Ali Gomaa

Ali Gomaa is an Egyptian scholar and jurist born in Beni Suef, Upper Egypt, on 3 March 1952. He was the eighteenth Grand Mufti of Egypt, heading Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah from late September 2003 until 2013. ^{1 2}

Gomaa specialises in Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh), follows the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence and the Ash'ari school of creed, and is a Sufi. ¹ A 2008 U.S. News & World Report report and The National considered him a respected Islamic jurist, and The New Yorker called him "a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam"; in later years, Western academic observers described him as a supporter of authoritarian forms of government. ¹

Ali Gomaa was born in the province of Beni Suef in Upper Egypt on 3 March 1952, corresponding to 7 Jumada al-Akhirah 1371 AH. ¹ His father was a lawyer; Gomaa told Al-Ahram Weekly that he was greatly influenced by him, having watched him stand up for what he believed was right, unafraid of the powers that be. ¹

He finished high school in 1969 and enrolled at Ain Shams University in Cairo, having already begun to memorise the Quran; he studied hadith and Shafi'i jurisprudence in his free time while at university. ¹ He received a B.Comm. from Ain Shams in 1973, then enrolled at al-Azhar University, where he took a second bachelor's degree, then an M.A., and finally a PhD with highest honours in juristic methodology (usul al-fiqh) in 1988. ¹ Because he had not gone through the al-Azhar high-school curriculum, he spent his first year at the college studying and memorising all the basic texts his fellow students had already covered. ¹

Gomaa taught in the faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies at al-Azhar University from the time he received his M.A. until his appointment as Grand Mufti, first as an assistant professor and then as a full professor, teaching creed, Quranic exegesis, hadith, legal theory and Islamic history. ¹

In 1998 he revived the tradition of open classes held in a mosque, teaching a circle of students six days a week from after sunrise until noon, saying that he wanted people to continue reading the classical texts as they were written, not as people want to understand them. ¹ Also from 1998, he gave the Friday sermon at Cairo's Sultan Hassan Mosque, followed by a short lesson in jurisprudence for the general public and a question-and-answer session. ¹ The Atlantic reported that his sermons and lessons drew a following from Cairo's religious middle class: entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, bankers and engineers. ¹

In the 1990s, as he told the American journalist Lawrence Wright, he went into Egyptian prisons for debates and dialogues with Islamic Group prisoners that continued for more than three years; those debates became the nucleus of the revisionist thinking behind the "Nonviolence Initiative" in which those prisoners renounced violence. ¹

Gomaa was appointed Grand Mufti in late September 2003 by President Hosni Mubarak, succeeding Ahmed el-Tayeb, who moved to the presidency of al-Azhar University. ¹ Under him, Dar al-Ifta issued some 5,000 fatwas a week, including official ones he worked on personally concerning important issues and routine ones handled by phone and internet by about a dozen subordinate muftis. ¹ His term was extended by one year in March 2011 because of the post-revolution situation; a committee chose Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam as his successor in February 2013, and he left the office in March 2013. ¹

On 5 August 2016, Gomaa survived an assassination attempt: two masked gunmen on a motorcycle fired at him as he walked to Fadel Mosque in the Sixth of October district. He was unharmed, one of his bodyguards was slightly wounded, and the Hasm Movement claimed responsibility for the attack. ¹

His public work rested on mass fatwa-giving and open teaching rather than a single television programme: alongside Dar al-Ifta's weekly fatwas by phone and internet, his statements and rulings were carried on national television, including his statement on television that it is permissible in Islam for a woman to have hymen restoration surgery for any reason, since Islam protects privacy and reputation and does not require a woman to provide proof of her virginity. ^{1 2}

He issued a fatwa asserting that men and women enjoy equal political rights in Islam, including the right of a woman to become president of a modern state, and that women can be judges. ¹ He speaks fluent English and was a former chairman of al-Azhar University's Islamic Jurisprudence Department. ¹

Gomaa chairs the board of trustees of Misr El Kheir Foundation, a major Egyptian development and charity foundation. Among its campaigns is "Zakat al-Gharimin", launched with the United Bank and the Ministry of Interior to free prisoners jailed over small financial sums; under him the foundation also cooperated with the Ministry of International Cooperation on small projects in Upper Egypt, Sinai and the New Valley. ³

This section should be read as a presentation of differing positions reported in the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

His supporters: Supporters see him as one of the most explicitly anti-extremist clerics in mainstream Sunni Islam. In September 2014 he was, alongside 226 other prominent Sunni scholars, a signatory to an open letter denouncing the Islamic State (ISIL) and its religious tenets, and he has said that terrorism cannot be born of religion and that terrorists are criminals, not Muslim activists. ¹ In November 2006 he ruled that female circumcision should not be applied, and on 24 June 2007, after an eleven-year-old girl died under the knife, he decreed that female circumcision was not just un-Islamic but forbidden; the fatwa is also used in Western Europe to combat the practice. ¹ He has publicly asserted that the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery, and made an official court complaint concerning a publisher who falsely put his name on an introduction to its Arabic translation. ¹

His critics: His 2006 ruling on sculptures angered artists and intellectuals in Egypt, who said his ban on producing and displaying sculptures overturned a century-old fatwa and feared extremists might use it as a pretext for destroying Egypt's antiquities; Jay Tolson defended him, noting that Gomaa made clear that destroying antiquities and public statues was unacceptable and indeed criminal, and had deplored the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. ¹ On apostasy, Gomaa told The Washington Post in 2007, unequivocally, that the death penalty for apostasy simply no longer applies; Gulf News later reported his clarifications distinguishing changing one's faith from its punishment, and in a statement posted on his website in 2009 he said he does not believe apostasy is punishable by death. ¹

The sharpest criticism concerned his position on the 2013 coup in Egypt. David H. Warren of the University of Edinburgh described him as one of "the most prominent supporters of the coup and its bloody aftermath"; Usaama al-Azami of the University of Oxford reported that Gomaa told the army shortly before the Rabaa massacre that they "should not hesitate to kill those who oppose them"; and Mohammad Fadel of the University of Toronto wrote that he exhorted the armed forces, in a sermon before its senior leadership, to kill supporters of the deposed president. ¹ Gomaa's supporters and a number of sheikhs responded that these statements were taken completely out of context: the speech was given four days after the Rabaa events, was addressed to soldiers to encourage them in their war against terrorism and those carrying arms against the military, especially in Sinai, and the full video is posted on YouTube so its context can be seen. ¹

The article credits Gomaa with more than fifty books and hundreds of articles. Among his works on legal theory are Alaqah Usul al-Fiqh bil-Falsafah, Aliyat al-Ijtihad, al-Bayan, al-Hukm al-Shar'i, al-Ijma' ind al-Usuliyyin, al-Imam al-Shafi'i wa-Madrasatuhu al-Fiqhiyyah, al-Madkhal ila Dirasah al-Madhahib al-Fiqhiyyah, Qadiyyah Tajdid Usul al-Fiqh and al-Qiyas ind al-Usuliyyin. ¹ His general works include al-Tariq ila al-Turath al-Islami (Nahdat Misr, 2004), al-Din wa-l-Hayah: al-Fatawa al-Asriyyah al-Yawmiyyah (2004), al-Kalim al-Tayyib: Fatawa Asriyyah (Dar al-Salam, 2005), al-Mar'ah fi al-Hadarah al-Islamiyyah (2006), al-Tariq ila Allah (2007) and Aqidat Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jama'ah (2011). ¹ He studied under many Azhari and other scholars, among them Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki and Jad al-Haqq Ali Jad al-Haqq. ¹

He is married and has three adult children; the museum does not publish family detail beyond what understanding his work requires. ¹

The sources describe an influence exercised through an institution as much as through a person: in his years Dar al-Ifta issued thousands of fatwas a week to questioners in Egypt and abroad by phone and internet, and his open lessons and sermons at Sultan Hassan Mosque gathered a broad Cairene middle-class audience six days a week. ¹ His official accounts and websites reach a wide online audience; such figures change constantly, and the museum records them only with a date. ²

• The defined sources cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.