1917 - 1996

Leading proponent of a centrist Islamism, renowned for opposition to secularism and anti-intellectual extremism.

Muhammad al-Ghazali graduated from al-Azhar in 1941 and became a leading political radical in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood before his dismissal from the Brotherhood's constituent body in December 1953, reportedly after involvement in an attempt to oust the movement's leader. His subsequent rise in the Egyptian Muslim jurisprudential system was accompanied by the publication of more than fifty books, ensuring popularity for his approaches to Qurʾanic exegesis and Islamic responses to modernity across the Muslim world. In 1989 he won the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies, but his subsequent books, The Sunna of the Prophet and the influential Journey through the Qurʾan, drew fierce attacks from Saudis for his outspoken attack on the simplistic methods of antimodernist extremists. In the 1980s he headed Islamic university academies in Mecca, Qatar, and Constantine (Algeria), where President Chadli Bendjedid sought to use him as a mediator with more radical Islamists. After publicly debating leading secularists in Egypt, Ghazali drew fire for justifying the killing of Farag Foda as an apostate in 1992. In favor of taking ideas from the non-Muslim world, Ghazali was moderate in supporting women's rights and a gradualist approach to Islamic democracy.

Bibliography

Esposito, John. Islam and Politics. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

Meijer, Roel. From al-Daʿwa to al-Hizbiyya: Mainstream IslamicMovements in Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine in the 1990s. Amsterdam, 1997.

— GEORGE R. WILKES

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.