The magazine quoted a prominent Bahraini sheik, Abdellatif al-Mahmoud, as demanding in a Twitter posting on June 24 that Mr. Morsi “accomplish what the Sahabi Amir bin al-As could not” and destroy the “idolatrous” pyramids. The allusion was to a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who went on to conquer Egypt, although scholars of Islam say he never even tried to take down the pyramids.

By July 12, someone claiming to be the Bahraini sheik had repudiated the Twitter posting as a hoax, saying that a faked screen shot had been published to make it look as if the sheik had posted the message. “This tweet hasn’t been written by me, and the traitors have fabricated it through Photoshop to distort my image,” said Sheik Mahmoud — or at least, said the user @amahmood2011 professing to be Sheik Mahmoud.

However, if @amahmood2011 really is Bahrain’s leading Sunni cleric, some of his Twitter postings are a bit peculiar, like the one suggesting that he had seen the Prophet in a dream and was given permission to shake women’s hands.

The biographical description accompanying that Twitter feed notes, in Arabic, that it is the sheik’s “Official Barody Account,” which sounds like a faulty transliteration of the English word parody.

The real Sheik Mahmoud could not be reached for comment.

None of that nebulous sourcing did anything to tamp down the steam sizzling from online reports that began appearing this month, most of them quoting one another rather than an original source, warning that the Islamists wanted to finally finish the job that the Islamic conqueror of Egypt had started (although he hadn’t), and that President Morsi was doing nothing about it (which he wasn’t).