Top Sunni cleric Tantawi dies

CAIRO – Sunni Islam’s top cleric Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, a controversial figure in Egypt, died yesterday in Saudi Arabia of a heart attack suffered while boarding a plane, state media said.

Tantawi, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar – Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning – had been in Riyadh to attend the King Faisal awards ceremony, the official MENA news agency said.
Tantawi, 81, was boarding a plane early yesterday morning when he suffered severe pain and fell on the stairs, Egyptian television said.
He was rushed to the Amir Sultan hospital in Riyadh where doctors pronounced him dead.
An Egyptian official told AFP that Tantawi had died of a heart attack.
Immediately after the announcement of his death, sombre music played on Egyptian television to footage of Al-Azhar mosque.
The news of his death was “an indescribable shock,” his son Amr Tantawi told the channel.
“The family has decided that since God chose for him to die on Saudi land, he will be buried in Al-Baqie” cemetery in Islam’s second holy city of Medina, he added.
Tantawi was appointed head of Al-Azhar, the 10th century university that has trained the majority of Sunni Muslim clerics from Africa and Asia, by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1996.
“The Islamic and Arabic word has lost a scholar and a jurisprudent” who was “dedicated to his work and to everything that served the good of Islam and Muslims,” Al-Azhar said in a statement.
The softly spoken cleric with a trim white beard, who was always seen wearing a traditional Azharite white turban, has long been a controversial figure in Egypt.
His rulings on a wide range of topics, such as the Islamic veil, abortion, suicide attacks, women prayer leaders and female circumcision, often caused a stir in the Islamic world and beyond.
In October last year, a national row broke out after Tantawi banned the niqab, or full face veil, in all residences and schools affiliated to Al-Azhar, except in classrooms where the teacher is male.
Many of his other rulings have also been controversial.
In 2003, he said suicide bombers were “enemies of Islam,” adding that “extremism is the enemy of Islam.”
After the September 11 attacks in the United States, Tantawi said: “It’s not courage in any way to kill an innocent person, or to kill thousands of people, including men and women and children.”
He also rejected Osama bin Laden’s call for a jihad, or holy war, against the West.
Tantawi, who has three children, was born in 1928 in the village of Salim in Sohag province, about 290 kilometres (180 miles) south of the capital, Cairo.
In 1966 he graduated from the faculty of theology at Al-Azhar. – Nampa-AFP

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