On his way to Fadel Mosque in 6th of October city last Friday 5 August, former Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa was met with a flood of bullets. Miraculously, he was unharmed and continued on to the mosque and delivered an emotional sermon. A member of the Al-Azhar Commission of Senior Scholars (CSS), Gomaa spoke in a trembling voice while an armed guard hovered near his pulpit: “Why would they kill a person who says my lord is Allah?” Gomaa asked.

On his way to Fadel Mosque in 6th of October city last Friday 5 August, former Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa was met with a flood of bullets. Miraculously, he was unharmed and continued on to the mosque and delivered an emotional sermon. A member of the Al-Azhar Commission of Senior Scholars (CSS), Gomaa spoke in a trembling voice while an armed guard hovered near his pulpit: “Why would they kill a person who says my lord is Allah?” Gomaa asked.

Gomaa’s sermon came in the midst of a heated debate on whether Friday sermons should be read (from a set, pre-written document) or improvised, in an attempt to prevent radicalization within mosques.

Unified sermon

In late July, Minister of Awqaf, Mohamed Gomaa (no relation to aforementioned Gomaa) imposed a new system requiring all preachers to read during Friday’s prayer the sermon published on the Ministry of Awqaf’s (MoA) website in a PDF format, but Al-Azhar rejected Gomaa’s decision, which initiated a controversy.

From June 2013, the state attempted to control the religious discourse, particularly with the increasing concerns of using mosques for political mobilisation. However, Al-Azhar’s blessing of President Mohamed Morsi’s removal, with the support of the Salafi movement, made mosques a “safe” place.

Nevertheless, the MoA imposed its controls to avoid political sermons. Only official preachers, whether from the MoA or Al-Azhar, are allowed to deliver sermons. Unifying the subject of sermons in all mosques in Egypt as of January 2014 however did not prevent the spread of a radical discourse calling for violence. The official religious discourse did not allow for an opposing discourse, which scholar and talk show host Islam Beheiry raised on his TV show.

Al-Azhar ultimately filed a lawsuit to erase Beheiry’s episodes from YouTube, and the verdict is expected to be issued next October. Beheiry is spending his last month in prison after being arrested in December 2015 on charges of disrespecting Islam because he criticised Sunni scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari and some radical opinions in jurisprudential books on his show and on Facebook.

Al-Azhar writes its own sermon

The CSS rejected the unified sermons, citing the Constitution that states that Al-Azhar and its CSS are the reference authority in terms of religious research and Islamic affairs, meaning that the MoA has no authority over them. Thus, Al-Azhar Mosque’s preachers did not abide by the written unified text and declared their rejection of that during Friday’s sermons, speaking freely about other topics.

Following a meeting between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb on August 3, the latter, on the same day, held a meeting attended by Minister Gomaa, calling for the training and education of imams.

Some say the meeting meant that el-Sisi was supporting el-Tayeb against the MoA. The MoA however kept imposing a unified sermon on mosques, while Al-Azhar Mosque’s imams kept ignoring it.

The MoA’s website says a sermon may not exceed 20 minutes and that imams should only read the unified text in order to control the religious discourse. Previously, when only the subject was unified, the website used to explain it days before the delivery day of the sermon with the proper religious evidence, whether from the Quran or the Sunnah, and imams would write their sermons accordingly and as they saw fit.

Worshippers are complaining of restlessness because the weekly religious ritual has turned into a reading session organized by the government inside mosques in order to praise its policies with a simplified religious speech.

On Friday, August 5, the unified sermon was about ‘Food security, protection and sanctity.’ It was read in most mosques. It says Prophet Muhammad was the founder of the first consumer protection body, and that prices are skyrocketing and should be monitored.

The assassination attempt of former Grand Mufti Gomaa however shows that the endeavors to impose control using the same sermon do not prevent terrorism.