Watani International met with the Grand Mufti of the Republic, Dr. Ali Goma’a, during his visit to London in which he headed a delegation comprising Dr. Muhammad Abu Leila, Dr. Gaffar Abdel Salam and Dr. Zaghloul Al-Naggar. The objective of the visit, as the Grand Mufti stated during a seminar held at the Egyptian Cultural Center, is opening a dialogue with the West.
In order to realize this objective, the delegation met with representatives from the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church and British diplomats.
Q: Why do not you hold seminars aiming at correcting the untrue concepts about Islam embraced by some Muslims like Abu Hamza Al-Masry, Abu Qatada and Omar Al-Bakry? Should you not do that before trying to correct Western misconceptions about Islam?
A: Those people you speak about are very few. They deviated from [true] Islam like any deviated group from any religion.
Q: But those people have many followers?
A: This is not true. The number of Muslims today is 1 billion and quarter of a billion…How many of them deviated? One thousand or two thousands? We tried to confront Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada and their likes with all political and ideological and security means.
When extremists assassinated President Anwar Al-Sadat, they were arrested. As a result of the dialogues we made with them, they repented and authored about 15 books about repentance…So, we succeeded in convincing thousands of them to return to moderation. Some of them run away like Abu Hamza. We asked the British government to extradite him to us in order to render him a fair trial and to bring him under the same circumstances lived by those who repented so that he may repent.
Q: Today, a lot of fatwas are released from various sources. Some fatwas allow killing Coptic Christians and plundering their properties as unbelievers. What is your Eminence’s opinion regarding these fatwas and why do not you give a fatwa that prohibits killing followers of other religions?
<
A: We have released many fatwas and books. Sheikh Gad Al-Haq released a book while he was a grand mufti. Sheikh Al-Dahaby released a book while he was a minister of Awqaf [Religious Endowments] and he paid his life for it. When fatwas are given by people who are not qualified to do so, we find ourselves in a cultural crisis. This crisis is the result of the culture of ignorance which leads people to turn to unqualified, unspecialized people.
Q: If a Muslim, or a Muslim group, seized a building or a piece of land owned by a Christian by force and built a mosque on it. Is performing prayers on an illegally-seized land lawful Shari’a-wise?
A: Seizing any thing by force from any human is not lawful…Praying on a piece of land that is illegally-seized is unlawful, meaning that if someone performs the noon prayer on that piece of land, he should perform it again.
Q: If mosques and Churches are the houses of God in which the name of God is mentioned, why putting obstacles before building and restoring churches. Do you agree on regulations that make restoring a Church’s closet or rebuilding a ruined fence need permissions from the president of the republic and security apparatuses. Why do not you give a fatwa that denounces these obstacles and explain that all citizens are equal in rights and duties?
A: Actually what you say has nothing to do with reality…I never heard that someone complained because of the obstacles before restoration or building of churches. The conditions stipulated for building are related to the architectural specifications that guarantee safety.
Q: As we are speaking about building of churches, what is your opinion concerning the ten conditions [for building churches] stipulated by an undersecretary in the Ministry of Interior in February 1934 which are based on the Ottomani Hamayouni law? These conditions are still in action and they include many tough restrictions on building churches. Do you agree on opening churches that have been closed for years?
A: What are these ten conditions? I do not know about them. I want to know what these conditions are because many of them were stipulated as means of taking care and giving more attention to Copts even if many Copts did not get this impression.
You know that Copts are a minority, official statistics that that they represent six or seven percent [of Egypt’s population]. Do you know that that not a single woman or black reached the US presidency? No naturalized American from the third generation reached the US presidency. It is Anglo-Saxons who reached power. What is the reason for it? Is it because the American constitution is corrupted? No, it is because of their large number.
• See art. 28, 29, 30: Dr. Bebawy’s dissertation “rights and duties of non-Muslims in Islamic states”.
