Mustafa al-Siba'i

Mustafa Husni al-Siba'i was born at Homs in 1915 (1333 AH), into a family known for learning and for preaching in the city's mosques; his father, Shaykh Husni al-Siba'i, was one of Homs' khatibs. He entered al-Azhar in 1933, and in Egypt he met Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and joined the society — the English article dates his joining to 1930 — taking part in Islamic student activism. In 1941 he was detained in Egypt for about three months and then held for four months at the Sarafand camp in Palestine. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar} {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en}

He took his doctorate in Sharia from al-Azhar in 1949 — the first Syrian to do so — with the thesis The Sunna and its Place in Islamic Legislation, which became a standard work on its subject. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en} {cite:source/encyclopedia-sibai-mustafa-al}

Back in Syria he founded the Shabab Muhammad association in 1941, worked to unite the country's Islamic associations — achieved in 1942 — and in 1945 the Brotherhood groups merged into one society and chose him as the first General Guide (murāqib ʿāmm) of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. After the arrest of the Egyptian guide Hasan al-Hudaybi, al-Siba'i also headed the Brotherhood's executive bureau for the Arab countries. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar} {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en}

The Arabic article records that in 1956 the society was dissolved, he was dismissed from the university and exiled to Lebanon, in a passage it sets in the Shishakli period. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar}

Al-Siba'i was elected deputy for Damascus in 1949, became deputy speaker of parliament, and sat on the nine-member committee that drafted the 1950 constitution. He was appointed professor in the Faculty of Law in 1950, and in 1955 he founded the Faculty of Sharia at Damascus University and became its first dean. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar} {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en}

His journals followed in sequence: al-Manar in 1947, closed after Husni al-Za'im's coup of 1949; al-Shihab in 1955; al-Muslimun (1955–1958), which afterwards moved to Geneva under Said Ramadan; and Hadarat al-Islam from 1958 until his death. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar}

His books include The Socialism of Islam (1959/1960), reprinted as Social Solidarity in Islam; Woman between Fiqh and Law; Glimpses of our Civilisation; Religion and State in Islam (1954); Orientalism and the Orientalists; and his last work, This is How Life Taught Me, dictated during his illness and published after his death in 1972. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar} {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en}

Al-Siba'i suffered hemiparesis on his left side for eight years and died on Saturday 27 Jumada al-awwal 1384 AH, 3 October 1964 — the English article places his death at Homs — and the funeral prayer was held at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The Arabic article corrects the erroneous 1967 death year given by al-Zirikli and copied by later writers. {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-ar} {cite:source/wikipedia-mustafa-al-sibai-en}