Lord Carey’s sadness following death of leading Muslim scholar Sheik Tantawi: The Church of England Newspaper, March 19, 2010, p 7. March 31, 2010
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Islam.trackback
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
One of the Anglican Communion’s principal dialogue partners in the Muslim world, Sheik Mohamed Sayed Tantawi has died. The Grand Imam of the al-Azhar, the oldest and most prestigious centre of learning in the Sunni Muslim world, died last week during a visit to Saudi Arabia. He was 81.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who worked with Dr Tantawi to inaugurate the Anglican Communion’s formal dialogue with Islam, told The Church of England Newspaper he was saddened to learn of the sheik’s death.
Over the 12 years he had known him, Lord Carey said he found Dr Tantawi to have been a “gracious and kindly man. Together we chaired the Alexandria Declaration in 2002 and have kept in touch ever since. He had a deep appreciation of the Christian faith and had a huge respect for Bishop Mouneer Anis [of Egypt]” Lord Carey said.
Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, stated the “world has lost a great forward-thinking Muslim leader,” with the death of Dr Tantawi.
“He was the only person who had been involved in both our Israel/Palestine work and our work in Iraq,” Canon White said, noting that his work with Lord Carey in producing the Alexandria Declaration was a “historic occasion as for the first time Jews, Christians and Muslims together condemned all forms of violence including suicide bombings.”
He also “totally supported our work to reduce tension between Sunni and Shia and to bring an end to all violence in Iraq,” Canon White added.
Appointed head of the al-Azhar in 1996 by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Dr Tantawi served for 10 years as Egypt’s grand mufti from 1986 to 1996, leading the House of Fatwa as the nation’s chief arbiter of religious law. As the head of the al-Azhar, he oversaw a university system with more than 300,000 students and a primary and secondary religious school system serving 1.5 million students.
A loyal supporter of the religious policies of the Mubarak regime, Dr Tantawi was a fierce critic of the Muslim Brotherhood and other hardline groups. He came under sharp attack from conservatives for banning the wearing of the hijab, or face veils, by female university students and for supporting France’s ban on the burqa. In 2008 he was criticised for shaking hands with Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, during a conference in New York.
Liberals, however, criticised him for his uncritical support for the authoritarian policies of President Mubarak, and for tying Islam closely with the fortunes of the regime.
“We discussed at some depth a number of the problems in Christian-Muslim relations and he was well aware that the issue of reciprocity, that Christians in Muslim lands lacked the rights that Western nations are giving Muslims,” Lord Carey said.
However, “I felt he was rather reluctant to take this further. Unlike his successor, Sheikh Ali Goma, Dr Tantawi, was unwilling to enter into political dialogue and preferred to keep as far away as possible from public criticism.”
Dr Tantawi was born on October 28, 1928, in Sohag, in Upper Egypt. He studied at the al-Azhar University, earning his doctorate in 1966, and for the next two decades taught religion or administered religious studies programmes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq, before his appointment as Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1986. The Egyptian press reports Dr Tantawi will be buried in Medina in Saudi Arabia.
