An article looks back on the life of a famous Egyptian cleric in the twists and turns of the country’s recent history.
In the late 1970s, Spain was going through a political, and ultimately a cultural, transformation. Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who had ruled the country since the 1930s, had died. The first free multiparty elections were held in 1977. Pedro Almodóvar was making his first short films on Super-8.
Into this maelstrom stepped a young Egyptian man, a few years younger than Almodóvar, a student of Spanish language on a three-month course in the southern Spanish province of Andalusia. He’d wanted to become a doctor, but his grades weren’t good enough. He failed the physical for the police, the Egyptian news website Al-Manassa reports. So, Spanish language it was.
And it was in Spain, suggests journalist Muhammad al-Duwaik, that everything changed for Hijazi Muhammad, a.k.a. Abu Ishaq al-Houweny.
Perhaps, the writer speculates, it was “the grief he felt when he saw traces of the glories of the Muslims who had lost Andalusia [known in Arabic as Al-Andalus] after a rule that lasted more than seven centuries” that brought about the change. Just as it was Sayyid Qutb’s two years in the United States in the 1940s which turned him from a conservative who loved European classical music and French literature into a radical who saw the West as Islam’s implacable spiritual (and political) enemy, it was Hijazi Muhammad’s three months in Spain which set him on course to become one of Egypt’s leading Salafist clerics, adopting the name Abu Ishaq al-Houweny.
Al-Houweny died in March in Qatar. Al-Manassa looks back on his trajectory in the context of the twists and turns of Egypt’s recent history.
What country did Hijazi Muhammad (a.k.a. al-Houweny) return to from Spain? The 1970s was a transformative time in Egypt too; and across the region. Many members of the Muslim Brotherhood, locked up under Nasser, were released from prison under his successor Sadat in the 1970s. An Islamic movement spread through the universities. Saudi Arabia, flush with oil wealth, encouraged the global spread of Wahhabism.
On graduation, Hijazi Muhammad refused to work for the state bureaucracy, or as a radio translator, or as a tour guide – such jobs would have forced him to work with women, the article notes – instead opting to work in a grocer’s shop. In his spare time he studied Islamic law at the feet of a Salafist cleric with Saudi links.
The moment was ripe for a kind of academic Salafism – generally loyal to the political structures of the state, seeking societal change through personal devotion – seen in Egypt, the US and elsewhere as a potential bulwark against Communism. For a number of young Salafists with a sharp tongue such as al-Houweny, cassette tapes became a key propaganda tool. “Unlicensed companies in Attaba district and downtown Cairo worked day and night copying these tapes in exchange for huge funding from the Gulf”, Al-Manassa reports.
Under Mubarak – who followed Sadat after his assassination in 1981 – the state viewed the variety of different currents of Islamic thought as potentially useful in keeping the whole divided. As long as they didn’t get too close to politics, they could be managed or even partially ignored.
But over time the Salafi movement became a “quasi parallel state”, the article notes. Al-Houweny’s branch of it became more rhetorically extreme. And yet, as it didn’t engage in violence, it didn’t attract the state’s acute concern. “Its most famous fatwas”, Al-Mannasa tells us, somewhat laconically, “concerned the rules on growing a beard, trimming a mustache and the appropriate length of clothing”. Al-Houweny meanwhile engaged in sparring matches with the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who he accused of being too close to the Mubarak family – branding him a sycophant – and too close to Sufism (a mystical approach to Islam that Salafis view as being a perversion of the truth).
The 2011 Egyptian revolution which toppled Mubarak was a watershed. After decade after decade of dictators from on high, what to do when faced with a popular political uprising? Embrace the rebellion on the streets, make political alliances, enter political contests (though this runs against some versions of Salafi teaching where loyalty to the ruler is baked in)? Or simply try to navigate an uncertain time as best you can?
Al-Houweny, the article suggests, chose the latter and rather rocky path. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi lost power in a military coup d’état in 2013, al-Houweny blamed the “treacherous media” for the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood’s experiment, while also suggesting that God had made them lose in order to teach them that “empowerment can only be achieved in servitude to God”.
A little later, he went to Qatar for medical treatment. He didn’t return. On his death last month, the establishment Al-Azhar university – the teachings of which al-Houweny had often sparred with – paid him a generous tribute. His grandson, meanwhile, has been languishing in an Egyptian jail since 2019.
What has really changed through all these twists and turns of power and religion, Al-Manassa asks? Can Egyptians be convinced that the solution to their crises will come from civilians “whose standing is based on competence, justice, transparency and accountability”. Or will those same civilians, through their failures, once more, “force the masses to turn to heaven through Salafi or Sufi intermediaries?”
CEM
The original article was published on 27 March 2025 in Arabic under the title ‘حجازي محمد الذي أصبح أبو إسحاق الحويني’.
It is available here.
Al-Manassa is an Egyptian news website.
