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Al Azhar Al Sharif, the top religious institution for Sunni Islam, has condemned a controversial parody of the Last Supper during Friday’s opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Drag queens parodied Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of the Last Supper, Jesus Christ’s final meal with his disciples.
Al Azhar warned the world of the danger of exploiting global occasions to condone the abuse of religion and promote destructive and shameful societal diseases, such as homosexuality and transgenderism.
It underscored its categorical rejection of all attempts to disrespect any prophets. The prophets are the best of Allah’s creation.
He chose them over all other beings to carry the message of goodness to the world, it said.
Al Azhar, and nearly two billion Muslims it represents, believes that Jesus is the messenger of Allah.
Allah also described him in the Quran as ‘honoured in this world and the Hereafter, and he will be one of those nearest (to Allah)’ (3: 45), it said.
Muslims believe that disrespecting Jesus or any other prophet is a sin and a shame on the perpetrators of this heinous abuse and those who accept it, Al Azhar added.
It also called for unity to confront this deviant and lowly trend that aimed to exclude religion and deify lowly sexual desires that spread health and moral diseases, impose an animalistic lifestyle that contradicted sound human nature, and thus forcibly normalise it in societies by all possible and impossible means and methods.
US and world leaders also denounced the mocking of Last Supper. Several legislators around the world denounced the opening ceremony.
The “mockery of the Last Supper was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world who watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games,” US House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a post on X.
“The war on our faith and traditional values knows no bounds today. But we know that truth and virtue will always prevail.”
The French Bishop Conference has described some scenes from the opening ceremony as “mockery and derision of Christianity”.
Christians around the world were “hurt” by these scenes, it said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban criticised the West following the controversial act, saying “there is no morality” in the Western world.
“Westerners believe that nation-states no longer exist. They deny that there is a common culture and a public morality based on it.
French lawyer Fabrice di Vizio announced plans to file a complaint regarding the performance, stating: “As a Catholic, I swear before God that I will complain. I will do this and invite all Christians to accompany me to address the spiritual damage we have suffered.”
The unprecedented opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics on the Seine River, which drew millions of viewers around the world, included a tableau celebrating the French capital’s vibrant nightlife and reputation as a place of tolerance, pleasure and subversiveness.
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