Muhammad al-Hamid

Muhammad al-Hamid

Muhammad al-Hamid ( Arabic محمد الحامد, DMG Muḥammad al-Ḥāmid ; * 1910 in Hama , Syria ; † 1969 in Hama) was a Syrian Islamist activist. He was the leader of the Nakschibendi order in Hama and founded a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood there .

biography

Muhammad al-Hamid was born in 1910 in Hama, which at that time belonged to the Ottoman Empire . He came from a strictly religious family. His father was the head of the local Nakschibendi order and his mother belonged to an influential dynasty of religious scholars . At the age of six, Muhammad lost both of his parents in quick succession. His brother Badr ad-Din, who had taken on responsibility for the family, made sure that he could continue to attend school. In 1928 he moved to Aleppo , where he continued his religious education, and returned to his hometown in 1935. In 1938 he went to Egypt , where he studied Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo . He specialized in Islamic jurisprudence and was approved to serve as a kadi .

During his stay in Egypt he made the acquaintance of Hasan al-Bannā , the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood , and became his adviser. At the same time he got to know Mustafā as-Sibāʿī and decided to introduce the Muslim Brotherhood after his return to Syria. In 1942 he returned to Hama, where he worked as a judge, religion teacher and political activist. In his sermons in the Sultan Mosque, the main mosque of Hama, he turned against the French mandate power and advocated jihad to end colonialism . After the end of the French mandate in 1946, he mobilized soldiers to fight the Jewish yishuv in Palestine . He wanted to take part in the Palestine War, but was stopped by leading Muslim clergy in Hama. In the early 1950s he tried to convince his students to join the Syrian army in order to prevent a complete takeover of power by the socialist Akram al-Haurani .

In addition to his political views, al-Hamid was primarily active as a preacher and teacher. He was sheikh of the Nakshibendi order in Hama, teacher at the largest middle school in the city, which is named after Ibn Rushd , and gave evening religious instruction in the Sultan's mosque, which was very popular. One of his most important supporters became the activist Sa'id Hawwa . In his speeches, al-Hamid combated the secularization that had prevailed in Syria since the 1950s and emphasized the importance of the Koran . Even Hanafit , he called for tolerance among the various Islamic law schools .

In the last years of his life, al-Hamid saw the rise of the Ba'ath Party . In negotiations with the Syrian authorities, he sought the release of prisoners and the possible return of refugees. He died in Hama in 1969.

literature

• Itzchak Weismann : Sa'id Hawwa: the making of a radical Muslim thinker in modern Syria . London, Routledge 2007. ( Online )
• Itzchak Weismann: Sa'id Hawwa and Islamic Revivalism in Ba'thist Syria . Studia Islamica No. 85, 1997, pp. 131-154. ( Online )

Individual evidence

1. ^ I. Weismann: Sa'id Hawwa