Islamisation by Stealth
Sheikh
Mohammed Metwali Sharawi:
Islamisation
by Stealth
The
Sheikh's evangelist mission via television screens and millions of his
audio cassettes was made possible by lavish subsidies from conservative
oil Sheikh's from
Born in 1911 in
In the 1920's Al-Azhar, the
official Muslim church and the seat of Islamic learning condemned Attaturk's
modernisation of Turkey
and his revolution in education as he replaced Arabic letters with Latin
letters making books easy to print and accessible to the public. Al-Azhar,
controlled by men whose intellectual training came from 'Kuttab'
forbade
Sharawi graduated from Al-Azhar in 1941, and the teacher's qualification in 1943. His view of the world was very much influenced by his outlook. In fact, Sharawi did not break from that early Kuttab taboo of daring to interpret the Koran until he was in his mid 60's. His interpretation never went beyond the linguistic meaning of the Koran verse, or attempts to examine the essence or the wisdom of the verse as some contemporary Islamic scholars like Sayyed Qutb, for example, did.
Last year he boasted that he hadn't read a single book since 1943 except the Koran.'
In the 1940's Sharawi raised King Farouk to a near divine status in poem linking him to the founder of Islam prophet Muhammad. He also wrote a religious poem glorifying the late dictator Colonel Nasser.
As minister of religious endowments in 1978, Sharawi defended President Sadat in parliament quoting a verse from Koran - which Muslims believe to be the word of Allah revealed to Prophet Mohammed: '' you are accountable to him but he is accountable to no one.'' The verse in its seventh century AD origin was referring to Allah.
From the 1970's Sharawi used his populist status to mount media attacks on intellectual giants like the late Novelist and playwright Youssef Idriss; Egypt's great modern philosophers like the late Tawfiq el-Hakim, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, or Abdel Rahman Badawi; and the Nobel Prize winner writer Naguib Mahfouz. Their sin was to question some of the Sheikh's reactionary fatwas and opinion as they warned that placing him above the possibility of making errors would be damaging to the health of the nation' intellectual being. However, the statecontrolled media came to the defence of the sheikh. Wanting to appear more Islamic than the Islamic terrorists do, the government of President Hosni Mubarak gave Sahrawi prime time for his '' interpretation of Koran'' open lessons and reduced airtime allocated to secular debating programmes that flourished from the 1950 to late 1970.
On his death, sources in
Moustafa Mashhour, the leader of Egypt's largest fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which introduced terrorism into the political scene in the late 1940's stated, ``Sharawi's fingerprints on Islamic teaching were matchless,'' . Sharawi was a founder member of the group with Sheikh Hassan el Banna in 1937, but later criticised their '' impatience as they started violence before they were ready to take over'', he told me in an interview in 1987.
Freethinkers, liberals, doctors, human rights' activists and feminists remember him in a rather afferent light. Sharawi issued fatwas - edicts- supporting the mutilation of female genitalia (female circumcision) and ruled that women should not be appointed to top government positions or become judges as women '' have incomplete minds and faith.''
Doctors were perplexed by his fatwa banning organ transplant and donating organs after death as blasphemy. ''You have no right to donate your organ because you are only a keeper of that body which belongs to Allah''.
In early 1990's Sharawi apparently
influenced several of Egypt's top belly dancers, and female film stars
who announced - always during TV chat shows - that they have seen the light
and were going to take up the veil, all thanks to the Sheikh's teaching.
Press reports claimed, however, that they had been
given large sums of money from rich oil Sheikhs in
Some of Sharawi's fatwas were either contradictory or double standards. He ruled against paying of interest on bank-deposits, yet he was the religious adviser to one of Egypt's top Islamic banking finance institutions, which used pyramid savings schemes that started off paying inflated returns and collapsed in 1988 robbing thousands of poor Egyptians of an estimated $5 billions of their savings.
When I interviewed Sheikh Sharawi
in 1987 in
His preaching was a major factor, among many, in moving his society, from its position 20 years ago as an open liberal secular pluralistic debating culture that was a lighthouse for the whole of the Middle East, into a conservative Islamic closed and often xenophobic society, displaying hatred to the country's Coptic minority - Christian orthodox- over one fifth of population - whose faith predates Islam in Egypt by sevencenturies. As he called them, Ahl-al-zthimma or second-class citizens who either convert to Islam or remain under the '' protection'' of the Islamic ruler paying protection money or Jizyah a poll-tax which the invading Arab Islamic military commanders imposed on the citizens of countries they conquered.
Terror attacks by Islamic extremists
against Copts in
While other Islamic intellectuals left a wealth of books and essays which scholars can study for generations to come, Sharawi's legacy is mainly the popular cassettes and video tapes of his preaching, which in the view of many Egyptian intellectuals a '' a reactionary and dangerous demagogic message,'' that was in general discouraging people from thinking independently or interpreting Koran for themselves. He even attacked electricity as anti' human nature as god intended it to be' because electricity turned night into day and made people `' active at night''. But afterconsultation with government, he then issued a fatwa that men who have to work at night could sleep during the day '' as long as they get up to pray''.
The national display of morning surrounding Sharawi's death horrified liberal Egyptian Intellectuals as it proved what they feared and warned for years that the official and popular endorsement of preaching the message of bigotry and non-tolerance would turn the nation backward on an irreversible course. During his life they warned against the '' intellectual terrorism'' used by Sharawi's trend to further the Islamisation by stealth as thestate competed with the terrorist to demonstrated to the confused public that the government was more Muslims that the Islamic groups.
Like his life, the death of
Sharawi, was yet another proof that little has changed in the structure
of power, which ensured the supremacy of the
The events
of ancient past foreshadowed contemporary events.
Serving both god and Caesar, the high priest of
For 6000 years, Pharaohs came
and went- whether they were Egyptians or conquerors, with blue blood in
their veins or Khaki uniform over their skin-, but
The official religion might have changed twice before Christ, and three times after his death, but the triangle of power remains more or less the same.
As the priestly class found independent funding and resources from the Islamic world, it is no longer dependent on the State for its massive wealth. Sharawi's Television evangelism mirrored this structure of power but the interests of the three institutions were so intractable that the government moved closer to the position of the clergy changing the nature of the secular state.
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Mohammed Metwali Sharawi
Islamic Preacher & television
Evangelist
Born Daqadous,
Died Giza, Egypt
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