American Footprints » Egypt

Tantawi Dies

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:20:58 +0000

This morning saw the death of Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, head of al-Azhar University, considered the world’s foremost seat of Sunni Islamic learning. Issandr El Amrani has an excellent overview of his career:

“Tantawi leaves a mixed legacy behind him: overall, the immediate verdict may be that he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows. The overall image is of a man besieged on all sides, but adept at fighting bureaucratic battles in the bloated, clerical civil service that al-Azhar has become.”

The whole piece is worth reading for its detail and local insight. As a historian, of course, I’m interested in what the Tantawi era meant for al-Azhar’s development as an institution. El Amrani touches upon this:

“He leaves behind an unreformed al-Azhar — an institution that includes a university and a school system as well as a theological center — whose credibility has hit rock-bottom. This may be because Tantawi was too pliant towards the regime, or because of the growth of various trends in contemporary Islam that reject al-Azhar’s centrality. While the Muslim Brothers dream of restoring al-Azhar to its former (imagined?) glories, Salafists and groups like the Quranists would do away with its mediation of religion altogether. The debate over al-Azhar and the trahison des clercs is far from over. Whoever replaces him — perhaps Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, another tentative modernizer — will have much work to repair al-Azhar’s standing and its vitality as a place of learning. It will also have to make difficult political decisions, especially on the issue of presidential succession, at a time when clerics are beginning to voice an opinion on the prospect of a Gamal Mubarak presidency.”

I suspect that the standard interpretation will be that Tantawi was the regime’s man by Midan Husayn. He was essentially Mubarak’s agent as Egypt’s Chief Mufti, and his reformist views should be seen in that light – not that they were necessarily insincere, but simply that they were what the regime wanted and Tantawi saw nothing wrong with allying himself with the government. This alliance, of course, may in some circles have hurt his message’s credibility as well as his own.

When I think of al-Azhar, however, I think beyond Egypt. I’ve seen Al-Azhar called the “Sunni Muslim Vatican,” but that’s a terrible analogy, as no formalized hierarchy establishes its position. A better analogy would be an Islamic Harvard in a tradition that emphasizes religious learning. Its status is based on multiple perceived indicators which are not necessarily directly tied to the quality of the education one gets there. Yet just as a Harvard degree carries cachet regardless of higher education gossip about the quality of the ivies vis a vis, say, the top tier of liberal arts schools in the U.S. Walking around al-Azhar, you can’t help but notice students from throughout the Muslim world, who will return to their countries with the prestige of an al-Azhar degree.

Of course, El Amrani is right that an assault on the ulama’s privileged authority in religious interpretation has been a key element of both liberal and conservative Islamic reform movements throughout the world since the 1800′s. In her excellent 1999 International Journal of Middle East Studies article “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952-94),” Malika Zeghal addressed some shifts in the construction of religious education, but didn’t really tackle of extent to which Azhari claims to continued authority were accepted by the Egyptian public, much less how the issues with its administration and politicization have affected its stature around the world. The experiences of its students and their affect on their own communities are as much a part of al-Azhar in the world as is its moral authority in the Nile Valley.

(Crossposted to my blog)

Engaging the Muslim World: Muslim Activism, Muslim Radicalism

Brian Ulrich — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:58:26 +0000

The second chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World tells the story of two organizations, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which are vastly different but yet too often conflated in American minds. He portrays the Muslim Brotherhood as a critical component of Egypt’s political landscape which the United States needs to engage if it is serious about democratic reform in the Arab world, while arguing that al-Qaeda is not only a minor group in the larger scheme of things, but a spent force. In fact, he says that, “The September 11 operation…was the flailing about of aging revolutionaries banished to camps in the rugged wastelands of failed states.”

Much of the first half of the chapter is taken up with a history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which places its origins in the context of the Egyptian and Arab nationalist movements of the early 20th century, and traces it through the Nasser era and into the present as its relations with the government, organizational structure and activities, and attitude toward violence fluctuates over time. He also addresses the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, whose thinking was never accepted by most Islamists, let alone most Muslims, but has become important in terrorist circles.

Many of the innovations in this chapter concern terminology, and a common thread is that, by positing a normative Islam, Cole then denies the use of Islamic terminology to al-Qaeda and similar organizations. With the base term of “Islamic,” Cole asserts early that because it refers to the ideals of the religion, it cannot modify “terrorism,” and much of the chapter can be read as a defense of how terrorist activities are contrary to Islam as understood by most Muslims. He also replaces “Salafi Jihadis” with “fundamentalist vigilantes” by reference to standard theological definitions of “salafi” and “jihad.” This feels chancier, as Thomas Hegghammer, in trying to cull labels for these phenomena from Arabic sources, found that “jihadi salafi” today refers in practice to transnational fundamentalist militants. Cole also makes a strong case for seeing the militant Islamist movements as cults, of which his core definition is, “a religious group characterized by values that put it in severe tension with the outside society, and organized so as to demand very high levels of obedience and conformity to the cult leader.”

In laying out his view of al-Qaeda as a desperate force, Cole places emphasis on the defeat of Egypt’s internal terrorists in the 1990′s, which led Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden to shift their focus to the United States as the “far enemy.” A few pages later he mentions Egyptian dominance of al-Qaeda leadership. He also defines al-Qaeda narrowly as only those fighters who have pledged loyalty to Bin Laden. I happen to agree that al-Qaeda is falling apart, but I can’t draw these connections so neatly given the multiple theaters of “fundamentalist vigilante” activity, and I’m also interested in the possible “banner definition” of al-Qaeda which the index suggests may be addressed in future chapters.

Cole also assigns Israel a crucial role for both the Muslim Brotherood and al-Qaeda. I don’t know much about the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930′s, but Cole’s assigning it a role in the MB’s activities during that period fits the general picture I have of Arab politics during that decade. As far as al-Qaeda is concerned, he refers to Muhammad Atta’s radicalization by the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1996 called Operation Grapes of Wrath, and particularly the Qana debacle, and also cites Flagg Miller’s work on al-Qaeda documents retrieved from Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government. I’ve been someone inclined to downplay the Israeli role for al-Qaeda, but found all this convincing.

Cole’s most controversial conclusion is likely to be his comparison between the Islamic militants and the far right in the United States represented by Timothy McVeigh and other fringe figures from the 1990′s. I find that, frankly, a perfectly good analogy. I hope, however, that with such groups starting to resurface now that an African-American Democrat is in the White House, Cole doesn’t get any more material for future commentary along those lines.

Engaging the Muslim World: The Struggle for Islamic Oil

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:59:51 +0000

I’m finally reading Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, and because of the competing demands on my time and the book’s range of topics, I’ve decided to respond to it chapter by chapter. The first chapter, “The Struggle for Islamic Oil: The Truth about Energy Independence,” hits what I suspect will be a common theme throughout the book: That the United States and the Islamic world have little choice but to work together constructively in common areas of interest if both are to prosper.

The chapter’s subtitle comes from Cole’s argument that U.S. energy independence simply isn’t in the cards in the near term, as it can only be sustainably guaranteed by solar power, which cannot reach its potential until problems of cost and storage are resolved. One might quibble here that Cole does not do justice to possible combinations of different energy sources and degrees of independence, but his main point is undeniable: For the foreseeable future, the United States and the rest of the world will depend on fossil fuels for most of their energy, and those fossil fuels will come predominantly from countries with Muslim majorities.

Cole’s book is directed primarily at an American audience, and an audience of the interested general public, at that, so he doesn’t spend much time taking apart the phrase “Islamic oil” which titles the chapter, preferring instead to make his major points simply and effectively before moving on. Cole therefore bypasses the issue of what sense, if any, energy supplied by Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan deserve to be called “Islamic oil” and focuses almost exclusively on the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. One might, however, shake loose the point that by joining OPEC, the Arab Gulf states went against the hopes of Arab nationalists such as Nasser, placing their own national economic interests above the pan-Arab concerns that animated the original “Arab street” whose specter analysts continue to invoke. Oil his not been a barrier to relations between the U.S. and these states, but rather the major bond, with the U.S. guaranteeing the regimes’ stability and independence to safeguard the free flow of oil, and frequently adopting what Americans consider the “moderate” line on foreign affairs to help maintain that alliance and the goodwill of their customer base. In Cole’s brief discussion of sanctions, one might go even further in discussing U.S. aid to Egypt and the economic benefits Egypt and Jordan get under the Qualifying Industrial Zone protocol to highlight the ways in which the U.S. has used economic carrots and sticks to create relations of dependence which are similar to those it has with the oil-producing Gulf states.

Cole’s historical background for the oil industry in the Middle East is important reading, and contextualizes the current tensions over oil prices and profits, as well as highlighting the ways in which the geopolitics of oil has shaped American policy in the Persian Gulf since the British withdrawal in 1971. It does, however, contain an error when he states that, “Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and was administered indirectly through the governor of Basra Province, in what is now Iraq.” When Baghdad governor Midhat Pasha asserted Ottoman claims to northern Arabia in the 1870′s, he did include Kuwait, but the Kuwaiti agreement to call themselves part of the Ottoman Empire depended on the Ottomans never actually doing anything. According to Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf Midhat Pasha’s agreement with Kuwait implied only “patronage and protection.” The Ottomans stationed no officers there, collected no taxes or fees, and did not intervene in local affairs, although Kuwait’s rulers occasionally supported them militarily. The deeper connections were economic, with Kuwaitis owning agricultural land in southern Iraq, which they continued to do deep into the 20th century. Jill Crystal has written of the role this played in the 1938 Majlis Movement, when both Iraq’s King Ghazi and some Kuwaiti merchants were interested in union between Kuwait and Iraq. Altogether, the relationship between Kuwait and the Ottoman Empire, even in the late 1800′s, does not fit that of a modern nation-state, but of a premodern agrarian empire with a tribally organized periphery.

That aside, Cole is right in pointing to the common threats faced by the United States and Muslim oil producers, such as global warming and the potential for resource wars as the demand for fossil fuels may surpass the available supply. These are challenges that can only be addressed by accepting interdependence and working toward commonly beneficial solutions.