“The prophet taught us to obey the ruler even if he’s a black slave,” said Sheikh Mohammed Muhanna, spokesman for the Council of Senior Scholars at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. “We love [President Abdel-Fattah] al-Sissi, the establishment and the army, and respect the army’s role.”

This statement was another episode in a saga riveting Egypt for weeks now over the comments by Islam al-Beheiry, who hosts a program on religion on the private television station Al Kahera Wal Nas. Beheiry considers himself an authorized interpreter of religion, and for the past year he has used his show to air his harshly critical views on radical Islam.

But his target list hasn’t been confined to radical organizations; he has also criticized Al-Azhar and its head, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. He has accused Tayeb of not ousting hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters from Al-Azhar, of rejecting any reform of the traditional religious learning system, and of issuing religious rulings based on 1,000-year-old books unsuitable to modern life.

Al-Azhar is a complex of institutions dating to the 10th century that currently includes a mosque, a school system, a university and the Council of Senior Scholars, whose religious rulings are binding on Egypt’s government (though not necessarily on its citizens).

But for decades, it has been in a trap. After existing for centuries as an independent institution, it was “nationalized” by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1961 and has since been an inseparable part of the governing establishment.

Open gallery view Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi. Credit: AP

As such, it has control over cultural and educational matters related to religion; it is responsible for the content of sermons given in more than 140,000 authorized mosques. Above all, it gives the government religious legitimacy for its actions.

But its opponents, including both extremist groups and respected religious scholars, say it has become the government’s puppet, approving everything Cairo does.

Consequently, Egyptian presidents have striven to bolster Al-Azhar’s standing as a religious shield against their rivals. Thus one would have expected Beheiry and others like him to be clearly informed that any direct attack on Al-Azhar or its head Tayeb was an attack on the regime.

But surprisingly, Beheiry has gotten through unscathed. Moreover, when Al-Azhar asked the governing authority of Egypt’s Media Free Zone, a media center akin to an industrial zone, to order the station to quash Beheiry’s program, the authority refused. It made do with a letter warning the channel to be more careful about the program.

TV magnate weighs in

The authority apparently faced two dilemmas. First, Sissi has urged Egyptians to “correct and renew our religious discourse” — and his recommendation amounts to an order.

As he put it, “several factors combine to create terror and radical thinking, including ignorance, poverty and our poor religious discourse, along with isolation and refusing to recognize the other’s culture.” Thus even Beheiry’s aggressive statements could be considered in line with the task of disseminating Sissi’s teachings.

But on the other hand, Sissi needs Al-Azhar, and he has also made clear that the necessary correction and renewal of the “discourse” must be effected solely by the state and religious experts, first and foremost Al-Azhar.

The second dilemma stemmed from the fact that Beheiry’s television station is owned by Tarek Nour, Egypt’s biggest advertising magnate, whose holding company dominates the country’s advertising market. Not only is Nour very close to Sissi, his sister is the president’s wife, and Nour organized and financed Sissi’s successful presidential campaign, just as he did for former President Hosni Mubarak in 2005.

Nour, like Sissi, is a vehement opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood. And when the owner of the station attacking Al-Azhar has family connections like these, it’s almost impossible for the authority to take the rebellious TV host off the air.

Sissi, incidentally, has shown no qualms about ordering the arrest or ouster of other journalists. He even approved the ouster of Culture Minister Gaber Asfour about two months ago over similar attacks on Al-Azhar. Freedom of expression, however, isn’t the issue here; it’s the president’s demand that Egypt’s religious discourse be “corrected.”

Al-Azhar hasn’t given up. After his demand for Beheiry’s ouster was rejected, Tayeb filed suit against the government’s radio and television authority, the Media Free Zone and Beheiry, basing the suit on an article in the Egyptian constitution that declares Islam the state religion and Islamic law the chief source of legislation.

Tayeb also charged that Beheiry was harming national security and disturbing the peace. It will be interesting to see how the court rules, given that it too isn’t blind to the close ties between Nour, Beheiry’s boss, and the president.

Al-Azhar also faces another problem: plans by author and journalist Sharif al-Shubashi to organize a million-woman demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on May 1 to protest a religious ruling requiring women to cover their hair.

“Al-Azhar’s instruction to wear a hijab during prayer is surprising,” Shubashi said. “Egypt hasn’t known such a thing for 50 years. Were the Al-Azhar scholars who lived in the 1940s and 1950s heretics?”

The hijab issue is developing into another storm that will eventually reach the president, who himself has the bump on his forehead characteristic of Muslims who pray regularly.

But Al-Azhar is well aware of the complication created by the close ties between Sissi and Nour. And thus Al-Azhar’s Muhanna hastened to declare his university’s “love” for Sissi, as if to make clear that religion is one thing and the president another. It remains to be seen whether Sissi agrees.