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In Egypt today, turāth (often translated as “heritage”, “legacy”, or “tradition”) is a pivotal concept for the Muslim religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) of al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Sunni learning located in Cairo. Although scholarly interest in turāth has grown in recent years, this literature has focused primarily on articulations of the concept at the hands of the Arab intelligentsia without attention to the ʿulamāʾ. To address this lacuna, and in so doing, offer a more complete understanding of the politics and contours of turāth debates in the contemporary Arab Muslim world, this article analyzes turāth in the writings and statements of ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952), one of its most prolific interpreters amongst the contemporary Egyptian ʿulamāʾ. Sections one and two explore the semantic evolution of turāth in the intellectual genealogy within which Jumʿa locates his understanding of the concept, which includes two students of al-Azhar: Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973). The third section analyzes Jumʿa’s conceptualization of turāth and compares it to those of ʿAbduh and Ḥusayn. The article argues that Jumʿa’s representation of turāth is central to his efforts to reassert the intellectual and religious primacy of the ʿulamāʾ in the contemporary Muslim world.

In: Die Welt des Islams
In: Women and Modern Medicine
In: Women and Modern Medicine
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Abstract

The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, a supercommentary written by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) base text in Ashʿarī theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition taḥqīq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against Salafī opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.

Open Access
In: Philological Encounters