Ali Gomaa

Ali Gomaa (علي جمعة, Egyptian Arabic: ) is an Egyptian Islamic scholar, jurist, and public figure who has taken a number of controversial political stances.

He specializes in Islamic Legal Theory.

He follows the Shafi`i school of Islamic jurisprudence and the Ash'ari school of tenets of faith.

Gomaa is a Sufi.

Ali Gomaa was born in the Upper Egyptian province of Beni Suef on 3 March 1952 (7 Jumadah al-Akhirah 1371 AH).

Gomaa is married and has three adult children.

In person, Gomaa's appearance has been described as "tall and regal, with a round face and a trim beard."

Gomaa graduated from high school in 1969, at which point he enrolled at Ain Shams University in Egypt's capital, Cairo.

Having already begun to memorize the Quran, he delved deeper into his studies of Islam, studying Hadith and Shafi'i jurisprudence in his free time while at university.

After completing a B.Comm.

(Bachelor of Commerce) at Ain Shams in 1973, Gomaa enrolled in Cairo's al-Azhar University, the oldest active Islamic institution of higher learning in the world.

Most had been educated in secular institutions, but—owing to the Islamic revival that swept the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s—many also had a working knowledge of the texts that play a central role in Islamic law: the Koran, the Sunna, and the Hadith.

These people saw the growing Wahhabi movement as irrational and an impediment to material progress.

"What Dr. Gomaa was attempting was unique and very important," says Hamdi Sabri, one of the mufti's early followers.

When he first met Gomaa, in the late 1980s, Sabri was a struggling young businessman, eager to take advantage of his government's move away from socialism.

Frustrated by the anti-progressive stance of the fundamentalist movement, Sabri turned to Gomaa for religious guidance.

"He was struggling to present Islam in its unaltered form: simply, as the love of God."

The article goes on to say that "Gomaa was free of the Westernization that characterized the liberal sheikhs who were often targets of extremist vitriol. One such sheikh, the leader of a popular Sufi sect, was denounced as decadent and corrupt when he failed to reprimand his followers for drinking liquor and wearing revealing clothes. Gomaa's ideas were countercultural, but his lifestyle was orthodox: he refrained from physical contact with women outside his family, encouraged abstinence before marriage for both sexes, and could often be seen walking with his prayer beads in hand, counting them methodically. Wahhabi extremists had no choice but to keep quiet; any public criticism of Gomaa would have jeopardized their credibility on the Egyptian street."

Gomaa has told American journalist Lawrence Wright that he worked with Islamic Group prisoners who later embraced the "Nonviolence Initiative" and denounced violence.

He received a second bachelor's degree (B.A.) from al-Azhar, then an M.A., and finally a PhD with highest honors in Juristic Methodology (usul al-fiqh) in 1988.

Since he had not gone through the al-Azhar High School curriculum, he took it upon himself in his first year at the college to study and memorize all of the basic texts, which many of the other students had already covered.

Gomaa's father was a lawyer, who he states was a very great inspiration to him.

He stated in an interview to Al-Ahram Weekly: "I was very influenced by my father...I used to watch him stand up for what is right, unafraid of the powers that be. He used to address police officers and judges quite confidently. Those were different times."

Gomaa taught in the faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies at al-Azhar University from the time he received his M.A. until he was appointed Grand Mufti, first as an assistant professor and then as a full professor.

In addition to being a teacher of Aqida, Tafsir, Hadith, legal theory and Islamic history, Gomaa is also a highly respected Sufi master.

In addition to the courses he taught at the University, Gomaa also revived the tradition of open classes held in a mosque where he taught a circle of students six days a week from after sunrise until noon.

"I began going into the prisons in the 1990s.... We had debates and dialogues with the prisoners, which continued for more than three years. Such debates became the nucleus for the revisionist thinking."

Gomaa established these lessons in 1998 with the aim of protecting the Islamic intellectual tradition from being lost or misinterpreted: "I want people to continue in the tradition of knowledge reading the classical texts the way they were written, not the way people want to understand them."

In addition to the lessons in al-Azhar, Gomaa also began giving the Friday sermon (khutbah) in Cairo's Sultan Hassan Mosque in 1998 after which he would give a short lesson in Islamic jurisprudence for the general public followed by a question-and-answer session.

In addition Gomaa speaks fluent English, and he was a former chairman of Al-Azhar University's Islamic Jurisprudence Department.

An article in The Atlantic states: When he became the khatib, or orator, of Masgid Sultan Hassan, a mosque long favored by devout Cairenes, Gomaa began to attract a following of another kind.

His rational, contemporary religious views, coupled with his background in commerce, made him appealing to a segment of Egyptian society that was fast becoming a thorn in the side of both the post-Nasserite government and the rising Islamic extremists: the religious middle class.

Entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, bankers, engineers, Gomaa's new followers were socially conservative but financially and politically progressive.

They favored extended privatization and transparent governance.

He served as the eighteenth Grand Mufti of Egypt (2003–2013) through Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah succeeding Ahmed el-Tayeb.

Ali Gomaa was appointed Grand Mufti in late September 2003.

He has, in the past, been considered a respected Islamic jurist, according to a 2008 U.S. News & World Report report and The National, and "a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam," according to The New Yorker.

However, in recent years Western academic observers have described him as a supporter of authoritarian forms of government.

Gomaa is also a supporter of the 2013 Military Coup.

He was succeeded as Grand Mufti by Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allam in February 2013.