Tag: mullahs

When I interviewed Sheikh Ali Gomaa in the fall of 2004, he seemed primed to become one of the great pragmatist leaders of modern Islam. Intelligent, blunt and keenly aware of the way information can be dishonestly predigested to support an agenda, he was far less rhetorical and far more practical than is fashionable among twenty-first century shayukh. He had held his state-appointed post as Grand Mufti of Egypt for less than a year, but in that time he had managed to overcome the suspicions of the Arab capitals ultra-conservative imams and enjoyed widespread popularity. He was one of the onlyand certainly the most powerfulmainstream Sunni clerics to support the Amina Wadud prayer. A year later, things had changed: when I ran into him at a social function, he was cynical and removed, disinterested in further discourse with the West, having been burned by a European paper that printed a skewed version of a fatwa he had issued about the practice of yoga. Today, his popularity is waning: after issuing a controversial legal opinion on Egyptian state television, in which he stated that protests and demonstrations against a politically confirmed leader are un-Islamic, some see him as a cats-paw of the Mubarak regime. In response, he has run to the right, issuing several fatwas at odds with his relatively enlightened views about women.

Gomaa is far from the only Muslim cleric whose public remarks have been ideologically erratic. Former Egyptian Grand Mufti Mohammad Es-sayyid El Tantawy, who famously confirmed the Islamic legality of sex-reassignment surgery in the late 1980s, has also made statements supporting jihad against Israeli civilians; Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran wrote Sufi poetry before launching his career as a despot. Modern clerics, it seems, cannot be relied upon to provide ideologically consistent legal opinions from year to year and even from week to week. The reasons why are complex, and if sustainable change is to occur in modern Islam, understanding them is vital.