Ali Gomaa
Ali Gomaa is an Egyptian Islamic scholar, jurist, and public figure who has taken a number of controversial political stances. He specializes in Islamic Legal Theory. He follows the Shafi`i school of Islamic jurisprudence and the Ash'ari school of tenets of faith. Gomaa is a Sufi.
He served as the eighteenth Grand Mufti of Egypt through Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah succeeding Ahmed el-Tayeb. He has, in the past, been considered a respected Islamic jurist, according to a 2008 U.S. News & World Report report and The National, and "a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam," according to The New Yorker. However, in recent years Western academic observers have described him as a supporter of authoritarian forms of government.
He was succeeded as Grand Mufti by Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam in February 2013.
Career
Ali Gomaa was born in the Upper Egyptian province of Beni Suef on 3 March 1952. Gomaa is married and has three adult children. In person, Gomaa's appearance has been described as "tall and regal, with a round face and a trim beard."Education
Gomaa graduated from high school in 1969, at which point he enrolled at Ain Shams University in Egypt's capital, Cairo. Having already begun to memorize the Quran, he delved deeper into his studies of Islam, studying Hadith and Shafi'i jurisprudence in his free time while at university. After completing a B.Comm. at Ain Shams in 1973, Gomaa enrolled in Cairo's al-Azhar University, the oldest active Islamic institution of higher learning in the world. He received a second bachelor's degree from al-Azhar, then an M.A., and finally a PhD with highest honors in Juristic Methodology in 1988. Since he had not gone through the al-Azhar High School curriculum, he took it upon himself in his first year at the college to study and memorize all of the basic texts, which many of the other students had already covered.Gomaa's father was a lawyer, who he states was a very great inspiration to him. He stated in an interview to Al-Ahram Weekly: "I was very influenced by my father...I used to watch him stand up for what is right, unafraid of the powers that be. He used to address police officers and judges quite confidently. Those were different times."
Teaching
Gomaa taught in the faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies at al-Azhar University from the time he received his M.A. until he was appointed Grand Mufti, first as an assistant professor and then as a full professor. In addition to being a teacher of Aqida, Tafsir, Hadith, legal theory and Islamic history, Gomaa is also a highly respected Sufi master.In addition to the courses he taught at the University, Gomaa also revived the tradition of open classes held in a mosque where he taught a circle of students six days a week from after sunrise until noon. Gomaa established these lessons in 1998 with the aim of protecting the Islamic intellectual tradition from being lost or misinterpreted: "I want people to continue in the tradition of knowledge reading the classical texts the way they were written, not the way people want to understand them."
In addition to the lessons in al-Azhar, Gomaa also began giving the Friday sermon in Cairo's Sultan Hassan Mosque in 1998 after which he would give a short lesson in Islamic jurisprudence for the general public followed by a question-and-answer session. In addition Gomaa speaks fluent English, and he was a former chairman of Al-Azhar University's Islamic Jurisprudence Department.
An article in The Atlantic states: When he became the khatib, or orator, of Masgid Sultan Hassan, a mosque long favored by devout Cairenes, Gomaa began to attract a following of another kind. His rational, contemporary religious views, coupled with his background in commerce, made him appealing to a segment of Egyptian society that was fast becoming a thorn in the side of both the post-Nasserite government and the rising Islamic extremists: the religious middle class. Entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, bankers, engineers, Gomaa's new followers were socially conservative but financially and politically progressive. They favored extended privatization and transparent governance. Most had been educated in secular institutions, but—owing to the Islamic revival that swept the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s—many also had a working knowledge of the texts that play a central role in Islamic law: the Koran, the Sunna, and the Hadith. These people saw the growing Wahhabi movement as irrational and an impediment to material progress. "What Dr. Gomaa was attempting was unique and very important," says Hamdi Sabri, one of the mufti's early followers. When he first met Gomaa, in the late 1980s, Sabri was a struggling young businessman, eager to take advantage of his government's move away from socialism. Frustrated by the anti-progressive stance of the fundamentalist movement, Sabri turned to Gomaa for religious guidance. "He was struggling to present Islam in its unaltered form: simply, as the love of God."
The article goes on to say that "Gomaa was free of the Westernization that characterized the liberal sheikhs who were often targets of extremist vitriol. One such sheikh, the leader of a popular Sufi sect, was denounced as decadent and corrupt when he failed to reprimand his followers for drinking liquor and wearing revealing clothes. Gomaa's ideas were countercultural, but his lifestyle was orthodox: he refrained from physical contact with women outside his family, encouraged abstinence before marriage for both sexes, and could often be seen walking with his prayer beads in hand, counting them methodically. Wahhabi extremists had no choice but to keep quiet; any public criticism of Gomaa would have jeopardized their credibility on the Egyptian street."
Work with Jihadi Prisoners
Gomaa has told American journalist Lawrence Wright that he worked with Islamic Group prisoners who later embraced the "Nonviolence Initiative" and denounced violence. "I began going into the prisons in the 1990s.... We had debates and dialogues with the prisoners, which continued for more than three years. Such debates became the nucleus for the revisionist thinking."Grand Mufti
Ali Gomaa was appointed Grand Mufti in late September 2003. by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, replacing former Mufti Mohamed Ahmed El-Tayeb. El-Tayeb was appointed Al-Azhar University president, taking over from Ahmed Omar Hashem.His office, the Dar al Ifta, a government agency charged with issuing religious legal opinions on any question to Muslims who ask for them, issued some 5,000 fatwas a week, including both official ones, which he would personally work on, about important issues and more routine ones handled via phone and Internet by a dozen or so subordinate muftis.
Conclusion of term
Despite having a one-year extension of his term because of the political situation in post-revolutionary Egypt, Gomaa's term was allowed to expire. A committee decided Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam to be the Mufti's successor.Views
On selling pork and alcohol in the West and 'non-Muslim countries'
In a fatwa issued by Dar-al-ifta, approved and signed by Ali Gomaa, the Egyptian Mufti stated that selling pork and alcohol is permitted in the West because "it is allowed taking the opinion of the scholars from the Hanafi madhhab, who allow to deal with wrong contracts in non-Muslim countries."Another justification was that the Prophet let his uncle Al-‘Abbas ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib take usury in Mecca when it was a non-Muslim city, and he did not prohibit him except in the year of the Farewell Pilgrimage.
During the fatwa, which was a reply to a question from a Muslim in Europe asking about whether it would be allowed for him to work in stores that sell alcohol and pork along with other products because he cannot find another job, Gomaa mentioned the terms "Dar-al-Harb" and "Ahl al-Harb" several times, and he gave a response that not only dealt with what the questioner had asked but also considered further points such as the taking of interest and gambling.
On female circumcision
Since taking office, Gomaa issued a number of fatwas and statements that have made an impact in the media. He has issued a fatwa asserting that men and women enjoy equal political rights in Islam, including the right to become president of a modern state.He recently stated on national television that it is permissible in Islam for a woman to have hymen restoration surgery for any reason since Islam promotes protecting one's privacy and reputation and does not require a woman to provide proof of her virginity.
In November 2006, he ruled that female circumcision should not be applied; this ruling is in accordance with Egyptian law, which also forbids female circumcision. This ruling came about after a conference instigated by research and a documentary on FGM in Somalia by the German action group Target. The fatwa is now also used in Western Europe to combat FGM.
On 24 June 2007, after an 11-year-old died under the knife undergoing circumcision, he decreed that female circumcision was not just "un-Islamic" but forbidden.
Views on women
Gomaa has asserted that women are the spiritual equals of men, which he says is repeated in the Quran and words of the Prophet Muhammad. He mentioned that "Al Jeeli, one of the great thinkers of Islam, learned the Hadith from fifty female sheikhs...Fifty female sheikhs! And yet there are those who deny that women have equal spiritual status in Islam. This is a disgrace."Gomaa has also asserted that women have the right to divorce their husbands. He stated in an article in "The Atlantic" that dubbed Gomaa "The Show-Me Sheikh", "Show me where it says in the Koran or the Sunna that a woman is obligated to cook, or that she can't ask for a divorce. Those listening are often left speechless, because no such support exists within canonical Islamic texts."
Gomaa has stated that the hijab is obligatory, but that woman who do not wear it are committing a minor sin as opposed to a major sin. He asserted that this is something known amongst the scholars, and that the only people who consider it a major sin are those not rooted in knowledge. He stated that missing the prayer is a major sin, and that the sin of not wearing hijab pales in relation to the obligation of prayer.
In responding to a modernist who said that covering hair is not mandatory for women, Gomaa responded that the modernist had misunderstood the words of 19th century Egyptian scholar, Qasim Amin. He stated to him that he has not read a word of Amin, and that Amin was referring to niqab—the veil that covers the face—and not the hijab that covers the hair. Gomaa has stated that it is known that is not permissible for a woman to cover her face, and that Salafists use this as a pretext to control and declare faithless other Muslims.
As Grand Mufti of Egypt, Gomaa issued a fatwa that women can be judges, even as secular judges rejected this notion.
According to Dr James Dorsey of Nanyang Technological University, "Gomaa asserted in 2015 that women did not have the strength to become heart surgeons, serve in the military, or engage in sports likes soccer, body building, wrestling and weightlifting. A year later, Gomaa issued a fatwa declaring writer Sherif El-Shobashy an infidel for urging others to respect a woman’s choice on whether or not to wear the veil." His reasoning was that the obligation of the hijab is known in the religion from necessity, and that anyone who denies something known in the religion by necessity is a disbeliever.