic Studies.
Experts believe that today, Egypt's close ties with the United Arab
Emirates, locked in a long-running dispute with non-Arab Iran over three
small Gulf islands, are partly to blame for the slow pace of improvement
in relations.
Iran tirelessly calls for closer defense ties with its Gulf Arab neighbors
and Egypt strives to secure a larger share of investment from the energy-rich
region.
Egypt also is closely tied to the United States, which, despite a slight
improvement in its own relations with Tehran, views the Islamic republic
as a regional menace sponsoring terrorism and seeking to acquire mass-destruction
weapons.
"I think that Washington would like to be able to control this
( Iranian -Egyptian) process as much as possible," said Graham Fuller,
a Middle East expert from the Rand Corporation in Washington.
The overwhelming majority of Egyptians are Sunni Muslims. This, however,
never stopped fundamentalist Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere from looking
at the Shiite Iranian Islamic experience as an example to be followed.
"Iran made a decision to stop exporting revolution at the end of
its war with Iraq," said Edmund Herzig, an Iran expert at England's
University of Manchester. "But this doesn't mean that they've completely
abandoned the idea or indeed stopped supporting Islamist causes around
the world."
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