ʿAlī Jumʿa as Editor: Reviving the Ḥāshiya in Late-Twentieth-Century Egypt

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuḥfat al-murīd ʿalā Jawharat al-tawḥīd, a supercommentary written by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) on Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī’s (d. 1632) base text in Ashʿarī theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, ʿAlī Jumʿa (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jumʿa’s edition taḥqīq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jumʿa situates al-Bājūrī’s ḥāshiya against Salafī opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jumʿa’s taḥqīq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.