By Saber Ayyub.
Tripoli, 7 December 2015:
The Dar Al-Ifta (Fatwa House) headed by Sheikh Sadek Al-Ghariani, still recognised as Libya’s Grand Mufti . . .[restrict]by the powers in Tripoli, has given its blessing to Saturday’s agreement signed in Tunis by delegations from the House of Representatives (HoR) and the General National Congress (GNC).
In a statement today, the Fatwa House praised the deal saying it showed which how easy it was for Libyans to reach an agreement without any outside intervention. It noted how quickly the two sides had managed to do a deal, compared to the UN-brokered Libya dialogue process which, it said, in more than a year of talks still had not succeeded in ending Libya’s crisis.
(The Dar Al-Ifta’s comparisons between the Tunis and Skhirat deals and reference to timescales are wide of the mark. Unlike the latter, the Tunis agreement has not yet come up with a prime minister and deputies or a political framework. It simply promises that it can do so in a 20-day period.)
Meanwhile, the Dar Al-Ifta also reminded both the GNC and the HoR that the first point in any final agreement had to be that the Sharia was the only basis of legislation.
In September, Ghariani said that any agreement emerging from the UN-facilitated Skhirat talks would be invalid if it did not accept Sharia law, and that this was the first clause in the Libyan Political Agreement. [/restrict]
