Who controls Egypt’s religious institutions? How the top of the executive, security apparatus loom over the 3 institutional houses of Islam

Mokhtar Gomaa, the endowments minister and longest serving Cabinet member, raised eyebrows at his ministry in May, when he asked his aides to prepare a list of properties that could be attractive to foreign investors to help the state generate money, according to a source at the ministry. 

The list contains assets in Cairo and Alexandria, including agricultural land and real-estate plots. They are part of a large body of endowments that, according to official statements, exceed LE1 trillion in value and date back to Mohamed Ali’s rule in 1835, when religious endowments were organized under one authority. These include endowments whose profit is earmarked for charitable purposes, assets whose benefits go to an endower’s community, as well as shared endowments with both charitable and communal traits. 

Gomaa’s list came amid an ongoing controversy around the inclusion of some religious endowments in the portfolio of Egypt’s sovereign wealth fund — a move that was officially denied by the Cabinet in 2019. However, the Cabinet did say at the time that the Egyptian Endowments Authority, which handles endowments assets within the ministry, would look to maximize its revenues by investing in some of its land assets. 

The move by the minister falls in full alignment with the presidency, whose control over the ministry and its endowments has been increasingly manifest in ways that were not possible to replicate with the relatively more independent Al-Azhar. 

Throughout the last year, the office of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has issued several statements on meetings between himself and Gomaa set up to discuss “the maximization of the benefits from endowments.” 

In 2020, legal amendments enabled the endowments authority to manage and invest the assets. In 2021, the Egyptian Endowments Fund was established, to be managed directly by the Cabinet with the purpose of aggregating all endowment surpluses and directing them toward priorities determined by the government.

“This is highly controversial,” a researcher specializing in religious institutions tells Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.

“All plans to sell endowments to help generate funds that serve any purpose other than the one stipulated in the original plan for those endowments are simply in breach of the fundamentals of Islamic rules. By definition, an endowment is a property allocated for a specific purpose by its owner; changing the purpose of the endowment, not to mention selling the property, is a flagrant contradiction of Sharia,” they add.

The state’s attempt to control endowments for purposes other than their communitarian nature is not new. In the 1950s and 1960s, Nasser, as part of his policy to impose tight state control over all aspects of life, stripped the ministry of its authority over endowments. The ministries of agriculture and agrarian reform, education, and health took control of a large swath of the assets, which were then directed toward Nasser’s programmatic reforms. This move, the researcher says, was framed to the public and to the employees of the ministry at the time as an attempt to make the endowments more beneficial to the poor.

Since the mid-1970s, the endowments have been mostly managed by the endowments authority, which former President Anwar al-Sadat set up, partially reversing the appropriations made to other ministries. With the move, Sadat appeared to be more observant of Sharia rules. 

Objection to the potential selling of endowments has primarily come from Al-Azhar, a source within the institution says. According to this source, as well as a source at the Endowments Ministry, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, Al-Azhar Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb has made it clear to the executive authority that he could not possibly approve of tampering with the assets and properties of the endowments. While Al-Azhar has no control over the endowments, any legislation that would place them under the control of any body would require the institution’s approval to ensure compliance with Sharia. 

But this is not the first time Al-Azhar has positioned itself in defiance of state directives. In 2017, the institution took a firm stance against a proposed bill to use funds and assets of the endowments to help build hospitals and schools, according to the Al-Azhar source. And according to the ministry source, the proposed bill was also criticized within the ministry, but the minister got support from some prominent Muslim clergy, including Ali Gomaa and Osama al-Azhary, who are known to be close to the presidency. This segment of the clergy argued that it is not against Sharia to repurpose the endowments in view of socioeconomic developments, as long as the objective of charity is maintained.

The same Ali Gomaa, a prominent Sufi cleric who served as grand mufti from 2003 until February 2013, would found Masajid in 2021 to pursue the renovation of mosques, especially those said to have an association with members of the Prophet Mohamed’s family. It works in coordination with the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, which has been a key contractor of various national development projects. Masajid is chaired by Naizy Sallam, who also chairs the food bank of Misr al-Khair, a non-profit chaired by Ali Gomaa that receives significant donations. Masajid has recently taken on the restoration of the Hussein Mosque with funds from the Dawoodi Bohras, a Shia sect in India, infuriating some Salafi figures, as the renovations carried clear Shia imprints on the interiors of the mosque, according to a source close to Masajid. The same source says that Gomaa’s primary motive in founding Masajid was to attempt to increase Sisi’s popularity among the large Sufi community, a key constituency for ousted President Hosni Mubarak that cares about these mosques.

Another contention around Endowments Minister Mokhtar Gomaa emerged earlier this year, according to the source within the ministry, when he was perceived internally by some to have mishandled the organization of tahajjud, a highly-attended evening prayer in mosques and public spaces during the last ten days of the month of Ramadan. After the month started on April 2, Gomaa announced plans to prohibit the rite, citing COVID-19 precautionary measures. The decision was met with public anger on social media, especially since most COVID-19-related measures had already been lifted by then, the ministry source says. 

The source says Gomaa dismissed advice from some of his aides against the decision, arguing that it was pushed by the National Security Agency, which, the source adds citing Gomaa, is concerned about possible mobilizations against price rises by large masses attending the prayers. 

Shortly after Gomaa announced his decision, Tayyeb decided to open Al-Azhar Mosque for the evening prayers during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Unlike other mosques, Al-Azhar is an independent institution that does not fall under the auspices of the Endowments Ministry. 

As a compromise, the security apparatus suggested that all mosques, Al-Azhar and those under the Endowment Ministry, would be allowed to open for prayers for three consecutive nights. However, according to the ministry source, this middle-ground didn’t spare Gomaa from heightened criticism from within his ministry for falling in line with security instructions. 

According to the ministry source, security agencies were alarmed by the massive attendance at mosques for Eid al-Fitr prayers on May 2. Neither Gomaa nor the security apparatus, he says, “wanted to see such large numbers turning up for the dawn prayers, nor do they wish to see this happening again [during Eid al-Adha] in July.” 

The same source says Gomaa was meeting with security officers to prepare for the July 9 Eid al-Adha prayers when the statement about the sermon came out. Similarly, the ministry source says there is close coordination between the ministries of endowments and interior ahead of the Eid prayers, in terms of the text and duration of the sermon, the mosques and public spaces that would be designated for it and the imams who would be authorized to preach. According to the ministry source, Gomaa carefully reviewed the list of imams who will lead the Eid prayers and passed this list and a list of stand-by imams for security screening.

Gomaa found himself in trouble yet again when he decided to impose a unified text for the weekly Friday sermon, the ministry source says. “This is unprecedented; imams have for years received instructions on the red lines, but they were never forced to read a text that is distributed from the office of the minister,” he adds. 

Since 2014, the ministry has issued weekly documents for the Friday sermon, with the instruction that imams should address the topics outlined in the text using the same approach that it employs. Until mosques were reopened last year in the wake of the pandemic, reading out the entire text was not obligatory.

Most of the executive’s concern over religious institutions and their potential use as a vehicle for mobilization by radical Islamists centers on Al-Azhar, whose relative independence has made it harder to control than the Endowments Ministry.

Despite Tayyeb’s support of Sisi in his move to oust the Muslim Brotherhood from power in July 2013, a rift between the two has grown in the years since. Tayyeb, according to the Al-Azhar source, was opposed to the violent dispersal of the Brotherhood sit-ins in August that year in which over 900 people were killed. Tayyeb was quoted by sources at the time as saying such dispersal was “haram.”

Years on, the rift has only widened, to the extent that Sisi has tried to remove Tayyeb from his position on several occasions. 

According to a 2012 law adopted shortly before the Brotherhood were ousted from power, the grand imam is directly elected from the institution's Council of Senior Scholars and serves in his post until he turns 80. This law arguably diluted the executive power wielded over Al-Azhar since the early 1960s, when Nasser took control of the institution and Al-Azhar’s grand imam had come to be directly appointed by the president. 

In an attempt to grab this power again, a draft amendment to the law was presented in 2017, through a parliament largely aligned with the executive. The amendment proposed that the grand imam serve just two terms and that his performance be subject to oversight. The amendment didn’t come through, a source within Parliament at the time and the Al-Azhar source say, for fear of the blowback it may have elicited and amid what they said was Emirati intervention in favor of Tayyeb. 

A proposed constitutional amendment that would have restored the president’s pre-2012 prerogative to appoint the grand imam of Al-Azhar was also scrapped in 2019 following UAE mediation, a source close to Al-Azhar told Mada Masr at the time.

In 2020, Tayyeb sent a letter to the House of Representatives criticizing a draft bill on the mandate of Dar al-Iftaa, the third of Egypt’s Islamic bodies. The grand imam’s letter expressed discontent over the bypassing of some of the established responsibilities of Al-Azhar to have oversight on edicts, as per the 2014 Constitution. The Al-Azhar source adds that the draft bill was an attempt by the executive to undermine Al-Azhar through other Islamic institutions, after the attempt to remove Tayyeb failed. The law was passed with minor amendments and Tayyeb did not make a big fuss.

Despite his public display of alignment with Sisi, Tayyeb is generally described as distant and abrupt, and his demeanor has prompted media attacks from anchors close to the authorities. Unlike other clergymen who are competing for the confidence of the president, the Al-Azhar source says, Tayyeb is far from interested in being in anyone’s camp “because he believes that his place is prominent at the court of the Quran.”

Mubarak appointed Tayyeb in 2010 when he was in his early 60s. A graduate of Islamic philosophy from the Sorbonne University, Tayyeb was seen as a reformist scholar whose appointment was believed to be a push by Mubarak to modernize the veteran religious institution. 

With the power shift of 2013, however, Tayyeb’s focus veered from reform to preserving the independence of his institution, according to Georges Fahmi, a researcher specialized in religious institutions. Unlike Endowments Minister Mokhtar Gomaa and Grand Mufti Shawky Allam, Tayyeb showed no interest in excessive criticism of political Islam, which is often used to serve the political agenda of the regime, Fahmi says.

The researcher also says Tayyeb’s distance from executive power does not bode well, especially when compared to Gomaa and Allam, who go the extra mile to praise and please the head of the executive. Allam has been dubbed “the death-sentence mufti,” given the exceptionally high number of death sentences that he ratified over the past years. In 2021, Egypt sentenced more people to death than any other country in the world and carried out the third most executions, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.

Tayyeb is equally distant from both Allam, who took office in February 2013 upon being nominated by the Council of Senior Scholars, and Gomaa, who took over the ministry in July 2013. According to Fahmi, there is a profound conceptual rift between them, as Tayyeb does not believe that combating militancy should be done by subjugating religious institutions to the ruling authorities, but rather through fixing the relationship between the executive and the religious institutions to help the latter regain credibility for the opinions of scholars.

“The Free Officers regime acted to undermine all entities that were not subject to the authority of the military; Nasser put the endowments in the hands of the executive because they represent civil society. Meanwhile, Al-Azhar represents an uncontrolled domain of clergy with influence,” the researcher says. “Today we are seeing the same scenario being replayed for the same purpose of control.”