This week, H.E. Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, will make his first official visit to the United States between October 6-9, 2009. One of the world's leading Muslim scholars, the Grand Mufti will deliver the keynote address at the Common Word Conference, a major international interfaith initiative (www.acommonword.com) hosted by Georgetown University. The Common Word Conference will bring together prominent Muslim and Christian leaders as well as international dignitaries such as the Right Honorable Tony Blair to the nation's capital for three days of open and closed door discussions. On Wednesday, October 7, 2009, H.E. will address the United States Institute of Peace on "Overcoming Radicalization and Extremism."

Since his appointment as Grand Mufti in 2003, Dr. Gomaa has been a strong proponent of fighting extremism and eradicating extremist thought. The purpose of Dr. Gomaa's visit to the United States this week is to address the Muslim community and provide practical steps for improving relations with the Western world. His message comes nearly four months after President Obama's Cairo speech in which he called for a new chapter in the relations between the United States and the Muslim world.

Published By Al-Ahram

Sheikh Ali Gomaa explains to Nashwa Abdel-Tawab::ntawab that the ummah might now be in a state of slumber but not death and that Islam can survive the flood of foreign and local challenges

Sheikh Ali Gomaa is the grand mufti of Egypt and one of the world's most recognisable Muslim scholars. He has travelled the world, lectured to thousands, and composed over 30 works spanning Islamic legal methodology (usul al-fiqh) and contemporary issues. Since becoming grand mufti in 2003, Gomaa has been both an admired and at times polarising figure with each of his fatwas (non-binding religious edicts) closely monitored and scrutinised. His deep knowledge provides him with a rare optimistic outlook for the future on the condition of simple sincere work. His major interest lies in holding intellectual discourse with the West as much as building local and foreign capabilities at home.

As usual it is not easy to meet Sheikh Ali Gomaa. A crammed schedule that takes up to 20 hours a day of hard work sees to that.

I've asked myself why it's difficult to meet Gomaa more than any other scholar especially after he limited his appearances on TV and in newspaper interviews, sticking only to his weekly programme on national TV and his column in Al-Ahram newspaper. He is not here and there on satellite channels and independent newspapers. In running Dar Al-Iftaa (house of issuing fatwas ), he answers people's religious questions and issues fatwas, a vital job since Egyptians have a religious nature about them. However, is such a task so time consuming, considering his qualified board of senior muftis who can do most of the job?

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Sheikh Ali Gomaa has recently been accused of issuing a statement declaring the Egyptian writer Sayyid al-Qimni an infidel and calling for him to be slain for insulting the Prophet of Islam and the God of Islam. This accusation is patently false. While there may be some extremist elements in Egypt that have made such statements, Sheikh Ali Gomaa and Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah (the institution that he heads) are not among them. In fact, it was only two years ago that Sheikh Ali Gomaa made clear statements to the effect that apostasy is not punishable by death in Islam, a position that he holds to this day.

On June 25th 2009 Al-Qimni was awarded the State Award for Social Sciences. This angered many Muslims in Egypt who consider his work to be offensive to Islam. As a result, a question was sent to Dar al-Ifta concerning the awarding of prizes to individuals who insult Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The fatwa, which is translated below, replied that awards and honors should not be given to those who insult and defame Islam. Noticeably, there was no mention of specific individuals, events, or awards. There is also no mention of a death sentence or incitement to harm al-Qimni. The fatwa, rather, calls for a recourse to legal channels of reparation. In an interview with the Egyptian newspaper al-Dastur, a spokesperson for Dar al-Ifta made their position clear stating that the role of fatwas is not to condemn, punish, or sentence people, that is the role of the judiciary. Fatwas clarify the legal status of actions without considering those involved or making any pronouncements concerning them as individuals, they are not death threats.

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The Grand Mufti of Egypt condemned the recent attacks in Egypt and described them as terrorist attacks that are strictly forbidden by Islam; a religion that teaches peace, mercy, security, and safety. He said in his statement moments after the attack that Islam forbids violence and the harassment of civilians. H.E. also said that Islamic law does not condone under any circumstance the attack of tourists who have come to the lands of Islam and whose safe passage has been guaranteed by the government. H.E. confirmed that these actions only serve the enemies of the state and aim to shake the status quo, which is prevalent. These actions also demonstrate a fundamental lack of respect for the sanctity of human life. The Grand Mufti has called for cooperation amongst citizens to deter this blind way of thinking that sees nothing except blood.

On January 31, 2008 an article appeared on the Canada Free Press website entitled “Wilders Prosecution is a Welcome Opportunity to Expose Islam” (article) in which the author Dr. Sami Alrabaa wrote concerning the Grand Mufti:

Ali Gom’a, the grand mufti of Egypt, the highest Muslim religious authority in the world, supports murdering non-Muslims. In the daily Al Ahram (April 7, 2008), he says, “Muslims must kill non-believers wherever they are unless they convert to Islam.” He also compares non-Muslims to apes and pigs, not only the Jews.

This statement is a fabrication, plain and simple. The only article that appeared in the Ahram newspaper that day penned by the Grand Mufti was his weekly column, reproduced and rendered into English below. The article does in fact discuss the Wilders film issue, but in no way condones the killing of innocent peoples. Sheikh Ali Gomaa has made numerous public statements condemning the killing of innocent lives, most notable in his article that appeared in the Washington Post “The Meaning of Jihad in Islam” July 21, 2007 (LINK). He has also been an advocate of speaking out against anti-Semitism. In his weekly al-Ahram column on January 1, 2007, he publicly asserted that the anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery and made an official court complaint concerning a publisher who falsely put his name on an introduction to its Arabic translation.

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Published in Daily News Egypt
By Yasmine Saleh

On Monday Egypt’s Grand Mufti along with Minister of Health Dr Hatem Al-Gabaly visited Nasser Medical Institute to check on the 34 Palestinians receiving treatment there.

Gomaa and Al-Gabaly held a press conference following their visit.

In an official press statement sent to Daily News Egypt,  Gomaa  said that Sharia clearly stipulates that we “as Muslims are obliged to do all we can in order to aid our brothers in Gaza.”

“We have to do everything possible to offer an urgently-needed help to the Palestinians in Gaza and help put an end to the bloodshed of our fellow Palestinian citizens that is happening in front of all the leaders of the civilized world,” Gomaa added.

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Published in Daily News Egypt
By Ali Gomaa

Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt, spoke at Churchill College, Cambridge University on Oct.12. The gathering was organized by the Radical Middle Way, a Muslim grassroots initiative articulating a mainstream understanding of Islam, in partnership with the Cambridge University Islamic Society. This is an excerpt of his speech:

I greet you all with the greeting of Islam: peace be with you all.

I would like to present you with some statistics from the Quran and the Sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet Mohamed). The Quran has roughly 6,000 verses. Three hundred of those verses address matters of law — roughly 5 percent.

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Published in NEWSWEEK
By Stryker McGuire

Muslim leaders from 40 nations say they're making progress to diminish the influence of extremists.

A year ago, 138 Muslim leaders from 40 nations addressed a plea for interfaith dialogue to the leaders of the world's Christian churches in a bid to diminish the influence of extremism around the world. That initiative, "A Common Word Between Us and You," led to a conference between Muslim and U.S. Protestant leaders at Yale University last summer and another last week with Church of England leaders at Cambridge University, to be followed next month by a meeting with Roman Catholic leaders at the Vatican. Ali Gomaa, who as the grand mufti (chief Islamic jurist) in Cairo is the senior Sunni Muslim figure in Egypt, was one of the Common Word signatories. He presided over the Cambridge conference with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. newsweek's Stryker McGuire interviewed Gomaa at a local hotel. At one point, their chat was interrupted by a carpenter's power saw. "That noise," joked Gomaa, "is from the sphere of terrorism." Excerpts:

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Published in Church Times
By: Bill Bowder

ISLAMIC and Christian leaders and scholars condemned religious viol ence in a communiqué issued on Wednesday at Lambeth Palace, at the end of a three-day conference to mark the first anniversary of the Muslim letter “A Common Word”.

In a two-page text, 17 religious leaders and scholars from Europe and the Middle East say they are “deeply troubled” by the threats to the Christian community in Mosul, northern Iraq.

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Published in EpiscopalLife
By: Matthew Davies

A multi-national group of Christian and Muslim leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Grand Mufti of Egypt, concluded a three-day meeting at Lambeth Palace October 15 with a firm recognition of the need for deeper understanding and mutual respect as they increasingly find themselves drawn together by globalization and interdependence.

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Published in The National
By: David Sapsted, Foreign Correspondent

Muslim and Christian leaders yesterday called on world governments to take action to protect the poor from the current global economic crisis.

The call came at the end of a three-day conference between leading clerics and scholars from the two faiths in Cambridge, aimed at fostering peace and understanding between the two religions.

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Published in TIMESONLINE
By: Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams today blamed “human greed” for the financial crisis.

He joined Muslim leaders from around the world in calling for world leaders to work together to prevent the burden of the financial crisis from falling on “the weak and the poor.”

Dr Williams joined the Grant Mufti of Egypt Dr Ali Gomaa at Lambeth Palace in London to launch the communique from a meeting earlier this week in Cambridge, described by participants as “the most significant gathering of international Muslim leaders ever to take place in the United Kingdom.”

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Published on The Archbishop of Canterbury Website

We, the Christian and Muslim leaders and scholars gathered for the Conference on A Common Word and Future Muslim-Christian Engagement from 12 to 15 October 2008AD/1429AH, give thanks to Almighty God for the opportunity to meet together and grow in mutual understanding, trust and friendship. 

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Published in Al-Ahram
11-17 September 2008

Since becoming grand mufti in 2003 Sheikh Ali Gomaa has been both a controversial and quietly impressive figure. He has become a media fixture, with each of his fatwas (religious edicts) closely monitored and scrutinised. Whether they attract support or opposition, few question the scholarly knowledge that informs his judgements.

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Published in TIMESONLINE

There was nothing inaccurate about Tony Blair’s remarks to a conference on Islam yesterday. Nor was there much that was new; he has extolled the virtues and diversity of moderate British Muslims many times before. The contribution that deserved to be singled out for its courage and clarity came, instead, from Dr Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt. His subject was Islamic law and governance, in which he is one of the world’s foremost experts, and his message was simple: ill-trained Islamic “scholars” who take it upon themselves to issue fatwas, or religious edicts, with little understanding of the contemporary world have no authority to do so. And extremists declaiming in mosques and via the internet that the only legitimate Islamic form of government is a restored “Caliphate”, such as that which stretched from Fez to Samarkand 500 years ago, are simply wrong.

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Published in The New Yorker
By: Lawrence Wright

Last May, a fax arrived at the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al Awsat from a shadowy figure in the radical Islamist movement who went by many names. Born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, he was the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Al Jihad, and known to those in the underground mainly as Dr. Fadl. Members of Al Jihad became part of the original core of Al Qaeda; among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant. Fadl was one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing. Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting Al Qaeda’s violence. “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt.

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Published in US News and World Report
By: Jay Tolson

John McCain recently reminded Americans that the great strategic challenge facing the West—and, indeed, the civilized world—is extremist Islam. And more important than any martial aspect of that threat, he said, is the ideological struggle between moderate and extremist understandings of Islam.

Yet going on seven years after the attacks that brought America's attention to the problem, it is hard to say that we as a nation—a government and a people—have gotten any closer to identifying, much less aiding, those voices of Islamic moderation that we hope will ultimately triumph.

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Published in US News and World Report
By: Jay Tolson

As readers of this blog may know, I traveled to Cairo recently to interview Sheik Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, for a story that appears in the March 17 issue of U.S. News.

A scholar and jurist who studied and taught for many years at Cairo's venerable Al-Azhar University, Gomaa since 2003 has been head of the Dar al-Ifta (the house of fatwas), a government office charged with rendering nonbinding religious legal opinions on virtually any question that might arise in a Muslim's life. As grand mufti, Gomaa ranks second only to the Sheik of Al-Azhar in Egypt's official religious establishment, and he also has considerable influence in the wider Sunni Muslim world. I went specifically to learn more about his traditionalist approach to Islam and particularly Islamic sharia law, an approach that he claims provides the best antidote to the simplistic, puritanical versions of Islam that are the seedbed of radical and often violent Islamic extremism.

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Published in US News and World Report
By: Jay Tolson

CAIRO—"Maybe we just need to buy CNN," says Sheik Ali Gomaa, more than a hint of exasperation creeping into his voice. After taking more than an hour to explain to yet another western journalist why a traditional conception of sharia law—along with knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence—is the best antidote to Islamic extremism, the grand mufti of Egypt is not able to disguise his frustration. Why, he wonders, does the West still not recognize who the moderate Muslims are, much less heed what they are trying to say? Shrugging his shoulders, he answers his own question: "The western media has paid no attention."

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Published in TIMESONLINE
By: Michael Binyon: Analysis

No area of Islamic jurisprudence is more disputed than the Hadiths. Scholars have been arguing for centuries over which of these oral traditions are authentic and which were invented to suit the needs of the time or the political ambitions of various rulers or upstarts.

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Published in US News and World Report
By: Jay Tolson

I set off to Cairo this week to meet and interview a man who is considered to be one of the most influential voices of moderation in the Islamic world. His name is Ali Gomaa, and he is the grand mufti of Egypt, a leading scholar of jurisprudence and head of the Dar Al-Iftah (literally, the House of Fatwas), a state-sanctioned body that issues religious judgments on matters ranging from employment and finance to gender relations to, well, just about anything of importance in a Muslim's life. In terms of religious authority in Egypt, and indeed within the larger Sunni Muslim world, the grand mufti ranks second only to the grand sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, perhaps the foremost center of Sunni Islamic learning.

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Published in Egypt Today
October 2007

I’VE MET THE mufti before, but always in a secondary capacity, and never had I been the sole object of the undivided attention of a man known to be scarily intelligent and blunt, with a short attention span for fools.

Our interview was scheduled for noon, and at 11:30 on the dot I was at Dar Al-Ifta, the nation’s —and, by extension, Sunni Islam’s —highest body for the interpretation of religious law. I was shepherded into a very small side office where the photographer and I struck up a conversation with the two men. An hour later we were still there, having progressed from drinking tea to a debate about the nature of preaching and what makes a sheikh a good sheikh.

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Published in The Washington Post
By: Ali Gomaa

Within Islam the term jihad refers to a large category of meanings. Today, however, there are attempts to isolate this term to only one form of jihad to the exclusion of all others. This includes a conception of jihad that at best refers only to armed struggle, and at worst to a barbaric form of warfare that seeks to destroy whatever peace may still remain in the world. This could not be farther from the concept of jihad as understood by Muslims throughout history and the world over. For Muslims, jihad is much more than armed struggle against an enemy from the outside for it includes constant struggles within both oneself and one’s own society. When jihad actually does take the form of armed struggle, Muslims are aware that it can only be done for the sake of a just cause.

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Published in Al-Ahram
28 June - 4 July 2007

Credible eminence is the challenge faced by any grand mufti in this day and age, and while one might choose to abide by a fatwa of his -- a fatwa, as he is eager to point out, is but a legal opinion on a specific topic, by no means binding to everyone in the Muslim community -- there is no denying the love and respect Sheikh Ali Gomaa inspires, nor the fact that, however lightly the media have taken some of his fatwas, he embodies hope in a progressive and tolerant future, counterpointing many and varying hardline views. He comes at the start of millennium, and for those Muslims who respond to him, at least, he is the right man at the right time. Though perfectly orthodox, Sheikh Gomaa is sufficiently aware of perspective and context to answer questions about daily life, politics, economics, women's status, sociology, science, astronomy, sports and art in a breathtakingly modern spirit, demonstrating as much familiarity with the secular as with the religious world. His responses testify to the ability to formulate a vision which, orthodox in its roots and form, is nonetheless modern in outlook and content. A Sufi, globally-oriented, Sheikh Gomaa is a multilingual orator, a professor in the modern sense as well as a religious scholar, a writer, television presenter, a husband and a father. And, controversial as he has proved to be, he is intent on preaching his message wherever he happens to be in the world, regardless of how it rings with government figures or other religious authorities.

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Published in Common Ground News Service
By: Shaykh Ali Gomaa

Cambridge, UK - The rise of extremism in the Muslim world has led to the widespread view of Islam as a religion of violence, retribution and war. This is in complete opposition to the truth of our religion and, on behalf of the vast majority of the 1.3 billion Muslims who are ordinary, peace-loving, decent people, I want to repudiate the actions of a misguided criminal minority.

Firstly, they contradict the central theme of peace in Islam. Peace is the greeting of Muslims amongst themselves, the last word spoken by a Muslim in his prayers, one of God’s names, and one of the names for Paradise.

Secondly, the Qur’an permits freedom of belief for all of mankind by saying, “To you is your religion and to me is mine.”

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Published in The Atlantic
By G. Willow Wilson
July / August 2005

On the night of December 30, 2004, the streets of downtown Cairo were unusually crowded. Government police officers, conspicuous in white gaiters, stood at attention outside a mosque, diverting traffic into a single congested lane. The police were on hand not to keep people out but to hem the mosque's occupants in. The speaker that evening was Mohammad Hassen, one of Cairo's most inflammatory sheikhs. President Hosni Mubarak's administration, anxious to allay fears of growing extremism after the October bombings in Sinai, was not taking any chances. Hassen and his followers had been known to advocate violence against Israel in the past.

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