Hawzah News Agency-During a conference in Grozny, Chechnya, Sheikh Tayeb said that Salafists were not Sunnis, while he was defining what is meant by Sunnism. 

The remarks caused a storm of anger among pro-government clerics in Saudi Arabia.

They said the rhetoric used by the Egyptian cleric during the conference was more in line with a policy to weaken Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia and establish a new, dominant Sunni leadership under the auspices of al-Azhar in Egypt.

According to the reports, several Saudi clerics said the conference, attended by thinkers from Egypt and other Sunni-dominated countries, was an attempt by the Russian government to deepen the gap between Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- two leading Sunni Muslim nations of the world.

The report comes just one day after the General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Scholars in Riyadh warned against what it called inciting and stoking sedition among Muslims belonging to different schools of thought.

“It is not prudent to ignite crises and trigger misadventures of political nature, as well as intellectual affiliations and sloganeering, to demonize the Muslims and thereby widening divisions,” the council said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

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