Before we dissect that, it’s important to place the Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most pre-eminent educational institution worldwide, into its current context. It’s not without its challenges, as my colleague Nathan Brown and I explored in a recent Foreign Affairs article and Carnegie Endowment piece. Be that as it may, when Ahmad al-Tayyib, known as Shaykh al-Azhar, delves into public discussions, people listen.
Al-Tayyib sits at the head of the Azhar establishment – the historic mosque, the university, and its wide network of Azhar-affiliated schools in Egypt and internationally. Islam does not admit a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure like Catholicism, so it is misleading to describe al-Tayyib as ‘Islam’s Pope’ – but he remains deeply significant. As such, when institutions like the Vatican engage with the Muslim community, the corresponding institution is the Azhar – hence why it was with al-Tayyib that Pope Francis engaged with in signing the document on ‘Human Fraternity’ last year.
Many conferences are held by the Azhar establishment: on battling female genital mutilation; extremism and terrorism; interfaith dialogue, and so forth. In terms of widespread attention, they do not receive much. This recent conference, on the ‘renewal of religious discourse’, would probably have received the same – except it didn’t.
As mentioned, Al-Tayyib made a political intervention towards the end of his comment. It was preceded by poignantly pointing out that despite all the educational efforts that Azhar and other educational establishments in Egypt had pursued, they still couldn’t make locally produced car parts – indicating al-Tayyib’s sense of disappointment that Egypt is not more self-sufficient. His frank declaration that the ‘Arab and Muslim character’ is essentially absent today was a general critique of the state of the Arab world and Muslims worldwide – including, one presumes, its rulers.
But it was the defence of scholastic Sunni tradition – which one can read as a subtle indictment of the suggestion that tradition is somehow the source of problems facing Muslims – that made up the bulk of Shaykh al-Azhar’s comment. At the conference, the president of Cairo University made a number of claims vis-à-vis the ‘turath’ (tradition) of Sunni Islamic intellectual thought, particularly with regards to Ash’arism, which is the main scholastic theological perspective at the heart of Sunni Islam. A number of the religious scholars present expressed acrimony towards the claims, seeing as he made rather ahistorical assumptions, alongside a general broadside at what he saw as the tradition’s lack of renewal against the background of modernity. That fits very well into the overall ‘renewal of religious discourse’ narrative in Egypt at present.