Three senior Iranian clerics have declared a TV serial being shown in many Arab countries this month to be sacrilegious and ruled that watching it is “haram,” that is, sinful and forbidden.
The serial was produced in Syria and is being broadcast through much of the Arab world this Ramadan. Many television series designed specifically to be broadcast evenings during Ramadan have become a standard feature in much of the Islamic world in recent decades.
The ban on watching the serial was proclaimed Friday in announcements published by Ayatollahs Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, Hossain Nuri-Hamadani and Ali Safi-Golpayegani, all very senior clerics.
Directed by Syrian filmmaker Abd al-Bari Abu al-Khair, “Al Hassan and Al Hussein” shows Imams Hassan and Hussein, the grandsons of the Prophet, as having good relations with Muawiyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs and a figure viewed with disdain in the Shia world.
But the criticism was not just part of some Sunni-Shia difference. The Sunni Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo also deemed the series sacrilegious and asked Egypt’s ruling military council to prevent the broadcast in that country.
The Egyptian Ministry of Information then asked, but did not order, Egyptian TV channels to cancel the serial. However, the TV stations ignored Al-Azhar’s objections and are now broadcasting the TV series nightly.
Al-Azhar announced that it plans to sue the producers of the series for depicting family members of the Prophet and his companions. An Al-Azhar decree issued in 1926 forbids the physical personification of the Prophet, his family and his companions.
At-Tahrir, Al-Hayat Mosal-salat and several other Egyptian TV channels along with some Lebanese, Syrian, Tunisian, Moroccan, and Sudanese TV networks have begun broadcasting the serial, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
Egyptian theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi and several Syrian and Saudi religious figures are named in the credits as having vetted the serial as religiously approved.