Among those attending the talks were influential Salafist clerics Sheikh Mohammed Hassan and Mohammed Abdel Salam, who just days ago addressed pro Morsi supporters at a rally.
“The Islamists who met Sisi, while not members of the Muslim Brotherhood, have been supporting them at the Rabaa al Adawiya sit in. Hopefully, the Brotherhood will listen to what they have to say to find a way out of the crisis,” a source close to the talks said.
But Yasser Ali, a spokesman for the pro-Morsi demonstrators, said the clerics had met Sisi “without having been mandated”.
Burns had also met with members of the Brotherhood’s political arm, which later stressed its continued commitment to “legitimacy, which stipulates the return of the president, the constitution and the Shura Council,” or upper house of parliament.
During his visit, the US envoy sat down with Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy in a bid to broker a compromise as Washington kept up the pressure from afar, with Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel urging Sisi to support an “inclusive political process”, the Pentagon said.
The diplomatic push came as the Washington Post published an interview with Sisi in which he urged Washington to pressure Morsi supporters to end their rallies.
“The US administration has a lot (of) leverage and influence with the Muslim Brotherhood and I’d really like the US administration to use this leverage with them to resolve the conflict,” he said.
Sisi said that police, not the military, would be charged with dispersing the protests, and insisted that millions of Egyptians “are waiting for me to do something”.
But Fahmy insisted authorities have “no desire to use force if there is any other avenue that has not been exhausted”.
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