Faith and the Campus

The dorm served lunch at noon, and the first ambulance screamed onto the al-Azhar University campus in eastern Cairo just after 3 p.m., followed by a line of white vans from the Red Crescent, the Arab world’s Red Cross. By sunset, the tally of students laid low by food poisoning at the esteemed Islamic university stood at 600 — more than enough, in the tinderbox of postrevolutionary Egypt, to set off a demonstration. Thousands of young people took angrily to the streets, broke down the door to the offices of al-Azhar’s religious head, known as the grand sheik, and forced the dismissal of the university president. In many ways typical of Egypt’s raucous public life since the mass protests that led to the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the events also opened a window on a quieter contest, in which the prize is al-Azhar itself. The most celebrated educational institution in the Muslim world — the name translates roughly as splendid — is being stalked by every player in the country’s nascent democracy, both for its prestige and its historical authority on matters of faith, a singular preoccupation of the new Egypt.

Until noon on April 1, those lofty qualities kept the major players — President Mohamed Morsi, parliament, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist fundamentalists, even the secular elite — from being seen trying to do what a batch of bad chicken managed in a single digestive cycle: drag the 1,000-year-old institution into the grubby push and pull of Egyptian politics.

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It’s an uncomfortable new reality for a seat of learning that, during its first millennium or so, accumulated the kind of gravity that often let it make its own weather. Until Egypt began calling itself a republic half a century ago, al-Azhar was answerable chiefly to the rigorous standards of the communal scholarship it came to embody: its leadership was elected by senior clerics. In the modern era, when it grew from a mosque and seminary into a university, issuing both fatwas — religious edicts — and degrees, al-Azhar became a virtual ministry of the Egyptian state. Its leader was appointed by the President, and its fatwas were occasionally colored by that President’s political interest, like the 2010 endorsement of Mubarak’s order to block smuggling tunnels into the Gaza Strip. The decision was highly unpopular: many Egyptians felt Gazans were being squeezed by Israel at one end and Mubarak on the other. Al-Azhar was derided as the dictator’s rubber stamp.

The revolution that overthrew Mubarak promised to free al-Azhar as well as the Egyptian people, and in some ways it has. With the crucial support of Egypt’s armed forces, which in the last days of its rule issued a decree aimed at protecting the university’s moderate tradition, al-Azhar’s leadership has skillfully maneuvered to assert a tenuous new independence. But it’s a delicate business. Everybody seems to have plans for the place. Secular Egyptians see al-Azhar’s reputation for restraint as a bulwark against the surging Islamists. It was nonreligious delegates to the constituent assembly who, knowing of the steadfastly moderate inclinations of al-Azhar’s leadership, insisted it hold a place in the new constitution — a flanking move against Islamists that could backfire down the road, since it ensures that future debates about democracy and law will return to the very thing the seculars were trying to keep out of politics: religion. The Islamists, both the mainstream Brotherhood and more-extreme Salafist groups, regard control of al-Azhar as the ultimate validation of their ideology of a Shari’a state.

Al-Azhar resists all of it. “Here we have to make clear that Azhar is not a political institution, has nothing to do with a position governing the state,” says Abdel Dayem Nosair, an adviser to the grand sheik. “There is no theocratic state in Islam … We’re only looking for a modern Egyptian state for all Egyptians, regardless of race or creed or color.”

The contest carries profound implications reaching beyond Egypt to the 1.4 billion Sunni Muslims who look to al-Azhar for guidance — and often for instilling in its most promising young scholars the view of Islam they will carry home as clerics. It may be too much to say that as al-Azhar goes, so goes mainstream Islam: it certainly does not have the authority over clerics and worshippers that the Vatican, say, has over the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. But a resurgent al-Azhar could pose a powerful, moderate counterpoint to the severe, puritanical form of Sunni Islam that has been ascendant in recent decades.

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That austere version of the faith, known by some as Salafism and by others as Wahhabism, has been backed by Saudi oil. Mosques built with Saudi money have, in recent years, been constructed in cities and towns all over the Muslim world, including Egypt. Without a Caliph to guide it from Istanbul and with al-Azhar’s authority muffled by successive despots, mainstream Sunni Islam has been largely leaderless for decades. “It’s a much more decentralized world out there than it used to be, in terms of religious authority in the Muslim world, and the rise of Saudi Arabia has allowed it to fund its own approach very lavishly,” notes Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Inside Egypt, Azhar is seen not only as an Egyptian institution but Egypt’s gift to the Islamic world.” The question now is, As al-Azhar awakens from its 60-year enforced slumber, what shape will that gift to the Islamic world take?

Mahmoud Alpha, who arrived at al-Azhar from Ivory Coast seven years ago, wants the university to retain its moderate image. “I prefer the centrist ideology,” he says. Like 6 out of 10 students, he studies religion, although al-Azhar added degrees in secular fields such as engineering and agriculture when it gained university status in the early 1960s. “The picture of Islam in the world has become a frightening picture,” he says. “Whenever people see explosions, they think of Islam or Muslims. What we see in Nigeria, what we see in Mali, that is not a true picture of Islam. The meaning of Islam is one of peace.”

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Alpha sits at an outdoor table beneath a sign reading CHINESE MUSLIM RESTAURANT, a greasy-spoon diner whose clientele testifies both to the global reach of al-Azhar and the diversity of a community that is, whatever Islam’s popular image, at most 20% Arab. To Alpha’s right, a Malian student shares a plate of noodles with a Uighur from western China’s Muslim Xinjiang province. To his left, a table of Malaysian men and Egyptian women pass around dumplings the size of coin purses. “I live in the student dorms, and there are 99 different nationalities around me and 4,000 students,” says Alpha.

Most of them carried to Cairo some version of the ambition that fires the lanky African. After completing his master’s degree in the politics of Islamic law, Alpha aims to return to Abidjan to help build moderate religious institutions under the country’s first Muslim President, the former IMF official Alassane Ouattara. The way for the future imam will be greatly eased by his status as an Azhari — the term for a graduate of the most esteemed seat of Islamic learning in the world.

Al-Azhar is nearly as old as Cairo itself. The mosque that long housed the religious school was built in 972 by the Fatimids, Shi’ite conquerors from Tunisia who founded the city. Al-Azhar became Sunni 200 years later when Egypt did, and it set about outstripping every other center of Islamic learning. The Ottomans who governed the Middle East for 400 years nodded dutifully to the scholars of al-Azhar even though Istanbul was home to the Caliph, the political ruler of the world’s Sunni Muslims. What Cairo had, as the place where the faith’s most learned scholars gathered to deliberate religious law, was the center of gravity that accumulated with consensus, key in Sunni jurisprudence. (Unlike the Shi’ite clergy, who have a hierarchy topped by Grand Ayatullahs, Sunni imams answer only to God.)

Still, al-Azhar was never far removed from Egyptian politics. It thrived when Egypt was loosely held by Britain, and it was placed under state control in 1961 after Egyptians embraced the secular nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. A reputation built over 1,000 years is not undone in a few decades, however, and when Egyptians took to Tahrir Square in revolt against dictatorship in January 2011, al-Azhar played a memorable role. A phalanx of students wearing the university’s traditional red caps and white turbans locked arms to protect the demonstrators from state security personnel. The spectacle was a stirring signal that Mubarak’s time was up — and that the sleeping giant that is al-Azhar had begun to stir.

There really is nothing else like it. “The importance of Azhar is its international legitimacy,” says George Fahmi, a researcher at the Arab Forum for Alternatives, a Cairo think tank. “They have this moral power. You cannot refuse Azhar.”

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Prestige Restored
When revolution came to Tahrir Square, Ahmed el-Tayeb had been sheik of al-Azhar for less than a year. Educated in Islamic philosophy at the Sorbonne, el-Tayeb represented almost an extreme of moderation: he wore a suit instead of robes until he took the top job. And as a Sufi, he counts himself a follower of Islam’s most mystical stream, one with deep roots in Egypt. But like his recent predecessors, he also carried the taint of the Mubarak regime, having served on the policies committee of the ruling National Democratic Party headed by Mubarak’s son Gamal.

In the fluid aftermath of the revolution, however, el-Tayeb made a series of savvy moves designed to restore the reputation of the sprawling institution, each playing up al-Azhar’s centrality to Egyptian public life while professing an aversion to the grubbiness of politics. Al-Azhar issued a number of declarations on the Future of Egypt, urging an inclusive, secular state respectful of religious minorities. It reached out to the 10% of Egyptians who are Coptic Christians, winning the trust of their Pope by establishing an ecumenical “Egyptian family house” and dispatching teams into the hinterland to promote tolerance amid increasing attacks on Christians. (When a Cairo cathedral was attacked by Muslim extremists in April, during a funeral for Copts killed in earlier attacks, Pope Tawadros II said el-Tayeb was the first outsider to call expressing concern.) And when self-righteous politicians refused to meet one another, al-Azhar issued invitations, and the recalcitrant leaders dutifully showed up. All this high-minded activism both buffed al-Azhar’s stature and caused el-Tayeb’s controversial history with the Mubarak regime to fade. “This was the first state institution that tried to reform itself,” says Fahmi.

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But its reinvigorated prestige is also what makes al-Azhar a target for takeover. Egypt’s military first filled the power vacuum left by Mubarak’s resignation, but as elections approached, it became apparent that the new Egyptian democracy would be dominated by religious parties. Al-Azhar’s leadership had no appetite to be controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood or by the Salafists, who gained popularity quickly after the ouster of Mubarak. In January 2012, just four days before a new parliament took office, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces decreed that the President would no longer appoint the grand sheik of al-Azhar. Henceforth, the sheik would be selected by a council of 40 senior religious scholars — a panel that el-Tayeb would appoint himself, after which it would become self-perpetuating.

The arrangement essentially left the future of Islam’s most esteemed institution in the hands of the comparatively liberal el-Tayeb, who selected the crucial council “all from among his friends and allies,” says Amr Ezzat, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a civil-liberties group. El-Tayeb appears intent on building a firewall between the upper reaches of al-Azhar and everyone else, including fundamentalists who want to make Shari’a the law of the land. “We are not a governing institution,” says his aide, Nosair.

That’s not exactly what Egypt’s new constitution says, however. Article 4 of the new charter states that al-Azhar’s scholars would be consulted on matters related to Islamic law, though whether the opinion is binding is left ambiguous. The measure was put forward early in the constitutional negotiations by nonreligious activists anxious to check the hegemony of the ascendant Brotherhood; in al-Azhar they believed they had a moderate counterweight with unimpeachable Islamic credentials. There are only two problems with the maneuver, critics point out. One is that Article 4 assures that Islam — which another article blandly declares will inform all of Egypt’s laws — will have a prominent place in Egyptian politics. The other danger is the assumption that al-Azhar will remain committed to wasatiyya, or moderation. What will the Egyptian state look like if future al-Azhar leadership insists that laws be written consistent with a rigid puritanical vision of Islam? “It works with Ahmed Tayeb,” Fahmi says of the arrangement. “With anybody else it might be a nightmare.”

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Islamist Ascendancy
Fahmi’s nightmare may already be incubating within the walls of al-Azhar — certainly among the student body, but increasingly among the faculty. Under Mubarak, Islamists within al-Azhar were held in check by state security, who, students note, barred Salafists from its dorms and Brotherhood professors from rising above departmental head. But they are flourishing now. On almost every other campus in Egypt, Brotherhood chapters lost badly in recent student elections, reflecting the plummeting approval ratings for the party’s governance, which has polarized the country. At al-Azhar, however, both the Brotherhood and Salafists carried large margins. “There’s the Salafi current that’s stronger, and people are attracted to it more than the Brotherhood. They have the credibility,” says Mohammad Hassan Ali Ibrahim, an agriculture student from the Nile Delta, pausing as he does his homework on a patch of grass between classes.

Thanks to al-Azhar’s hands-off commitment to academic freedom, there are significant numbers of Salafi-minded scholars on campus, says Walead Mosaad, an American-born moderate cleric who teaches theology in the mosque. Others at al-Azhar say the university’s moderate leadership, closeted in its ivory tower, has lost touch with the Egyptian street, where extremist strains of Islam have grown stronger in recent years: Salafist parties won 25% of the vote in the first post-Tahrir parliamentary election.

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On campus, what strikes a visitor is a magnanimity no longer evident elsewhere in Egyptian political life. On Cairo’s clogged streets, young men wade through traffic holding aloft signs reading HONK IF YOU HATE THE BROTHERHOOD. But on an April morning, the comity that al-Azhar’s leaders have taken pains to encourage in national politics appears well established on campus. Outside the college of engineering, a reporter’s search for a victim of food poisoning turns up not only Mohammad Eid, 23, (“There was a lot of vomiting”) but representatives of all the main factions, leaning together against a parked car before class and getting along famously.

The bacterial chicken really did throw open a window on the politics surrounding al-Azhar. President Morsi’s conspicuous visit to hospitalized students was interpreted as an encouraging pat on the shoulder to the protesters who embarrassed el-Tayeb. And when the Egyptian military announced it would buy al-Azhar a new kitchen, that was a reminder that the institution has a powerful friend, one with a lot of tanks. (“Azhar is a priority,” an armed-forces spokesman told Egypt Daily News in April, “as it is a highly respected institution.”) “I have a comment,” says Mohsen Fikry, 24, raising his hand. He wears the beard of a Salafi. “We appreciate the army — however, only in the military field, defending the country.”

“That’s the Islamist groups!” says Ahmed Shogaa, 22, a secular student who throws his arm around the Salafi, laughing. “We love the army!” Amid the joshing, only the Muslim Brotherhood representative hangs back, true to the group’s underground roots. The Brothers are famous for their patience. A couple of blocks away, gathering his books from the grass as he heads for class, agriculture student Ibrahim smiles at the question of al-Azhar’s going fundamentalist. “In the old regime, they wouldn’t let them live in the dormitories,” he says. Now the former outcasts are winning elections. “Nothing comes all at once.”

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