In Egypt, two foundations have been created to promote two radically different interpretations of the renewal of the Islamic discourse. The ensuing controversy, which has also involved a bishop, allows for a reflection on the parallels between Islam and Christianity
Last update: 2024-09-10 10:51:06
Ever since the expression was rehabilitated at the start of al-Sisi’s presidency, many voices in Egypt have called for a renewal of the Islamic discourse. Over the time, this has spawned a series of cases which have been given wide media coverage. They include, just to mention two examples, the debate between the Grand Imam of al-Azhar and the president of Cairo University in 2020 and, in 2015, the broadcast of the television program With Islam, hosted by the reformist thinker Islam al-Behairy, followed by its immediate suspension. The issue has recently returned to the spotlight and, for the first time, has involved the Coptic Church.
Update vs Rethink
To understand the points of contention, it is important to clarify that the umbrella term “renewal” covers two very different cultural projects. The first is better defined as an aggiornamento, an update. It aims at addressing a few specific norms in classical Islamic law to bring them more into line with the current social situation. For example, al-Sisi has attempted, without success, to abolish verbal repudiation, demanding that there always be a written declaration.[1] He had better luck with the law regulating the construction of places of worship, which for decades had created tensions with the Coptic minority. Still in the spirit of this renewal-update, the state promotes a social and media climate that is generally more tolerant of diversity.
However, for a group of more impassioned intellectuals, these are only modest palliatives to the deep crisis that is besetting Arab and Islamic societies. From their perspective, renewal means something rather different: a radical rethinking of the entire tradition in the light of the illuminist project. In addition to a contextual reading of the Qur’an, aimed at extracting its fundamental ethical principles, many of these thinkers, like Islam al-Behairy himself or the well-known journalist Ibrahim Issa, are specifically targeting the hadīth, the sayings and the deeds attributed to the Prophet of Islam, which together make up the Sunnah or “tradition,” the second and most important source of Islamic law.
That some of these sayings are spurious is something Muslim scholars have always known. For example, it is reported that the great ninth-century traditionist al-Bukhari reviewed six hundred thousand hadīth, authenticating only seven thousand of them. Nevertheless, whereas for the ulamas the sifting has already been done, once and for all, by the great scholars of the early centuries, like al-Bukhari himself or his contemporary Muslim, for the reformists the entire issue needs to be re-examined from scratch. And this should be done not on a point-by-point basis, but rather through a paradigm shift that interprets the whole hadīth corpus as an expression of the concerns of the Islamic community in the second and third centuries of the Hijra, rather than as evidence of the actions and thought of the Prophet of Islam. This is a thesis that is also well-known in biblical studies. Applied to Islam, it would lead to reconsider not this or that norm, but the entire edifice of the shariah and a considerable part of the Muslim creed. Incidentally, a fairly similar program was formulated by Muhammad Bin Salman as part of Saudi Vision 2030.[2]
Early this year, the main advocates of the revisionist approach set up a foundation, which they chose to call Takwīn, “construction,” or more precisely Takwīn al-fikr al-‘arabī “construction of Arabic thought”. The name is certainly apt, because their approach is undoubtedly constructionist (or de-constructionist, to be more precise). As stated on the foundation’s website, the goal of Takwīn is indeed “to place Arab culture and thought within new conceptual frameworks […], in order to reformulate our relationship with the religious heritage.”
In response, in May of this year Sheikh Usama al-Azhari announced the establishment of a rival foundation, called Ta’sīl, an equally apt name meaning “rootedness”, “return to the roots”, i.e. the sources, interpreted according to the methods of classical Islamic sciences. As his name suggests, al-Azhari is a scholar at the al-Azhar university-mosque, where he teaches hadīth, logic, and foundations of religion, a subject similar to Christian dogmatic theology. But above all, he is advisor to President al-Sisi on Islam-related issues, and in July he was appointed minister of awqāf, the Islamic religious endowments. This seemingly surprising fact—after all, the entire renewal process was set in motion by al-Sisi himself—can be read in two, not necessarily contradictory, ways. It could either signal that the reformists have gone too far in their proposals, or it could be a reworking of a well-established strategy by the Egyptian state: that of supporting mutually incompatible positions—al-ra’y wa-l-ra’y al-ākhar, “the opinion and the counter opinion,” to quote a well-known Al-Jazeera’s format—to act as arbiter in the disputes that inevitably ensue.
Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the birth of these two foundations marks a step forward. Now the two camps are quite distinct and their respective positions clear: (de)construction vs. return to the sources. Of course, the subject is an extremely sensitive one and the specter of takfīr, or accusation of unbelief, hovers in the background. For instance, in a recent film, The Guest (2018), Ibrahim Issa imagined his own assassination attempt by a Salafi. Sadly, this possibility cannot be entirely discarded: one has just to think back to the case of Farag Foda in the early 1990s.[3] Yet, as long as dissent remains within the realm of verbal skirmishes between the two positions, however crude, this debate certainly enriches the cultural scene.
A Bishop Enters the Fray
It was on this basis that Usama al-Azhari threw down the gauntlet to Takwīn in mid-May, inviting four of the most prominent names in the foundation, Islam al-Behairy, Ibrahim Issa, the writer Youssef Ziedan, and the poetess Fatima Naoot, to a “great dispute.” Quite unusually, in his challenge message al-Azhari called for the support of “the Christian brothers.” Just as Muslims—the sheikh argued—are deeply troubled by the reformist appeals to follow the Qur’an alone and reject the tradition of the Prophet, so too would Christians (Copts) disagree with a call to rely solely on the Gospel, bypassing the tradition of the Church. Taking the idea to the extreme, the intellectuals of Takwīn are, in short, the Protestants of Islam and al-Azhar is the Church of the Muslims. In order to add substance to his statement, al-Azhari also added that he had phoned Bishop Ermia and received his support. And indeed, Anba Ermia immediately posted a statement on his Facebook page saying that “we all work to protect the fundamental elements of faith as we received them, without making any changes. This is why we strongly reject and do not accept the denial of the noble Sunnah and the ecclesial tradition.”
Anba Ermia is a prominent figure in the Coptic Church. He is general bishop and president of the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center of Cairo. He is also assistant secretary-general of the Egyptian Family House, an institution conceived by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar immediately after the 2011 uprisings to advance mutual understanding between Muslims and Copts. Therefore, it is no surprise that his statement stirred controversy among the ranks of the Coptic faithful and other Christians as well. Some, like the controversial polemicist Brother Rachid, a Moroccan convert from Islam who presents popular programs on al-Hayat TV, have accused the bishop of “dhimmitude”, the inferiority complex that Arab Christians are said to have internalized after more than 1,400 years of Muslim hegemony. More light-heartedly, numerous memes have popped up on Facebook showcasing the proverbial Egyptian sense of humor. They depict, for example, Anba Ermia proclaiming that “anyone who does not pray on the Prophet cannot receive Communion.” Indeed, a bishop stepping in to defend the Islamic Sunnah is something unusual, to say the least, given that the Sunnah contains numerous and explicit condemnations of Christians and Christianity.
The Azazeel Affair
Setting aside the political pressure, which in this case can be presumed to be strong, we can make two points that might help us understand Bishop Ermia’s statement. The first has to do with the adjective used to qualify the Sunnah: in his Arabic statement it is described as musharrafa, “honored”, rather than sharīfa “noble”, as is the normal Sunni custom. Assuming this is not merely a rhetorical device, it could contain an important nuance. What matters is that the Sunnah is subjectively honored by Egyptian Muslims, even if objectively it contains elements that are incompatible with the Christian faith. This impression is reinforced by the next paragraph, which stigmatizes “the destructive ideologies that endanger social peace.”
It is also important to remember that among the members of Takwīn is Youssef Ziedan, a prominent figure in Egyptian culture and the author of Azazeel, a historical novel which won the International Prize for Arab Fiction in 2009. Set in late-antique Egypt, at the time of the Christological controversies which separated Alexandria from Constantinople and Rome, this Arab Name of the Rose presents the confusions of the monk Hiba: emotional confusions for the beautiful Martha—inevitably—but also cultural confusions, due to growing intolerance in his Church. Hiba sides with Nestorius, who reads the forbidden books of Plotinus, Arius, and the Gnostics, and is horrified by the violent temperament of Cyril, the instigator of the murdering of philosopher Hypatia, “the teacher of all ages.” The novel does not display a particularly refined understanding of the fifth century and, were the author himself not oriental and, therefore, by nature exempt from that pernicious disease, it would certainly deserve the label of orientalism. However, he does touch one truly sore spot, Cyril’s inflexibility. The intolerant zeal of the great Alexandrian teacher, a saint not only for the Copts, but also for Catholics and the Orthodox Churches, played a decisive role in precipitating the divisions inside Eastern Christianity. Moreover, the parallel in Azazeel with contemporary Egypt is conspicuous: you simply have to replace Cyril and his combative monks with the names of some twentieth-century Muslim clerics. Ironically, some of them, failing to perceive the attack, hailed the novel as a denouncement of the nefariousness of the Coptic Church.
Be that as it may, it is likely that Bishop Ermia was aware of the Azazeel affair when he decided to join forces with al-Azhar in the dispute with Takwīn. Although the liberal current defends certain values, such as religious freedom, on which the Christian minority cannot but agree, this does not mean that the method it employs and the objectives it pursues are automatically immune from criticism. Moreover, members of Takwīn hold very different positions: some of them would essentially like to reconnect Islam to the biblical world that preceded it, from a perspective similar to that developed, outside Islam, by the American historian Fred Donner in his noteworthy book Muhammad and the Believers;[4] others instead hold more openly agnostic positions and would like to enclose the first centuries of Islamic history within a “Great Wall of Skepticism”,[5] in order to redesign various aspects of Islam from scratch.
In this sense, Bishop Ermia’s position is less paradoxical than it might appear at first glance. It seems to defend the principle of tradition (and, by implication, of an authority charged with defining it), without suggesting that its content is identical for Christians and Muslims. The same appears to be true for Usama al-Azhari, the first to suggest such a parallel.
Parallel Convergences
And yet, in doing so, it seems to me that both parties have fallen into a trap that is frequently seen in interreligious relations. I would call it the “false parallelism trap”. On the one hand, it is natural that interreligious conversations tend to highlight similarities. As humans, we share a series of fundamental questions—What’s the meaning of life and death? Where do we come from and where are we going? Who can assure us in the end?—that make up the fabric of our existence. It is this religious sense, Luigi Giussani would say, that makes communication between cultures and faiths possible.
On the other hand, although the questions are the same, the answers can be very diverse. And it is this second aspect that explains the sometimes-disconcerting variety of cultural and religious expressions found in humanity. It is therefore important to keep these two aspects together: what we have in common and what makes us different. If we had nothing in common, we would have nothing to say to each other. But without our differences, we would talk in the name of an abstract “religion”, which always ends up bowing to mainstream agendas.
When it comes to the dispute between Takwīn and Ta’sīl, there is an element of truth in the parallel between Sunnah and ecclesial tradition. Both religions refer to a founding event in the past, in which believers can only partake by becoming part of a community. However, there are also profound differences, not only in the content of the two traditions (which is obvious), but also in the ways they function. The ecclesial tradition is a reality that is enriched by the passing of generations. Especially in the Catholic understanding of it, tradition comes from the past but is future-oriented; it is a seed that grows over time to become a plant and release all its potential. It needs an authority—the Pope for the Catholic Church, the Synod for the Coptic Church—that can recognize certain doctrinal pronouncements as definitive. At the same time, authority is also entrusted with the task of protecting this heritage through an unrelenting process of purification. Staying with the image of the seed, as the plant grows, it is continuously blighted by parasites of all kinds. Human sciences can be of great help in this disinfestation process, particularly historical criticism, in that they provide a distinction between what is essential and what has been introduced surreptitiously, even in good faith. When the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated in 1440 that the Donation of Constantine, considered the legal basis for the Papal States, was in fact a forgery, he did not attack tradition. Rather, it purified it of a growth that was threatening to deform it. And this, we might say, happens almost regardless of the intentions of the critics and their methodological presuppositions, which can also be of pure skepticism.
Can the same be said about the Islamic Sunnah? Not exactly. The Sunnah’s raison d'être is indeed to reconstruct, with the utmost accuracy, the historical experience of the Prophet of Islam. Here again, it is essential for Muslims to make sure that nothing extraneous is added to the original core. However, the Sunnah is purposely past-oriented and any addition that is not already explicitly contained in the initial event is by definition negative, an innovation, bid‘a in Arabic. In this respect, the idea that the community may have contributed to the shaping of tradition, a concept typical of the deconstructivist approach, immediately becomes problematic for the Sunnah, whereas it is less so in Christianity. By the way, this very different role attributed to the community is the source of continuous misunderstandings between Christians and Muslims, for instance when Muslims claim that they can demonstrate the baselessness of the doctrines of Trinity or Christology from the fact that the formulas in which these dogmas are expressed—substance, person, hypostasis—cannot be found word-for-word in the New Testament.
Even in simple phenomenological terms, it is easy to observe that, although important, the writings of the School of Alexandria or the Desert Fathers or the traditions relating the Holy Family’s journey to Egypt, do not occupy, in the Coptic Church, a place equivalent to the Sunnah in Islam. If we were looking for something similar to the hadīth, we would probably have to look toward the New Testament. In short, even when it comes to principle, as opposed to content, tradition does not represent exactly the same thing for Christians and Muslims.
Often, the false parallelism trap goes hand in hand with a transactional approach and that is what has happened in this case, too. You defend the Sunnah and I, in return, defend the Fathers of the Church. Compounded, so to speak, by a maximalist approach: “take it all or leave it all.” However tempting the offer might be, the best response is probably a polite refusal. Reconnecting with those who came before us in faith is something that resonates in both religions and makes them mutually meaningful, but this principle is translated into practice in different ways. It is up to Christians and Muslims to measure themselves with historical criticism according to the genius of their respective traditions.
This is a translation from the Italian text