Founded in 970 in Cairo, al-Azhar Mosque is the oldest continuously active center of Islamic learning, and one of the few to preserve the classical Islamic tradition of teaching all four Sunni madhhabs. Globally recognized as an influential voice of wasaṭīyah Islam, its fatwās are sought by socially progressive Muslims as well as by heads of state, and it attracts aspiring young Muslim scholars from the West and the Muslim world alike. As we will see in Chapter 2, a combination of historically determined factors led to the evolution of al-Azhar as the leading voice of moderate Islam. Further, the analysis of ongoing debates among al-Azhari-trained ‘ulamā’ presented in Chapter 3 will illustrate how al-Azhar's claim to be the moderate voice of Islam, capable of balancing commitment to the fiqh with contemporary realities, is justified. However, its historic ability to strike a balance in favor of wasaṭīyah Islam is under higher pressure right now than arguably at any other time in the recent past. This chapter will illustrate why.

In the post-Arab Spring in Egypt al-Azhar is faced with a serious crisis of legitimacy: its alliance with General Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi's government has severely compromised its moral authority within the global Muslim community. Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyib, the Shaykh al-Azhar (Grand Shaykh), who demanded the protection of basic political freedoms under the Muslim Brotherhood government, led by Mohamed Morsi, of which he was openly critical, went on to lend unqualified support to the al-Sisi government, despite its discernible disregard of those very freedoms. The decision by the al-Azhari leadership to cooperate with the Egyptian military regime, and its reservations about the Muslim Brotherhood, are not new developments: ever since al-Azhar lost its independence to the Egyptian state under Gamal Nasser's regime (see Chapter 2), official al-Azhar has time and again had to lend religious legitimacy to highly controversial political decisions of successive Egyptian regimes. While such pragmatism has compromised al-Azhar's moral authority in the eyes of the Islamists and moderate Muslims alike, collusion with the state has also been a boon: state resources have helped to expand al-Azhar's educational network across the country.