Entries for March 2008

My profile of Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, provides a brief look at the work of an important Muslim jurist who argues that traditionalism, particularly traditional Islamic jurisprudence, is the best antidote to Islamic extremism. Followers of the grand mufti, including many of his former students at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, believe that his approach to Islam and Islamic law has a profound influence not just on Egyptians but on Muslims throughout the Middle East and even beyond. But others are more skeptical. They say that his position as a state-appointed official makes him suspect in the eyes of most Egyptians.

While both sides are partly right, the skeptics might seem to have the stronger case, at least if recent history is any guide. While Islam has prayer and mosque leaders (imams and mullahs), the religion has never had a formal priesthood. But it has long had an elite class of scholar-jurists, or ulema, whose deep learning in sharia (religious law, as based in the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet) and the different methodologies of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) has endowed it with special clerical authority. By dint of their scholarship, the leading sheiks of the ulema were empowered to issue fatwas, religious-legal opinions on matters large or small that might arise in the everyday lives of Muslims. At least until the founding of modern Iran, the ulema never ran Muslim nations, but good Muslim rulers, whether caliphs or kings, have always been expected to respect the authority of the ulema and particularly their authority as specialists on sharia .

"We are not rigid," says Dr. Essam El-Erian, a physician and high-ranking official in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. I have come to his Cairo office to discuss the brotherhood's agenda. More specifically, I hope to explore how the brotherhood's use of Islam as the basis of a political program might be at odds with the views of Muslims like Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, who rejects the idea of Islamic political parties on the grounds that they create divisions among Muslims.

A genial man with a confident, sometimes booming voice, El-Erian tries immediately to set me straight: "Islam cannot be used by anybody," he says. "Islam is Islam. All of the basics are in the text."

As readers of this blog may know, I traveled to Cairo recently to interview Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, for a story that appears in the March 17 issue of U.S. News.

A scholar and jurist who studied and taught for many years at Cairo's venerable Al-Azhar University, Gomaa since 2003 has been head of the Dar al-Ifta (the house of fatwas), a government office charged with rendering nonbinding religious legal opinions on virtually any question that might arise in a Muslim's life. As grand mufti, Gomaa ranks second only to the Sheik of Al-Azhar in Egypt's official religious establishment, and he also has considerable influence in the wider Sunni Muslim world. I went specifically to learn more about his traditionalist approach to Islam and particularly Islamic sharia law, an approach that he claims provides the best antidote to the simplistic, puritanical versions of Islam that are the seedbed of radical and often violent Islamic extremism.