Interesting Times

Abstract

One of the most striking features of the contemporary Islamic world is the growing importance of sectarian politics. Tensions between Sunnis and Shi‘is have been on the rise in many countries for approximately thirty years above all in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan, but also, periodically and to a remarkable degree, in Egypt.1 The latter case is the more astonishing as Egypt not only lacks a Shi‘i population of any tangible size but also distinguished itself, during the second half of the twentieth century, as the home of the only noticeable ecumenical society in modern Islam. The Jama‘at al-taqrib bayn al-madhahib al-Islamiyya (”Association for the rapprochement of the Islamic schools of law,” henceforth JT), which was founded in Cairo in January 1947 by the young Iranian cleric Muhammad Taqi al-Qummi, can be rightly regarded as the first organized and systematic attempt to bridge the gap between Sunnis and Shi‘is.2 Although its protagonists several of whom were high-ranking scholars of al-Azhar University tried hard to avoid open discussion of sectarian conflicts within Islam, the activities of the association were from the very beginning accompanied by polemical criticism from mainly Sunni Salafi circles. At the end of the 1950s, it nevertheless managed to reach a wider public, as the Egyptian president Nasser discovered the usefulness of pan-Islamism for his foreign policy.