The prestigious Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo wants Pope Francis to make the closing remarks at a global peace meeting it is holding there during the pontiff's visit to Egypt in April, sources at the mosque told Adnkronos International (AKI) on Monday.
"We are working to have Pope Francis and (Al-Azhar Grand Imam) Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb close the world peace conference taking place in Cairo on 27-28 April," the sources told AKI.
The Al-Azhar has organised the peace conference to overlap with Pope Francis' visit to Egypt on 28-29 April, an event that Tayeb announced in May last year during his historic meeting with Francis at the Vatican, the sources said.
At their meeting on 23 May 2016, Francis and Tayeb agreed to resume dialogue sessions in Cairo between the Vatican and the al-Azhar that were broken off in 2011 after Pope Benedict XVI deplored an attack on a Coptic Church in the city of Alexandria.
In an interview with Egyptian TV channel CBC, Tayeb's deputy Abbas Shuman said the planned Cairo peace conference would cover the issues of poverty, extremism and terrorism.
Francis is visiting Egypt at the invitation of its president Abdelfattah al-Sisi and it is the first trip to the country by a pontiff since John Paul II.
John Paul II met the then-grand imam of Al-Azhar in Cairo during his visit to Egypt in 2000, a year before Al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks on New York transformed relations between the West and the Muslim world.
