Mona Kamal/The Arab Weekly: Egyptian president said to be frustrated over al-Azhar/Mohamed Zainhe: Al-Azhar mosque: A Muslim centre of soft power

 Egyptian president said to be frustrated over al-Azhar
Mona Kamal/The Arab Weekly/September 04/16

 Observers say failure of al- Azhar to initiate requested reforms, inability of presidency to replace grand imam of al- Azhar will create friction.  Cairo – There is frustration in the Egyptian presidency at the failure of al-Azhar — the highest seat of Sunni Islamic learning — to re­form the curricula of its schools, changing education methods of its preachers and detaching Islam from extremism, sources close to the presidency said.

 Egyptian President Abdel Fat­tah al-Sisi called on al-Azhar Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb to create reforms and rid curricula taught to tens of thousands of al- Azhar students of material that could lead to extremism.  The president’s requests were not being taken seriously by al-Azhar, observers said.  “One of the reasons this is hap­pening is that al-Azhar is controlled by the very people who encourage extremist thinking,” said Sayed al- Qemni, a writer who has criticised al-Azhar. “Nothing good will come out of al-Azhar under its current leadership.”

Government sources, who re­quested anonymity, said an early August meeting between Sisi and Tayeb was a “last chance” for the grand imam to initiate reforms en­visaged by the president.
Sisi, the sources added, views al-Azhar as an international seat of learning that has the responsibil­ity to stem extremism, correct mis­understandings of Islam and turn religious discourse into a tool for peace, not for bloodshed.  His vision is in response to the eruption of what has been de­scribed as an “extremist tsunami” in which there is a misunderstand­ing of Islam.
Egypt has been battling an Islam­ist insurgency in the Sinai peninsu­la. There militants, who had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), call Egyptian Army troops “infidels” and Sisi an “apostate”.

 In January 2015, Sisi told Tayeb that correcting wrong religious ide­as and purifying religious thinking of extremist thoughts were part of his mission.  “I will complain to God against you [if you do not carry out this mission],” Sisi said.  Sisi has called for a religious revo­lution.  Frustration at al-Azhar is appar­ently growing within the cabinet. “Nothing has been done since the president called for renewing reli­gious discourse,” Culture Minister Helmi al-Namnam said August 25th at a conference in Alexandria.  The presidency has a list of meas­ures to reform al-Azhar and a num­ber of radical clerics — thought to be standing in the way of reform — who must be replaced, sources said.

Sisi does not have the authority to replace al-Azhar’s grand imam, who is usually selected from mem­bers of the Islamic Research Acad­emy, the highest intellectual body within al-Azhar. Members of the academy nominate one of their number to lead al-Azhar. The nomi­nation must be approved by the president but the president cannot sack the imam once the nomination is accepted.  Tayeb, 70 and described by some academics as a “walking Islamic encyclopaedia”, was nominated as grand imam in 2010 when Hosni Mubarak was president. Islamist president Muhammad Morsi tried to replace Tayeb with a loyalist.

Observers say the failure of al- Azhar to initiate requested reforms and the inability of the presidency to replace the grand imam of al- Azhar will create friction.
“The fact is that al-Azhar, as it stands now, is not qualified to ini­tiate reforms and any calls in this regard will be sabotaged by its lead­ers,” liberal writer Tarek Heggy said, “but the sure thing is that President Sisi will not get tired of demanding this reform.”
Al-Azhar matters in any interna­tional effort to neutralise radicals and fight extremism because it is the one entity that produces thou­sands of preachers every year. Tens of thousands of foreign students study at al-Azhar, giving it great international leverage. A change within al-Azhar can reverberate in Islamic circles around the world, observers say.
This change is under way, ac­cording to Mohamed Mehanna, an adviser to the grand imam of al- Azhar. He said it has established a new academy, which will soon start training preachers.
“President Sisi supports al-Azhar and the role it plays in renewing re­ligious discourse,” Mehanna said. “Reports about the president’s frus­tration at al-Azhar have nothing to do with the reality.”

 Al-Azhar mosque: A Muslim centre of soft power
Mohamed Zainhe/The Arab Weekly/September 04/16
Hosting thousands of foreign students, Al-Azhar university is at forefront of drive to defend moderate Islam against international wave of extremism.
General view of al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. Cairo – There is continuing de­bate over the role which Al-Azhar mosque, built more than 1,000 years ago, could be playing in­side and outside Egypt. Al-Azhar university — believed to be the oldest Islamic one in the world — hosts thousands of foreign students and is at the forefront of a drive to defend moderate Islam against an international wave of ex­tremism. “Al-Azhar has been a centre of knowledge for hundreds of millions of Muslims through the years and throughout the world,” said Azmi Megahid, a professor of Islamic civilisation at al-Azhar university. “Now, as extremists kill people in the name of Islam, al-Azhar is mov­ing to show that Islam has nothing to do with extremism and that it came to spread peace and love in the world.” Inside Egypt, the mosque, which was probably named after Fatimah al-Zahra, one of Prophet Moham­mad’s daughters, was at the heart of political, religious and social ac­tion for hundreds of years.

 Its scholars renewed Islamic thought, advised Muslims on day-to-day affairs, travelled across Egypt to illuminate believers on the tolerant nature of the Islamic reli­gion and acted to defy despots who sometimes ruled the country. Al-Azhar’s influence weakened in the decades before Egypt’s 2011 revolution but after the upris­ing it again came to the forefront of events. Its imam sanctioned the ouster of Islamist president Muhammad Morsi in 2013. The mosque sends clerics to stop occa­sional flare-ups of sectarian strife in Egypt. It also legally acts to silence critics, although much to the cha­grin of free speech campaigners.

 Al-Azhar was built in two years, starting from 971, the year when the city of Cairo began to be con­structed. The mosque is insepara­ble from its university, which was established as a school of theology in 988. The school started as an Is­maili Shia one but later became a Sunni school and remains so. It is considered by the vast ma­jority of Sunni Muslims as the most prestigious school of Islamic law. Al-Azhar, which maintains a com­mittee of certified scholars to judge individual Islamic questions, a press for printing the Quran, trains preachers to speak about Islam.
“This mosque was built to be a change-maker in the life of the people of this country,” said Sheikh Hassan Mustafa, a scholar at al- Azhar. “It first oversaw the change of faith of the people from Shia to Sunni and now it seeks to drive the people away from radicalism to moderation, which is at the heart of Islam as a religion.”

 The mosque is a grand structure that houses centuries of architec­tural styles. Its entrance is through the 15th-century Barber’s Gate, where students used to have their heads shaved and which leads into a courtyard that dates to the tenth century. It is overlooked by three stately minarets.

The latticework-screened resi­dential quarters of the schools on the right side date to the Mamluk period. Al-Azhar university’s library, which was consolidated in 1897, is said to include 99,062 books and 595,668 volumes of precious manu­scripts, some as old as the eighth century. About 100,000 students, including foreign ones, study at al- Azhar university. The style of education at the uni­versity remained relatively infor­mal for much of its early history. At the beginning, there were no entrance requirements, no formal curriculum and no degrees. The ba­sic programme of studies was — and still is — Islamic law, theology and the Arabic language. The university teaches a full cur­riculum of modern courses, such as medicine, languages, pharmacol­ogy, engineering, sciences, media and agriculture. Al-Azhar mosque has undergone many renovations, restorations and additions but most of those are said to have destroyed much of the mosque’s original character. The oldest part of the mosque is said to be its original prayer hall, which is made of five aisles parallel to the old Qibla wall with the cen­tral nave cutting through them in the middle, running from the court in the west to the wall in the east.

Wael al-Roubi, a 33-year-old law­yer from the northern coastal city of Alexandria, travelled to Cairo to pray at al-Azhar. “It is really worth the pains of the journey,” Roubi said. “It is a won­derful place where history and faith are intertwined in a unique man­ner.”