Egyptian president to visit Iran

Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi will attend a summit in Iran later this month, a presidential official says, the first such trip for an Egyptian leader since relations with Tehran deteriorated decades ago.

The visit could mark a thaw between the two countries after years of enmity, especially since Egypt signed its 1979 peace treaty with Israel and Iran underwent its Islamic revolution.

Under Morsi's predecessor Hosni Mubarak, Egypt, predominantly Sunni Muslim, sided with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-dominated Arab states in trying to isolate Shi'ite-led Iran.

The official said that Morsi will visit Tehran on August 30 on his way back from China to attend the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, where Egypt will transfer the movement's rotating leadership to Iran.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not yet authorised to make the announcement.

The trip is no surprise - it came days after Morsi included Iran in a proposal for a contact group to mediate an end to Syria's escalating conflict.

The proposal for the group, which includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, was made at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca.

The idea was welcomed by Iran's state-run Press TV, and a leading member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said that Tehran's acceptance of the proposal was a sign Egypt was beginning to regain some of the diplomatic and strategic clout it once held in the region.

After the fall of Egypt's longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising last year, officials have expressed no desire to maintain Mubarak's staunch anti-Iranian stance.

Last July, former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Elaraby, who also heads the Arab League, delivered a conciliatory message to the Islamic Republic, saying "Iran is not an enemy," and noted that post-Mubarak Egypt would seek to open a new page with every country in the world, including Iran.

Any normalisation, however, would have to be based on careful calculations.

Majority Sunni Egypt has its own suspicions of Iran on both religious and political grounds.

The country's ultraconservative Salafis consider Shi'ites heretics and enemies, and for more than three decades under Mubarak, state-run media fed the public stories of Iranian plots to weaken the Egyptian state.

However, many Egyptians sympathise with Iran's Islamic revolution and consider Tehran's defiance of the United States a model to follow, while others seek a foreign policy at the very least more independent of the US.

Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8518485/egyptian-president-to-visit-iran

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