Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (also Mohammed Sayyed Tantawy , Arabic محمد سيد طنطاوي, DMG Muḥammad Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī ; * October 28, 1928 in Salim Scharqiyya , Egypt ; † March 10, 2010 in Riyadh , Saudi Arabia ) was Sheikh of Azhar .

Life

After visiting the al-Iskandariyya Institute studied Tantawi 1958 at the al-Azhar University , the Usul al-Din (about: Fundamentals of Religion), where he made 1959 its conclusion.

Tantawi then worked for the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Affairs until 1964 and then switched to teaching at al-Azhar University. In 1966 he received his doctorate there with his work The People of Israel in the Koran and in the Sunna .

From 1972 to 1976 he taught at the Islamic University of Libya and then moved back to al-Azhar University, where he became dean of the faculty for Usul ad-Din . After teaching at the universities of Medina (1980 to 1984) and Basra (1985), Tantawi was appointed Dean of the Azhar Faculty for Islamic Studies and Arabic Language, and on October 28, 1986, Grand Mufti of Egypt .

On March 17, 1996, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi was elected Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar University. As such, he was also the imam of the al-Azhar mosque and was considered the supreme religious authority of Sunni Islam .

On February 24, 2000, he met Pope John Paul II .

In November 2008, Tantawi met Israeli President Shimon Peres at a UN conference on intercultural dialogue in New York and shook hands with him. The publication of a corresponding photo provoked angry reactions from the Egyptian public - the media and Islamist politicians in Egypt called for the Sunni cleric to be removed from office. After the hostility that went as far as the accusation of “treason”, Tantawi justified the handshake as an oversight: “I shook his hand without knowing how he looked. This handshake was only very, very briefly, in passing because I hadn't recognized him at first ”.

On March 10, 2010, Tantawi died of heart failure while visiting Saudi Arabia.

Positions

In the West, Tantawi was considered a liberal among Islamic legal scholars. He criticized the Taliban 's policy on women . Preacher, he also no longer to call Jews and Christians as "descendants of apes and pigs," asked, and condemned after the attacks of September 11 and Beslan to terrorism as "un-Islamic". The attacks can in no way be justified by Islam, according to Tantawi, and the jihad should only be used in defense. In 2003 , he explicitly recognized the right of the French state to ban the headscarf in public schools and declared that although it was the duty of a Muslim to wear the veil, Muslim schoolgirls should choose the lesser evil and obey the law.

However, he described all those who support the State of Israel as "legitimate targets" for acts of violence. In his doctoral thesis, The People of Israel in the Koran and in the Sunna , published in 1968/69 , which is regarded as the standard work among Arabs, he wrote that consuming non-Jewish blood was a religious rite of the Jews .

Tantawi campaigned in 1998 for the book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics by Roger Garaudy , which denies the Holocaust , which was nevertheless banned in France (confirmed by the European Court of Justice in 2003).

In contrast to earlier statements that did not recognize the Palestinian suicide bombings as martyrdom , Tantawi declared in 2002 that they were legitimate as a defensive maneuver and should be intensified. He was responding to the prevailing opinion among scholars at al-Azhar University and "corrected" his original judgment.

In contrast, Tantawi was less popular in the Muslim world. He was accused of being too dependent on the Egyptian government under Hosni Mubarak , who had appointed him. The proximity to Mubarak earned him the nickname as-Sayyid bil-OK , which means something like "man of the okay". His comparatively moderate criticism of the USA during the Iraq conflict met with strong rejection in the Islamic world.

In October 2009, Tantawi asked a student at the Islamic al-Azhar University in the Egyptian capital Cairo to remove the niqab , the face veil. According to Tantawi, this type of covering is only a tradition and does not represent an Islamic duty for devout Muslims. He then ordered the wearing of the niqab to be banned by a decree in all institutions of al-Azhar.

various

He was one of the signatories to the Amman Embassy . He was one of the 24 personalities who wrote a fatwa (legal opinion).

literature

• Safaa M. Afifi El-Sheikh: Western Churches in the Image of Contemporary Egyptian and Arab Religious Scholars: A Contribution to the Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI. (Doctorate from HU zu Berlin) Dissertation to obtain the academic degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 ( Online ; PDF; 1.8 MB) (see p. 104 ff .: The positions on interreligious dialogue by Dr. Sayyid Tantawi)

Web links

• Islam means humanity , interview with SPIEGEL “on Islamic orthodoxy, religious fundamentalism and the West”, Jan. 13, 1997

swell

1. ↑ The curriculum vitae of the Grand Sheikh Dr. Mohammad Sayyid Tantawi, Al-Azhar website ( Memento of the original from August 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ The Holy See : Jubilee Pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, 2000 February 24, 2000
3. ↑ See illustration on the blog "View of the world - from Beer Sheva"
4. ↑ "Egypt Top Cleric Says Unaware He Shook Israeli Leader's Hand", NASDAQ.COM December 2, 2008 Archived copy ( memento of the original from December 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Al Jazeera Deutsch Al-Azhar head dies in Saudi Arabia, March 10, 2010
6. ↑ "In the Empire of Just Faith" , SPIEGEL Online, Feb. 9, 2006
7. ↑ Nordbruch ( Memento of the original from December 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ taz: Niqab or not Niqab? , Quatara.de: Dispute over face veils in Egypt ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ faz.net: "Headscarf dispute on the Nile" faz.net, October 13, 2009
10. ↑ see ammanmessage.com: Fatwa .