Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, whose offices were attacked, is the university's ultimate authority.
Police initially blamed Shiite pilgrims trying to push past frustratingly slow security checkpoints near the Imam al-Hussein mosque.
So it was not surprising that he was drawn to a tall, solitary classmate named Sayyid Imam al-Sharif.
Guards checked every person before they crossed the green iron gates of the Imam Moussa al-Kadhim mosque.
The pilgrimage is to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, one of the 12 Imams of Shia Islam.
Iraqi security forces tightened their security measures Saturday in and around Baghdad to protect pilgrims flocking to Imam Moussa al-Kadhim's shrine.
However, this chain of succession was disrupted with the vanishing of the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi.
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In 1999, when he was still Imam at Dar Al-Hijra, he testified in support of Ihab M.
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And a senior Muslim cleric, the Grand Imam of the prestigious al-Azhar university, Ahmed al-Tayeb, expressed sorrow and said he "greatly remembers his vision towards Jerusalem and its history".
When asked why he released three men suspected of killing Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a London-based cleric stabbed to death on the steps of Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, he says he handed them over to the requisite authority, declining to say what that is.
Its imam would be a senior Islamic scholar, drawn from Cairo's al-Azhar university.
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Afterwards, Egypt's Grand Imam summoned rival political factions, youth groups and church officials to the headquarters of al-Azhar, the 1, 000-year-old institution that is the top seat of Sunni Islam.
The cleric recently told Al Jazeera's Arabic-language Web site that he met Hasan nine years ago while serving as an imam at a mosque in the Washington, D.
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