Encyclopedia of Islam

Shaarawi, Muhammad al-

---

b

rotherhood

 and its offshoots, and so he kept 

them and their activities on a short leash. Much 

of this changed with the coming of a

nWar

 

al

-

s

adat

 (r. 1970–81) to power, although he was not 

solely responsible for the change by any means. 

A reform-minded Islamist movement had been 

important in Egypt since the founding of the Mus-

lim Brotherhood in 1928, and it was only Nasir’s 

combined charisma and autocracy that kept their 

activities suppressed, especially after 1954. Sadat 

released many of the members of the Muslim 

Brotherhood from the prison camps where Nasir 

had placed them, and he encouraged the Islamist 

movements to broaden their power base and attack 

the leftists, which Sadat saw as buttressing his own 

authority against the legacy of his predecessor. 

Shaarawi benefited from all of this, even though he 

was never exactly an activist, and it seems he was 

never a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat, 

as a means of encouraging the kind of Islam that 

he thought politically beneficial, provided “mod-

erate” Islamists such as Shaarawi access to a large 

popular audience, thereby doing much to shift the 

national discourse onto a more religious basis.

Shaarawi was closely allied to the Saudi Ara-

bian elite, having taught in that country for much 

of the 1960s and 1970s. His beliefs, while not 

extreme, tended toward the literalism and dogma-

tism of the Islamists. Since his death, a great deal 

of debate and controversy has arisen in Egypt sur-

rounding efforts by his son to ensure that his father 

is revered as a 

saint

 and miracle worker, and that 

his tomb is visited in an annual pilgrimage. Many 

of Shaarawi’s most devoted followers consider this 

a sacrilege, and it is hard to imagine that Shaarawi 

would have been pleased with the controversy. 

Nonetheless, there is now a saint’s shrine over 

Shaarawi’s place of burial, and an annual saint’s 

festival or 

mawlid

 takes place there in early June, 

to which singers of religious songs and believers 

from Egypt and elsewhere come to pray, to join in 

the sacred and secular aspects of the festival, and 

to honor Shaarawi in their own way.

See also i

slamism

; 

sermon

.

John Iskander