THE MOST BEAUTIFUL piece of work in the garden museum of legendary sculptor Hassan Heshmat is The Victory Leap, the artist’s testament to the heroism of Egyptian troops in the 1973 War. In this isolated venue, Egyptians from all walks of life can visit and walk among the masterpieces bequeathed to the nation in the late artist’s will.

Or at least they could until last month, when a monaqqaba (women dressed in full niqab) broke into the Heshmat Museum and destroyed a number of statues including The Victory Leap. Promptly arrested, the woman declared she was merely doing her duty as a good Muslim by adhering to a fatwa recently issued by Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa in which he said it was forbidden for Muslims to use statuary representing living beings, particularly humans, as home decorations.

Though Gomaa did nothing to place his fatwa in context or make clear why he was issuing it, the fatwa was strictly limited to statues of human beings in homes and did not mention works or art in museums or Pharaonic statuary on display at antiquity sites around the nation.

In fact, the fatwa seemed to confuse just about everyone. Even as they attacked Gomaa’s declaration, liberals noted that Gomaa had been the senior-most Islamic cleric to speak out against the Taliban’s destruction of the famed statues of Buddha in Bamiyan.

“When Amr ibn Al-Aas invaded Egypt, he left every single [Ancient] Egyptian statue intact,” Gomaa said in early 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha figures, one of which was believed to be the largest statue of its kind in the world.

The monaqabba’s attack on Heshmat’s work prompted the latest —and most vicious —chapter in the long-running battle between the scholars of Al-Azhar and the nation’s marginalized liberal intellectuals.

Mohsen Allam President of the Egyptian Writers’ Union Mohamed Salmawy

In what many analysts consider a historic first, Gomaa acknowledged the conflict flat out by agreeing to confront the poet Ahmed Abdel Moeti Hagazi (widely seen as the most respected of the mufti’s critics) live on the popular Channel 2 nighttime talkshow El-Beit Beitak.

The debate was among the most watched Beitak shows ever as Gomaa bluntly addressed Hagazi’s claim that far from being a force for moderation, Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning, directly and indirectly encourages terror.

While Hagazi told the mufti he doesn’t believe Gomaa is himself “pro-terror,” he is certain that “the prevalent religious discourse encourages terrorism.” The poet claims it is worrisome that Al-Azhar and its Dar El-Ifta (the Islamic Research Academy, which issues what most scholars agree are binding fatwas) are looked to by the faithful for guidance because “in Islam, you are supposed to ask your heart for fatwa. No one is allowed to coerce a Muslim into choosing this or that. A Muslim must listen to the sheikhs, but is supposed to exercise freedom of choice at the end,” Hagazi says.

As for Gomaa? He says the fatwa that sparked the debate was in fact three years old.

“Al-Azhar has been a bastion of Sunni tolerance for the past 1,000 years,” Gomaa told Hagazi. “We have always refuted superstition and extremism,” he added, later saying that the fatwa had been dug up by a journalist looking to stir the embers of debate.

Mohsen Allam Editor-in-chief of Al-Qahira newspaper Salah Eissa

The ruling, he said, had been issued by Dar El-Ifta just weeks after he became mufti in 2003. It was, he said, the ruling of the committee, not his personal opinion. “But I have to adhere to what the majority of scholars agree upon. People come asking for the fatwa of the majority, not for my personal opinion.

“There is a specific system followed by Dar El-Ifta when issuing a fatwa. There are certain sources we have to go back to. Another point to consider is the fact that El-Dar has always said that full statues were haram,” he says.

Both the legendary Mohammed Abdou and the previous Mufti, Ahmed El-Tayeb, had opined that statues are not haram, but the mufti stressed that they never issued fatwas on the point: “In 1903, Mohammed Abdou said in a series of articles that he thought statues are not haram, but there was never an official fatwa on this question during his time.”

Long before he became mufti, Gomaa was a regular columnist for the London-based Al-Hayat, and he continues to write regular op-ed pieces for Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar in addition to being a frequent guest on El-Beit Beitak. By the standards of Al-Azhar, he has been a liberal voice throughout.

“Alcohol is haram, but is sold in Egypt,” he told Hagazi. “So is gambling, and people gamble. Just because sculptures are considered haram does not mean that people should go and destroy statues or monuments. We must teach children the idea of co-existence and acceptance; we don’t want a group of hypocrites who wear the veil here and take it off the minute they are on the plane heading abroad. I want people not to drink alcohol because they know it is haram —and if they drink it, I want them to ask God’s forgiveness afterward.”

“I was hoping this controversy [over the statuary fatwa] was going to pass, but it did not. The intellectuals turned it into an issue. If this is what they want, so be it —maybe this will open new debate regarding important topics like the relationship between art and religion, or art and freedom.”

Gomaa was far less sanguine about Hagazi’s claims that Al-Azhar has failed to deter terrorism.

“Al-Azhar currently has 7,500 institutes, in which 1.5 million students are studying, in addition to a university teaching half a million students. If it were not for Al-Azhar, Egypt would have turned into another Afghanistan or Iraq. Al-Azhar has indeed succeeded in the war against terror. And terror will never end because it is in human nature, a demonic instinct. As long as good and evil exist, terror will exist. Asking Al-Azhar to end terrorism or considering it a failure if it did not is unacceptable. No Azhar graduate, whether in the East or the West, has ever tainted their hands with blood,” the mufti said.

Gomaa was heavily involved in the Interior Ministry’s campaign against terror in the 1990s, when he opened dialogue with extremist groups. “They arrested 16,000 members of the groups, and only 80 of them turned out to be graduates of Al-Azhar. After we spoke to them, 13,000 of them renounced [terrorist thought], and the first to do so were the 80 Azharites, whom we were able to set straight in six hours. Thought is fought with thought, and iron with iron,” Gomaa added.

At the end of the debate, Hagazi said that while the mufti had “changed my mind somewhat, my basic questions persist. We can talk generally about Al-Azhar’s moderate stance and its enlightened views, but there is still a [conservative] movement inside Al-Azhar that wants to compete with the extremist movements, fearing these movements will accuse them of being lenient, or of acquiescing to the authorities’ demands. They issue extremist fatwas thinking that this will show them to be holding on to the essence of religion,” Hagazi claimed.

Many left-leaning intellectuals felt the mufti made a better case in the debate than Hagazi. The prominent columnist and writer Anis Mansour congratulated the mufti on “winning people’s respect, which he did quite effortlessly.” Like the mufti, Mansour believes the main problem lies in the media: “We must meet publicly and cooperate with the aim of acquainting readers and audiences with the tolerance of our religion — and with the fact that our religious scholars are worth their respect and trust,” Mansour wrote in his daily Al-Ahram column after the debate.

Mansour is optimistic about the future, saying he believes a number of prominent religious leaders are working to adapt religious discourse to the problems of modern society.

Others are not so optimistic. Like Hagazi, they feel that Al-Azhar has failed to stand up to extremism throughout the ages. Intellectual distrust of religious institutions quickly rises to the fore whenever Al-Azhar issues a fatwa or urges that a religious book be censored. These intellectuals insist they do not censure Al-Azhar as an easy way out or a safe method of attacking terrorism without getting hurt. Instead, they claim to have consistently taken a stand against extremism even as Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, Farag Fouda and Naguib Mahfouz were all touched personally by the hand of terror.

The current attack on Al-Azhar is in part caused by disappointment: In a nation in which people actually listen to their sheikhs, they say, the official institution should be working hand-in-hand with the intellectuals to preach tolerance and moderation instead of trying to burnish their conservative credentials so as not to lose sway over extremists.

Take Mohamed Salmawy, the editor-in-chief of the French-language weekly Al-Ahram Hebdo and the president of the Egyptian Writers’ Union. Salmawy claims the issue at stake is far greater than the Hagazi-Gomaa debate about whether Al-Azhar has done enough to curb terrorism.

“The point is that the religious discourse needs modernization,” Salmawy says. “It needs to be more suitable for our times. This is a purely Islamic characteristic: Omar ibn El-Khattab [the second Caliph] stopped the hudoud [penalties such as the cutting off of a thief’s hand] when certain circumstances made it necessary. This means that Islam is by nature a flexible religion, so long as we leave the very essence of the faith intact. Some countries have banned polygamy, for example, despite it being acceptable in Shariah.”

The award-winning playwright and writer believes the door is always open to ijtihad (the personal struggle for knowledge and understanding).

“Ijtihad has been a fundamental characteristic of Islam since the early stages of the Islamic renaissance,” Salmawy says. “This is why religious discourse must evolve, which is what happened at the turn of the twentieth century with Sheikhs Mohammed Abdou and Al-Afghani, who started a movement for reform and enlightenment at Al-Azhar. It cannot be that we were more open-minded at the turn of the twentieth century than we are now at the turn of the twenty-first.”

Salmawy is particularly unhappy that Al-Azhar refuses to revisit old fatwas that need updating to keep pace with changes in modern society.

“The mufti defended himself saying that [the fatwa on sculpture] was an already existing fatwa. I believe the role of the mufti at this stage is not to look through old fatwas in his archives. Any employee can do that. We can do that if all the fatwas are online. The mufti’s role is to modernize these fatwas to suit the world we live in today at the turn of this century, like the imams of last century did,” the writer says. “Islam is by nature a progressive religion that is suitable for all time.”

Salah Eissa, the historian, novelist and editor-in-chief of the Ministry of Culture’s newspaper Al-Qahira, is a long-standing critic of Al-Azhar.

“The basic idea is that we should not have a religious institution. Egypt is a civil country. This was the case throughout history, except for the time of Al-Risala (The Message) and during the era of the four Caliphs,” he says. “The state was always a civil one run by the sultan. He chose his own ministers, whose advice he could disregard if he so pleased.”

“Al-Azhar is a mosque whose purpose is to impart religious knowledge but this has not stopped the Azharites from trying to give themselves power over everyday debates.”

Soliman Fayyad, one of Egypt’s foremost novelists and linguists, is also an “ex-Azharite,” as he puts it, saying he rejects his association with the university from which he graduated.

“As a former Azharite, I can tell you that the institution of Al-Azhar was created by politics. Religious scholars had to justify the actions of the ruling regime. As a result, their religious stances and even their fatwas changed according to who was in power. During imperial rule, they produced fatwas to keep the king happy; during the revolution, they produced fatwas to keep the republican regime happy. This has been their role throughout the ages,” he says.

Fayyad and Eissa agree that Al-Azhar became a politicized institution in 1537, when the Ottoman sultan invented a new post, that of Sheikh Al-Islam. In the years that followed, some sheikhs have gone so far in their search for worldly power that they have created their own militias and sought to influence not just Azhar elections, but those outside their walls.

Eissa says both governments and extremists have courted Al-Azhar over the years, but conservatives have gained new power since many sheikhs “working in the Gulf have returned and brought with them that region’s more conservative Islamic thought.

“The civil nature of government in Egypt is a crucial one,” Eissa continues, saying reform will be slow to take hold at Al-Azhar, which has 7,500 institutes and local offices spread over 4,000 Egyptian cities and towns.

The growing religiosity of Egypt’s lower and middle class is only complicating the issue, giving Al-Azhar additional power. Although the body has no legal power to confiscate or censor books or artistic material, Salmawy says, “Literature and culture are now subjected to moral censorship. The backwards religious atmosphere is imposing restrictions on writers, artists or playwrights. These restrictions can be more severe than a confiscation or censorship order that can be repealed and contested in court.

“Today, we censor old films on television. Why? Things that were acceptable in the 1960s are not acceptable today,” he says. “The books of Ihsan Abdel-Quddous and Naguib Mahfouz are today published after they are censored by the publisher, who strikes out phrases he thinks don’t suit society’s mores. True, Al-Azhar does not censor books, and if it does we are very well able to stand up to it and take it to court. But what do you do about the prevalent climate? You cannot sue society.”

That’s why Salmawy’s association, sometimes with the support of the Ministry of Culture and its Supreme Cultural Council, has stood up in court for writers including Ahmed El-Sheikh, Naguib Mahfouz and Khairy Shalaby when their work faced religiously inspired censorship.

“So far, the extremists and even moderate Islamists have failed to infiltrate the ranks of Egyptian intellectuals. You will not find amongst them a single important artist or novelist; they have their own intellectuals, but they are not as rich or multi-layered as the free intellectual,” Eissa says.

Eissa also believes that writers have done more to change public opinion about terrorism than Al-Azhar says, saying the film El-Irhabi (The Terrorist) and the television drama Al-Aela (The Family) have been far more influential than occasional sermons from Azhar’s pulpits.

“Still,” he admits, “the intellectual’s role is not as strong as it should be. Some people are scared; others just go along with the flow. In light of the political stagnation, some are unconcerned and are not thinking clearly. They want any change regardless of what comes next,” Eissa says. “Religious conservatives are gaining ground in politics, though. The Kifaya movement has made a grave mistake in attacking all the existing parties: It’s the same logic that prompted many people to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Eissa, like many leftists, is particularly worried by the attitude that “if all the moderate religious groups want is to establish a civil state with a religious base, then that’s fine as long as they’re democratic.”

While not calling for all-out censorship, Eissa wonders whether it’s wise to allow Al-Azhar a loud voice in attacking extremism —or to allow new religious programming on the airwaves.

“There is a scary number of religious shows on satellite channels that spread backward ideas like interpreting dreams and eyebrow fatwas,” he says. “Sheikhs are just sheikhs. They cannot be psychologists and sociologists and physicians. It is the role of the intellectual to promote enlightenment and rational thinking; the idea that people must make their own decisions. You do not need a sheikh to tell you whether to steal or not. The new sheikhs are making use of the satellite boom to become stars, and thus peddle their own agendas.

“Intellectuals need to resort to the same methods — it is the only way,” he says.

At the same time, Eissa and Fayyad warn that intellectuals should not look to lead a reform of Islam. That, they say, must come from within the community of religious scholars. Intellectuals can prod, question and make demands, but it is not up to them to reform the faith.

“It is important for intellectuals not to be dragged onto religious ground,” Eissa says, “or they will have to make compromises to placate public opinion. Their work must be purely civil, be it political, economic or scientific.”

“Every person is free to act as they want,” Fayyad adds. “Whether to wear the veil or have statues in the home has to do with the person’s private relationship with God. Those who want to make these public issues are detracting your attention from much more crucial issues. For example: Why do religious leaders leave out a crucial issue such as that of the zakat on natural resources, which is mentioned in the Qur’an and Hadith? All the natural resources — petroleum, gold, copper, even natural gas, fish and precious stones — are mentioned in Shariah. Countries with a wealth of them owe poorer countries zakat of 20 percent of the annual value of resource extraction. Why are we not fulfilling this obligation?

“I wrote about it years ago in Al-Ahali and even called Sheikh Shaarawi and Sheikh Ghazali to ask their opinion. They both told me, ‘What you say is correct, but will only cause economic strife.’ My column was met with complete silence. They do not want to open the debate. The nation’s religious scholars prefer to keep their lips sealed regarding Muslims’ rights —we call the one who does this a shaitan akhrass [mute devil].” et