Ideals and Interests in Intellectuals’ Political Deliberations: The Arab Spring and the Divergent Paths of Egypt’s Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib and Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa

Abstract

The academic literature equates the Arab Spring politics of Egypt’s two highest official religious figures – the Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib and Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa—as “anti-revolutionary.” This article argues that al-Tayyib and Gomaa’s politics are fundamentally different. While Gomaa’s politics are submissive to the state, al-Tayyib’s politics are a negotation without confrontation. I explain the former by Gomaa’s struggle for religious authority either by seeking official positions or obstructing the revealing of information harmful to his religious legitimacy. The statist legitimacy threat against Gomaa is central to understanding his politics. Defending al-Azhar, on the other hand, is what explains al-Tayyib’s fluctuating politics. Theoretically, I advocate that explaining intellectuals’ politics requires focusing on their political deliberation. Only with a methodologically rigorous reconstruction of the intellectuals’ political deliberation and its context, can we decide the relative relevance of factors like ideals, interests, and structures (e.g., the state). I establish this with more than a thousand chronologically ordered primary sources and twenty interviews with people in Gomaa and al-Tayyib’s circles.