Egypt and al-Azhar: Love at first fight

program in the Department of Religious Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

2011

Currently attached to Zayed University. [email protected] [email protected] A Paper to be presented at the 55 th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association on November29-December1, 2012. Philadelphia, PA. USA.

2022

Al-Azhar has always been one of the most important Islamic sources for centuries, and it was the Al-Azhar Mosque in Egypt that represented the Islamic Da'wah and Islamic political action independent of the rulers in the era of the Mamluks and the Ottomans, and until the beginning of the era of “Muhammad Ali” during whose reign the movement of Al-Azhar began to be restricted and stripped of its political influence in several stages ended as it is now. As a result, some Al-Azhar scholars began to think about moving away from the restrictions that surrounded the Al-Azhar Mosque. Since then, Al-Azhar has continued to produce religious cadres for Islamic movements or for many Islamic movements at a very high and distinguished level of knowledge in Islamic sciences. The important role that Al-Azhar still plays in a number of major contemporary Islamic movements will appear in the pages of this book.

Middle Eastern Studies, 2023

This paper examines the relationship between al-Azhar and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) following the 2011 Egyptian uprising. While the interplay between them in the pre-revolutionary period was mostly shaped by the gap between the status of al-Azhar as a body of statist Islam and the MB as a dissident Islamist movement, Mubarak’s downfall yielded a change in their status, raising the question of its effect on their attitude toward one another. Though on the face of it, following Morsi’s ouster, al-Azhar seems to have reverted to its traditional position of backing the de-legitimization campaign of the authoritarian regime against the MB, the paper portrays a more intricate picture: not one of close affinity during the MB’s rule despite the potential to realize common interests and advocate centrist Islam, but one of competition over religious authority; not one of utter hostility following al-Azhar’s support of the coup, but one of restrained conflict.

Journal of Sufi Studies, 2022

Challenged by Salafi Islam, Sufism managed to reassert itself in Egypt by acquiring new roles in society while emphasizing commitment to the Sharia. This article explores the role played by the religious organs of the state in promoting Sufism under President Hosni Mubarak, in the context of growing challenges to religion-state relations during this period. Focusing on the thought of ʿAlī Jumʿa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt (2003-2013), and the current Shaykh al-Azhar Aḥmad Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Ṭayyib, it also assesses the contribution of popular preachers, many of whom were graduates of al-Azhar, to this mystical discourse. The study aims to demonstrate that these popular preachers shared with the Azharite scholar some form of identification with theoretical mysticism, reflecting a broad inclination towards Sufism within Egyptian society.

When Pope Francis I visited Egypt in 2017 to stimulate inter-faith dialogue he walked into a religious and geopolitical minefield at the heart of which was Al-Azhar, one of the world’s oldest and foremost seats of Islamic learning. The pope’s visit took on added significance with Al-Azhar standing accused of promoting the kind of ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam that potentially creates an environment conducive to breeding extremism. The pope’s visit came as Al-Azhar, long a preserve of Egyptian government and ultra-conservative Saudi religious influence, had become a battleground for broader regional struggles to harness Islam in support of autocracy. At the same time, Al-Azhar was struggling to compete with institutions of Islamic learning in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan as well at prestigious Western universities. The battleground’s lay of the land has changed in recent years with the United Arab Emirates as a new entrant, a sharper Saudi focus on the kind of ultra-conservatism it seeks to promote, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s efforts since 2015 to impose control and force Al-Azhar to revise its allegedly conservative and antiquated curriculum that critics charge informs extremism.