World Bulletin / News Desk

Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, has claimed that the Arab Spring uprisings, which spread across the Arab world in 2011 in a bid to rid it of decades of dictatorship, was a plot initiated by the West to recolonize the Middle-East and North Africa.

“The Arab Spring revolutions have carried some benefits for some Arab countries. Yet, some of these revolutions were part of a larger plot to divide other countries,” el-Tayeb told the El-Hayat El-Youm program on Sunday, according to the Al-Arham newspaper.

“The West has invented incorrect theories to be able to control the treasures of the East, ignoring the fact that science should be a mutual human benefit,” el-Tayeb added in his first televized interview since Egypt's July 3 military coup ousted elected president Mohamed Morsi.

“Till now, the west has not met with the east, where a widening gap has been growing though Al-Azhar scholars have predicted the possibility, if not the necessity, of meeting between the east and the west since the renaissance,“ he said.

While the Arab Spring resulted in a few minor reforms in the still-standing Algerian government, the result in other countries has been much different.

In Tunisia, where the revolution first started, former dictator Zine al Abidin Ben Ali fled mass protests to make way for the rise of the Islamist Ennahda Party. However, mass protests against Ennahda forced the ruling party to make a number of concessions to avoid civil war.

Egypt likewise succeeded in ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was later replaced by Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi in the country's first free elections. A year later, however, Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi removed Morsi from office in a military coup. Since then, hundreds of anti-coup activists have been imprisoned and sentenced to death as violence against the interim authorities rage on across the country.

Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was killed after being caught by a mob. However, the new Libyan authorities have failed to bring clashing militias under control. Similarly, the new government in Yemen has struggled to contain growing militancy and separatism.

Syrians have been unable to remove Bashar al-Assad from power after a three-year civil war has brought the country to ruins.