Al Azhar plans to preach Islamic message on TV

Cairo:  Al Azhar, Egypt's 1,000-year-old seat of Islamic learning, will soon be preaching its doctrines on satellite television, a space it has previously left to Islamist parties now leading the country's first free polls.

Al Azhar, Egypt's highest religious authority, also plans to spruce up its websites, improve religious education and mobilise its imams to offer an alternative to the unexpectedly popular puritan message some Islamist politicians deliver.

Alongside its traditional work training most of Egypt's imams and providing thousands of religious rulings (fatwas) daily, it has also been hosting discussions among religious, political and cultural leaders to ponder Egypt's future.

"The revolution has helped us to reform," said Mahmoud Azab, adviser to Shaikh Ahmad Al Tayyeb, Grand Imam of Al Azhar and top Islamic authority for many of the world's Sunnis.

Ebrahim Negm, senior adviser to Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, Egypt's second-highest religious authority after Al Tayyeb, said: "We have not adequately coped with the changing modern means of communication and information technology."

Rivalries

The advisers told Reuters Al Azhar was not taking sides in the political rivalries marking Egypt's staggered elections.

Rather, it was making up for time lost during Hosni Mubarak's three-decade dictatorship when it kept close to the authorities, while banned Islamists eagerly embraced the new media and grassroots contacts to spread their stricter views. Islamists swept about two-thirds of the vote in the first of three voting rounds for parliament last month.

The Muslim Brotherhood won about 37 per cent, followed by Salafists with 24 per cent and a moderate Islamist group with about 4 per cent.

Origins

Founded as a madrasa in 970, Al Azhar is centred around its fabled mosque in old Cairo, where imams can still be seen lecturing to students sitting cross-legged on the floor.

In the last century, it became a modern university, adding secular subjects such as engineering and medicine and expanding to new buildings. Al Azhar also came under control of the state, which pressed clerics into service defending autocratic rule.

Bound by tradition and overshadowed by the state, Al Azhar missed the boat when new communications options opened up and Islamists seized them to challenge its mainstream view of Islam.