El-Nas () (also spelt Al-Nas or Elnas and Alnas, meaning "The People Channel") is an Egyptian television station founded in January 2006 and broadcast from Cairo until the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état.
Founded by Saudi investor Mansour bin Kadsa (alt. Mansur Bin Kadasah), Al-Nas began as a channel mostly for Arabic pop songs and dream interpretation shows. After a few months, Al-Nas shifted its focus to religious contents that targeted audiences who seeks religious knowledge, with numbers of high-profile Salafi preachers featured daily on various religious shows.
Before shutdown, it was one of the most popular channels in Egypt. As of 2015, Al-Nas has been relaunched.
El-Nas (and other Salafi TV stations) were accused by human rights organisations for hosting Islamist sheikhs and preachers that encouraged anti-Shi'ism and sectarian violence in Egypt.
Controversies
Innocence of Muslims movie
El-Nas drew worldwide attention in September 2012, when host Sheikh Khalad Abdalla played a clip of Innocence of Muslims a few days prior to the 2012 diplomatic missions attacks.
Female presenters and music
With supporting arguments from proper Islamic guidelines, scholars Muhammad Hussein Yacoub and Abu Ishaq Al Heweny (alt. Shaykh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni), both of whom appear on the channel, have worked to ban successfully all female presenters from the channel. The latter person has also advocated with the removal of music from being played on El-Nas.
Shia lynchings in Giza
After more than 3,000 mobsters surrounded and torched the houses of a small Shia community in a suburb of Giza in Egypt on 23 June 2013, and brutally lynched and subsequently desecrated the corpses of four Shia Muslim men, including the prominent cleric Hasan Shehata, El-Nas ran interviews with sympathisers and inciters of the shocking hate crime during which they justified the extreme violence on the basis of purely subjective and unverified claims that carried no criminal charge under the Egyptian law. In its report, Amnesty International noted that the most recent incitement of violence against the Shia Muslim minority in Egypt prior to the incident took place at a Muslim Brotherhood rally "in support of the Syrian uprising" a week earlier attended by extremist Salafi sheikhs as well as the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Commenting on the incident, Amnesty said "local residents had reported Salafi and other Islamist groups inciting hatred and violence against the Shi’a community over the past few weeks, including during Friday sermons, where they distributed pamphlets calling for their expulsion from the area" and criticised Morsi for “fail[ing] to disassociate himself and his government from the hatred and incitement against Shi’as.” During the conference held on 16 June, the report observed, top Salafi Sheikhs “used sectarian and inflammatory language to condemn attacks against Sunnis in Syria’s armed conflict.” In his own controversial condemnation of the attacks, Morsi had ignored the sectarian nature of the violence in Egypt, which has seen unprecedented levels of the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including Coptic Christians and Shia Moslems, after the Muslim Brotherhood took power in 2012.
Before being sold in 2015
A year before the closure of the channel, there was a trend to change the channel to a public channel, and this has already been done since Dr. Hassan Alwan, the media expert, took over the management of the channel and developed the channel in terms of the general shape of the screen and the content, and a dispute occurred between him and some of the currents rejecting the idea that had dominated the channel for the past six years Hassan Alwan announced this in the Egyptian newspapers and reported on social media at that time that the El-Nas is from now a public channel and not religious, and began to hold cooperation protocols between the channel and government media institutions, including the protocol of cooperation between the People’s Channel, Dar Al-Maaref, October Magazine, and so on. Juttah comprehensive software includes Altrebeoah, medical and entertainment programs, kitchen and programs talk show daily morning program came under the name Tala'a Al-Nahar and the last evening under the name of Masr El Gedida (meaning Heliopolis in Arabic), the viewership of the channel and consequently the advertisements of the major companies increased, but the channel was like the rest of the religious channels and was closed because it is still classified as religious.