Fearing a slide into civil war, Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim clerics published a religious edict on Friday prohibiting Muslims from killing their fellow countrymen, particularly other Muslims. Last week, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group that has led a two-month campaign of protests against the government, issued a similar fatwa, or religious ruling, following one of the nation's worst violent sectarian clashes in years. "It is religiously prohibited to engage in fighting with fellow Lebanese in general and Muslims in particular and to attack private and public property," said a statement by the Council of Lebanese Scholars, a Sunni body, that was published in Lebanese newspapers Friday.
The council also called on the opposition to end its sit-in in downtown Beirut and "return to the constitutional institutions to assume political duties."
The Hezbollah-led opposition has staged two months of demonstrations and sit-ins in a bid to topple the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Siniora has refused the opposition's demands for a veto-wielding share of the Cabinet. At least three people were killed and dozens were injured in a street battle last week between Sunnis and Shiites that began as a scuffle in the cafeteria of a Beirut university. Following the confrontation, the military declared Beirut's first curfew since 1996. Maronite Christian clerics have also called for a "truce among the nation's sons."