The Saudi Takeover of Al-Azhar University

[pistoff democrat]

The traveler who walks the streets of Cairo notices the many simple bookstands that proliferate all over the city. However, he may fail to observe the titles that top the hit parade of those numerous Arab streets. There are three: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf; the forgery the Tsar's secret service peddled on the world under the title of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the works of the Great Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, Mohammad Sayed al-Tantawi.

Al-Azhar University is the oldest of all universities in the Moslem world. It was established in 971 A.D. by the Fatimid (Shiite) dynasty that had taken over the whole of Northern Africa and was challenging the orthodox Sunni Caliphate of Abbasid Baghdad. In antiquity, Al-Azhar stood supreme. But its prestige is founded upon more. Al-Azhar has an Academy of Islamic Research whose fatwas are authoritative in the Sunni world. It boasts of fourteen faculties (departments) in Cairo itself, and thirteen elsewhere in Egypt. It even has eight faculties for girls. Several tens of thousands of students study there; five to six thousand professors teach at Al-Azhar. In brief, it is a center of the Sunni Moslem world, and, even more, of the Arab world.

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The importance of Al-Azhar's submission to the Saudis is not a mere theological issue: In 1990, when the Saudi royals met reluctance on the part of a large number of their own Wahhabi clerics to accept the call for "infidel" troops to come into the Kingdom and protect it from a fellow Arab, fellow Muslim, predator, they turned to Al-Azhar and asked the Cairene clerics to issue a fatwa mandating precisely that. The fatwa was duly issued. The same goes with entire categories of fatwas, such as those dealing with suicide bombing: Al-Azhar approves, especially when the bombing is directed against Israel and abets "resistance" to the U.S. presence in Iraq, by all available means. For the Saudi royals, their patient investment in Al-Azhar is paying handsome dividends.


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