Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy (محمد سيد طنطاوي; 28 October 1928 – 10 March 2010), also referred to as Tantawi, was an influential Islamic scholar in Egypt.

Tantawy born on 28 October 1928 in the village of Selim ash-Sharqiyah in the municipality of Tama, Sohag in Egypt.

He joined the Alexandria Religious Institute in 1944.

He graduated from Al-Azhar's faculty of religious studies in 1958 and went on to teach.

He obtained his first degree with honours, his master's degree in education in 1959 and his PhD in 1966.

His doctoral thesis was on the children of Israel in the al-Quran and al-Sunnah.

In 1966, he was awarded a PhD in Hadith and Tafsir, exegesis of the Qur'an.

He became a member of the faculty of Ausol Aldeen in 1968 and a member of the faculty of Arabic & Islamic Studies at the Islamic University of Libya in 1972.

In 1980 he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he became chief of the Tafsir branch of the Postgraduate studies branch at the Islamic University of Madinah.

He returned to Egypt in 1985, when he became Dean of the Faculty of Ausol Aldeen at the prestigious Alexandria Religious Institute.

From 1986 to 1996, he was the Grand Mufti of Egypt.

In 1986, Tantawy was appointed as Grand Mufti of Egypt on his 58th birthday, 28 October 1986.

In 1989 the Egyptian government's support for Western-style, interest-based banks (long considered anathema by Muslim scholars as usury, or riba) was under siege by the expanding Islamic finance movement.

In response to a government request for a ruling, Tantawy (then Grand Mufti of Egypt) issued a fatwa that described some forms of financial interest as tolerable- among them, those paid by government bonds and those on ordinary savings accounts.

He declared that charging interest on such bank loans was in fact ribh, or just gaining profit, which was allowable.

This eventually allowed the development of a mortgage industry.

However, his ruling did not issue as an effectual decree.

Tantawy's rationale was based on an interpretation of the Islamic sources as banning usury (an extreme and manipulative form of interest-taking) but not any and all comparable forms of gain.

His views on this issue have been very controversial among his fellow Muslim scholars.

Despite years of friendship with Tantawy, well-known Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi has sharply criticized his position on interest.

He issued a fatwa which allowed abortion in cases where a woman had become pregnant as a result of rape, though this created controversy and Mufti Ali Gomaa said Tantawy was wrong, and that irrespective of how the life was created, after 120 days an abortion becomes impermissible, forbidden.

In 1996, president Hosni Mubarak appointed him as the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, a position he retained until his death in 2010.

He held this position for almost ten years, until he was appointed Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University by the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, on 27 March 1996.

The Al-Azhar Mosque is one of the most influential and important Sunni Muslim institutions.

Tantawy completed a seven thousand page exegesis of the Qur'an (Al-tafser al-waset).

This Tafsir took over ten years to complete.

Tantawy opposed female circumcision calling it un-Islamic, especially in 1997, when he said "The ulema (theologians) of Islam are unanimous in agreeing that female circumcision has nothing to do with religion" and revealed his own daughter had not been circumcised.

Tantawy initially took a line against suicide bombings, and unlike his compatriot Yusuf al-Qaradawi, he condemned the use of suicide bombings against Israelis, rejecting the argument that all Israelis were legitimate targets, because at some stage they would all carry a gun.

In 2001 he issued a fatwa banning women from acting as surrogate mothers or from receiving frozen sperm from dead husbands.

In response to the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy, he stated "We have no objection if the Pope holds another speech and declares publicly that what the Byzantine emperor had said was wrong. At the same time, the Pope has to apologize frankly and justify what he said".

Speaking after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Tantawy said "It's not courage in any way to kill an innocent person, or to kill thousands of people, including men and women and children."

He said that Osama bin Laden's call for a Jihad against the west was "invalid and not binding on Muslims", adding "Killing innocent civilians is a horrific, hideous act that no religion can approve".

He said the Qur'an "specifically forbids the kinds of things the Taliban and al-Qaeda are guilty of".

In 2003 he called suicide bombers "enemies of Islam", adding "people of different beliefs should co-operate and not get into senseless conflicts and animosity. Extremism is the enemy of Islam, whereas, jihad is allowed in Islam to defend one's land and to help the oppressed. The difference between jihad in Islam and extremism is like the earth and the sky"

Tantawy, however, later the same year changed his position and said anybody blowing himself up in the face of the occupiers of his land is a martyr, in response to a question about the Islamic shari'ah stance over the Palestinians who blow up their bodies against the Israelis.

He stressed, however, that Islam did not allow the killing of innocent civilians and children but only invaders and aggressors.

Tantawy opposed women as Imams in mixed congregations during Friday prayers (Jumu'ah), saying when "A woman's body is private. When she leads men in prayer, in this case, it is not proper for them to look at the woman whose body is in front of them. Even if they see it in their daily life, it should not be in situations of worship, where the main point is humility and modesty."

He also called Haidar Haidar's book, Feast for Seaweed, blasphemous.

Tantawy led the funeral prayers at the funeral of Yasser Arafat in 2004, during which he said that "Arafat has done his duty as a defender of the Palestinian cause, with courage and honesty".

In October 2009, Tantawy launched a campaign against the niqab (the full-face veil which covers the entire body except for the eyes, increasingly worn by women in Egypt) by personally removing the niqab of a teenage girl (after she failed to remove it) at a secondary school affiliated to Al-Azhar University, which he was touring in Cairo's Madinet Nasr suburb, much to the shock of all concerned.