A monaqqaba (women dressed in full niqab) broke into the Hassan Heshmat Museum in May 2006 and destroyed a number of statues including The Victory Leap, the artist’s testament to the heroism of Egyptian troops in the 1973 War. Promptly arrested, the woman declared she was merely doing her duty as a good Muslim by adhering to a fatwa recently issued by Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa in which he said it was forbidden for Muslims to use statuary representing living beings, particularly humans, as home decorations, says Egypt Today magazine. It has pleaded that Al-Azhar, the most respected Islamic University updates some century-old fatwas to suit the world we live in today.



Though Gomaa did nothing to place his fatwa in context or make clear why he was issuing it, the fatwa was strictly limited to statues of human beings in homes and did not mention works or art in museums or Pharaonic statuary on display at antiquity sites around the nation.

In fact, the fatwa seemed to confuse just about everyone. Even as they attacked Gomaa’s declaration, liberals noted that Gomaa had been the senior-most Islamic cleric to speak out against the Taliban’s destruction of the famed statues of Buddha in Bamiyan.



‘When Amr ibn Al-Aas invaded Egypt, he left every single [Ancient] Egyptian statue intact,’ Gomaa said in early 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha figures, one of which was believed to be the largest statue of its kind in the world.



Recently in a television debate, Ahmed Abdel Moeti Hagazi alleged that far from being a force for moderation, Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning, directly and indirectly encourages terror.While Hagazi told the mufti he doesn’t believe Gomaa is himself ‘pro-terror,’ he is certain that ‘the prevalent religious discourse encourages terrorism.’ The poet claims it is worrisome that Al-Azhar and its Dar El-Ifta (the Islamic Research Academy, which issues what most scholars agree are binding fatwas) are looked to by the faithful for guidance because ‘in Islam, you are supposed to ask your heart for fatwa. No one is allowed to coerce a Muslim into choosing this or that. A Muslim must listen to the sheikhs, but is supposed to exercise freedom of choice at the end,’ Hagazi says.



‘Al-Azhar has been a bastion of Sunni tolerance for the past 1,000 years,’ Gomaa told Hagazi. ‘We have always refuted superstition and extremism,’ he added. Both the legendary Mohammed Abdou and the previous Mufti, Ahmed El-Tayeb, had opined that statues are not haram, but the mufti stressed that they never issued fatwas on the point: ‘

‘Alcohol is haram, but is sold in Egypt,’ he told Hagazi. ‘So is gambling, and people gamble. Just because sculptures are considered haram does not mean that people should go and destroy statues or monuments. We must teach children the idea of co-existence and acceptance; we don’t want a group of hypocrites who wear the veil here and take it off the minute they are on the plane heading abroad. I want people not to drink alcohol because they know it is haram -and if they drink it, I want them to ask God’s forgiveness afterward.’



In respect to the allegation that the Al-Azhar has failed to deter terrorism, he said, ‘Al-Azhar currently has 7,500 institutes, in which 1.5 million students are studying, in addition to a university teaching half a million students. If it were not for Al-Azhar, Egypt would have turned into another Afghanistan or Iraq. Al-Azhar has indeed succeeded in the war against terror. And terror will never end because it is in human nature, a demonic instinct. As long as good and evil exist, terror will exist. Asking Al-Azhar to end terrorism or considering it a failure if it did not is unacceptable. No Azhar graduate, whether in the East or the West, has ever tainted their hands with blood.’



Gomaa was heavily involved in the Interior Ministry’s campaign against terror in the 1990s, when he opened dialogue with extremist groups. ‘They arrested 16,000 members of the groups, and only 80 of them turned out to be graduates of Al-Azhar. After we spoke to them, 13,000 of them renounced [terrorist thought], and the first to do so were the 80 Azharites, whom we were able to set straight in six hours. Thought is fought with thought, and iron with iron,’ Gomaa added.



Mohamed Salmawy, the editor-in-chief of the French-language weekly Al-Ahram Hebdo and the president of the Egyptian Writers’ Union. Salmawy claims the issue at stake is far greater than the Hagazi-Gomaa debate about whether Al-Azhar has done enough to curb terrorism.

‘The point is that the religious discourse needs modernization,’ Salmawy says. ‘It needs to be more suitable for our times. This is a purely Islamic characteristic: Omar ibn El-Khattab [the second Caliph] stopped the hudoud [penalties such as the cutting off of a thief’s hand] when certain circumstances made it necessary. This means that Islam is by nature a flexible religion, so long as we leave the very essence of the faith intact. Some countries have banned polygamy, for example, despite it being acceptable in Shariah.’



The award-winning playwright and writer believes the door is always open to ijtihad (the personal struggle for knowledge and understanding). ‘Ijtihad has been a fundamental characteristic of Islam since the early stages of the Islamic renaissance,’ Salmawy says. ‘This is why religious discourse must evolve, which is what happened at the turn of the twentieth century with Sheikhs Mohammed Abdou and Al-Afghani, who started a movement for reform and enlightenment at Al-Azhar. It cannot be that we were more open-minded at the turn of the twentieth century than we are now at the turn of the twenty-first.’ Salmawy is particularly unhappy that Al-Azhar refuses to revisit old fatwas that need updating to keep pace with changes in modern society.



Soliman Fayyad, one of Egypt’s foremost novelists and linguists, is also an ‘ex-Azharite,’ as he puts it, saying he rejects his association with the university from which he graduated. ‘As a former Azharite, I can tell you that the institution of Al-Azhar was created by politics. Religious scholars had to justify the actions of the ruling regime. As a result, their religious stances and even their fatwas changed according to who was in power. During imperial rule, they produced fatwas to keep the king happy; during the revolution, they produced fatwas to keep the republican regime happy. This has been their role throughout the ages,’ he says.



Fayyad agrees that Al-Azhar became a politicized institution in 1537, when the Ottoman sultan invented a new post, that of Sheikh Al-Islam. In the years that followed, some sheikhs have gone so far in their search for worldly power that they have created their own militias and sought to influence not just Azhar elections, but those outside their walls. He says both governments and extremists have courted Al-Azhar over the years, but conservatives have gained new power since many sheikhs ‘working in the Gulf have returned and brought with them that region’s more conservative Islamic thought.