Word: al-azhar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mohammad Tantawi—the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar Mosque in Egypt and one of Sunni Islam’s highest authorities—has publicly stated that Muslim women must obey the laws of the non-Muslim countries in which they live, even if it means not wearing the headscarf. Of course, French Muslims must obey French law, but Tantawi is missing the point of the public uproar. What if they protest the ban not as Muslims living in a non-Muslim country, but as French men and women rejecting a law that infringes upon the freedoms...
...looting and burning of the National Library and the Awqaf Library, which was the repository for material from private and mosque libraries throughout Iraq, are spiritual blows as well. Between them, the two libraries made Baghdad the largest, most valuable repository of Arabic books outside Cairo's al-Azhar Library. The National Library's prized collection included royal court records and thousands of documents from the earliest Islamic periods, along with thousands of books (many handwritten, some of them one of a kind) on Islamic law and practice. In the Awqaf Library, attached to the Ministry of Religious Endowments...
...Sudanese government executed a theologian named Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for daring to question the Koran. The sages at Al-Azhar University in Egypt had found Taha guilty of apostasy for a thesis he developed in his book, The Second Mission of Islam. Taha argued that the Koran contains two categories of verses: those that the prophet Muhammad recited in Mecca and those recited in Medina. For Taha, the Medina verses, with their emphasis on legal rules, were written in a historical context that no longer exists, so Islam should instead focus on the spiritual and ethical message revealed in Mecca...
...churches, mosques and synagogues in record numbers, some religious leaders turned to one another in what amounted to a big group hug. One of those interfaith friendships has now unraveled. Three weeks after kneeling in prayer with Jewish leaders, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, a scholar with Cairo's prominent al-Azhar University and the leader of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City, was quoted on an Arabic-language website saying that Jews carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and that Jewish doctors were poisoning Muslim children in U.S. hospitals. Next, he abruptly resigned from the center and moved...
Beyond straining Muslim-Jewish relations, the incident provoked a rift among Muslims. The board of the Islamic Cultural Center decided to break its long-standing tradition with al-Azhar, which for the past 50 years has furnished the mosque with its leader. The board instead has promoted Gemeaha's chief deputy, a Palestinian who has lived in the U.S. for 22 years; his salary will be paid not by al-Azhar, as was Gemeaha's, but by the government of Kuwait, the mosque's main benefactor...