Muhammad Mustafa al-Maraghi

Muhammad Mustafa al-Maraghi (1881–1945) was an Egyptian Azhari scholar and sharia judge who served twice as Grand Imam (Sheikh) of al-Azhar: from 1928 until his resignation in October 1929, and again from April 1935 until his death. Before that he was Grand Qadi of the Sudan (1908–1919) and then president of Cairo's Supreme Sharia Court; he was among the most prominent pupils of Muhammad Abduh and a bearer of his reform project. ^{1 2}

He is known for personal-status legislation that freed the sharia courts from adherence to a single school of law, for his Azhar reforms (the Law of 1936, the cross-madhhab Fatwa Committee, the research observatory), and for defiant stands before power — including his refusal, on his final sickbed, to issue King Farouk a fatwa barring the king's divorced wife from remarrying. ^{1 3}

His full name was Muhammad ibn Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Mun'im al-Maraghi, of El Maragha in the Sohag governorate of Upper Egypt. He was born on 7 Rabi' al-Akhar 1298 AH, corresponding to 9 March 1881 (the English article gives 5 March), and the Arabic article traces his lineage to al-Husayn ibn Ali (may God be pleased with him). His father was a man of some culture, from a family known for judges and scholars according to the Arabic article; the German article describes the family as large landowners. ^{1 2 3 4}

He memorised the Qur'an as a boy, and his father sent him to al-Azhar in Cairo, where he studied the Arabic sciences under Ali al-Salihi and attached himself to Muhammad Abduh, attending his lectures on tafsir, tawhid and rhetoric and absorbing his reform method; the bond lasted for life. ¹

On 26 May 1904 he sat the 'alimiyya examination and passed at the head of his cohort; Muhammad Abduh himself examined him, noticing his fever and telling him: "I noticed you were feverish, but you were beyond passing", and invited him home in his honour. He then taught at al-Azhar for a few months, drawing crowds of students by his brilliance in exposition. ¹

When the government of the Sudan asked Muhammad Abduh to choose sharia judges, al-Maraghi was foremost among his choices; he travelled as qadi of the Dongola district and was soon transferred as qadi of Khartoum. In 1907 he fell out with the Grand Qadi and the judicial secretary over the choice of court inspectors and resigned, returning to Egypt. It is related of him that he refused a six-pound raise on the qadi's salary, telling the judicial secretary: "My astonishment is like yours: that the English judge takes fifty pounds, while you begrudge the Egyptian sharia judge twenty." ¹

In September 1907 he was appointed inspector of religious lessons at the Awqaf ministry. Then Slatin Pasha, the Sudan government's agent in Egypt, visited him offering the Grand Qadiship; he stipulated that his appointment be by decree of the Khedive of Egypt — the Muslim ruler — and the decree issued on 1 August 1908; he held the post until 1919 (the TDV entry notes that one of its sources dates the appointment to 1909). ^{1 2}

In office he insisted that the choice of the fiqh opinions his judges would apply was within his authority; the dispute with the judicial secretary went to the Governor-General, who upheld him. He also supervised the sharia section of Gordon College and staffed it with Egyptian teachers from al-Azhar and Dar al-Ulum. ^{1 2}

In 1911 Britain planned to celebrate the coronation of George V as Emperor of India; the notables of the Sudan were summoned to receive the royal ship at Suakin, and protocol reserved boarding to senior Englishmen. Al-Maraghi refused to attend unless he boarded like them; the arrangement was changed, he boarded and met the king, and when some Englishmen objected that he had not bowed to the king as those who shook his hand bowed, he answered: "There is no bowing to other than God in our religion." ¹

In the 1919 revolution he led the Egyptians of the Sudan in demonstrations for Saad Zaghloul and collected signatures recognising Zaghloul and his companions as the nation's delegates; some British officials proposed imprisoning or exiling him, but the judicial secretary judged it safer to grant him urgent, indefinite leave, and he returned to Egypt — ending his Sudan service. ¹

In Cairo he held, in succession: head of sharia inspection at the Ministry of Justice (9 October 1919), president of Egypt's Grand Sharia Court (21 July 1920), member of the Supreme Sharia Court (27 January 1921), and its president (11 December 1923). ^{1 2}

In these posts he formed a committee under his chairmanship to organise personal-status law and directed it not to adhere to the Hanafi school where another school's ruling better served society's public interest — the judges had until then been bound to the Hanafi school alone. The personal-status law issued in July 1920; the TDV entry details among its effects that a divorce sworn as an oath does not take effect, that a triple repudiation in one utterance counts as a single divorce, and rulings on the grandson's inheritance. He later issued Marriage Law no. 25 of 1929 with his book Buhus fi'l-tashri' al-Islami (Studies in Islamic Legislation). ^{1 2}

He was a member of the Greater Committee on the Caliphate formed on 25 March 1924 after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate, and in a letter to Governor-General Wingate he argued — as the German article and the TDV entry summarise it, following Kedourie — that the caliph need not be of Quraysh and that the caliphate is in essence a worldly office. In July–August 1925 he undertook a secret mission to Mecca and Medina to sound out the Hijaz on King Fu'ad's caliphate ambitions, and he was the main organiser of the 1926 Cairo Caliphate Congress. ^{3 2 4}

His appointment as Sheikh al-Azhar is dated by the Arabic article to 9 Dhu al-Hijja 1346, i.e. 28 May 1928; the German article and the TDV entry give 22 May 1928. He formed committees under his chairmanship to study al-Azhar's laws and curricula, and in August 1928 presented a reform memorandum comprising the opening of the door of ijtihad, three higher faculties (Arabic sciences, sharia, and theology) and a cap on admissions. ^{1 3}

But the king wanted control of al-Azhar's affairs, including its appointments, while al-Maraghi wanted a free hand in choosing his assistants; he resigned on 10 October 1929 (the Arabic article's lead rounds this to "his resignation in 1930"; the German article frames the departure as a royal dismissal). His exit provoked an ulama revolt in which seventy scholars were transferred or dismissed, according to the German article. He then spent more than five years at home revising his reform foundations and the studies of his teacher Muhammad Abduh. ^{1 3}

He was reappointed Sheikh al-Azhar in April 1935 (27 April in the TDV entry), backed by thousands of scholars and students, the government and public opinion, and issued Law no. 26 of 1936, which organised Azhar education in four stages and restored the three faculties: Sharia, Usul al-Din (theology) and Arabic Language. ^{1 2}

On 11 August 1935 he founded the Fatwa Committee — a chairman and eleven members: three Hanafi jurists, three Maliki, three Shafi'i and two Hanbali — which answers according to a specific school if the questioner requests it, or otherwise by the rules drawn from the Qur'an, the Sunna, consensus and sound analogy, preferring what is gentler for the questioner where the evidence supports it. He reorganised the Corps of Senior Scholars, requiring of each member an original scholarly treatise; he revived the Department of Preaching and Guidance (first created by him in 1928); and shortly before his death, in July 1945, he created a research-and-culture observatory that became the nucleus of the Islamic Research Academy. ^{1 2}

He led al-Azhar's delegations to the world congresses of faiths in London (1936), The Hague (1937) and Paris (1939), campaigned for modern sciences in the Azhar curriculum, and met Marmaduke Pickthall over authorising the latter's translation of the Qur'an. ⁴

• Bahth fi tarjamat al-Qur'an wa-ahkamiha (A Study on Translating the Qur'an and its Rulings): his treatise on the obligation and permissibility of translating the Qur'an, printed at the Ragha'ib Press in Cairo in 1936 (the German article dates the treatise to 1932 and notes that he argued permissibility through a Hanafi argument). ^{1 3}
• Al-Zamala al-insaniyya (Human Fellowship): written for the London congress of religions and printed in 1936. ¹
• Tafsir Juz' Tabarak: written to complete Muhammad Abduh's project of a commentary on Juz' 'Amma. ^{1 2}
• Al-Awliya' wa'l-mahjurun (Guardians and the Interdicted): a fiqh study of interdiction over the foolish, which earned him membership of the Corps of Senior Scholars; manuscript in the Azhar Library. ^{1 2}
• Buhus fi'l-tashri' al-Islami (Studies in Islamic Legislation): with the grounds of Marriage Law no. 25 of 1929. ¹
• Al-Durus al-diniyya (The Religious Lessons): commentaries delivered at celebrations in the great mosques of Cairo and Alexandria, heard by King Farouk in the Ramadan nights from 1356 to 1364 AH and published in the Azhar journal; he died while commenting on Surat al-Qadr, two weeks before its night. He also wrote commentaries on al-Hujurat (1940) and on Luqman and al-'Asr (1943), and linguistic and rhetorical studies composed in his teaching. ¹

This section reports the assessments as the sources attribute them; the museum issues no verdict of its own. Abd al-Halim Mahmud, a later Grand Imam of al-Azhar, said of him: "A clever scholar, of extraordinary personality, awe-inspiring, a man of opinion in learning and politics, eloquent of style." The Governor-General of the Sudan wrote to the British Foreign Office that al-Maraghi "is counted among the most shrewd men of the world", and during the 1919 revolution The Times wrote: "Remove this man, for he is more dangerous to our country and our lives than the calamities of war." ¹

Against this, Kedourie — as relayed by the German article — describes him as having been, up to the First World War, "an ardent supporter of British rule" in the Sudan; the same article records that after 1936 he supported King Faruq's caliphate ambitions, and that the High Commissioner Lampson suspected his motives. His reform heir Mahmud Shaltut championed his 1928 reform memorandum, and Shaltut is regarded as the scholar most influenced by him in carrying forward the renewal of al-Azhar. ^{3 1}

In inter-school rapprochement, he held an extended dialogue with the Twelver Shia scholar Abd al-Karim al-Zanjani of Najaf, and in February 1938 — after meeting the Aga Khan III — proposed a Cairo-based Supreme Islamic Council for Sunni–Shia rapprochement; the proposal met coolness and scepticism among Shia scholars and was not realised, as the German article documents following Brunner. ³

No source used here names a fiqh school for al-Maraghi: the Arabic article's infobox gives his religion as Islam, with no madhhab; the Urdu article does likewise; the English and German articles and Ali Gomaa's TDV encyclopedia entry name none; and Wikidata records Islam generically. His judicial and legislative record argues against attachment to one school: he freed his judges in the Sudan and Egypt from the Hanafi-only constraint, composed his Fatwa Committee from the four schools, and once used a Hanafi argument on the Qur'an-translation question — a position taken in an argument, not an affiliation. His faith is therefore left unclassified (unknown) in the data record, with this basis stated. ^{1 4 3 2 5}

He was ill at the Mowasat hospital in Alexandria when King Farouk, having divorced his first wife, sought a legal fatwa barring her from remarrying after him; the king pressed him by every means and visited him in hospital, but al-Maraghi refused, and after a violent confrontation between them his health collapsed. He died on the night of Wednesday 14 Ramadan 1364 AH, corresponding to 22 August 1945 (the TDV entry dates the death to 23 August); the place of death recorded in the Arabic article's infobox is Alexandria. ^{1 2}

The TDV entry records that his body was taken to Hulwan, that the funeral prayer was held at al-Azhar Mosque, and that he was buried in the Sayyida Nafisa cemetery in Cairo. In 1918 he had received the honorary OBE, according to the English article, for his Sudan service. ^{2 4}

• English Wikipedia article on Muhammad Mustafa al-Maraghi (revision 1357399555); Arabic Wikipedia article (revision 72346389); Urdu Wikipedia article (revision 12253951); German Wikipedia article (revision 266314227); Ali Gomaa, "MERÂGĪ, Muhammed Mustafa", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29 (2004), pp. 164–165; Wikidata item Q4120117.
• Conflicts recorded in the text: the birth day (9 March in the Arabic, Urdu and TDV sources vs 5 March in the English article), the death day (22 August vs 23 August in the TDV entry; Wikidata carries the conflicting years 1944 and 1945, the first rejected), the first Azhar appointment (28 May in the Arabic article vs 22 May in the German article and TDV), the character of his first departure (resignation in the Arabic article vs dismissal in the German; the Arabic lead rounds it to 1930), and the dating of the Qur'an-translation treatise (printed 1936 vs 1932 in the German article).