Dr Osama Al-Azhari
Minister of Awqaf
(Charitable Endowments)
The issue of the infiltration of (MB) ideology into Egyptian homes is considered one of the most dangerous intellectual and social issues that deserve deep study and serious contemplation. Through what can be described as a “soft threat,” this group managed to penetrate minds and hearts via books that spread in Egyptian homes over many decades, without many people realising the directed ideas and deviant contents they carried, which strayed from the authentic scientific and religious approach.
The works of this current’s theorists have found their way into home, school, and mosque libraries, shaping in people’s minds an image of religion very different from that of the moderate Azhar approach. They planted in minds the seeds of an ideology built on reductive oversimplification, misleading reduction, and slogans lacking sound scholarly grounding. Over time, this ideology became part of the prevailing religious culture – even among those who oppose the group politically or intellectually- because the influence sneaked in through books that people thought were books of knowledge and religion, while in reality they were tools for constructing an alternative consciousness.
The group actively sought to penetrate every field of Islamic scholarship. It produced works on Fiqh (jurisprudence), Tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis), sirah (prophetic biography), Maqasid (the objectives of Sharia) and fatwas, through which it attempted to construct a new religious vision that distorts awareness and weakens the authentic methodology upon which major scholarly institutions, led by Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, were founded.
The goal was not merely to present a different perspective, rather the project was much deeper. They aimed to undermine the scholarly legacy of the great imams and replace it with an alternative methodology under the slogan, “They were men and we are men” – a slogan later adopted by extremist groups as a pretext to rebel against religious constants and established scholarly authorities.
One of the most prominent examples in which this mode of thinking became manifested is the book “Fiqh al-Sunnah (jurisprudence of sunnah)” which promoted – what its author termed – “a new fiqh” outside the framework of the recognised jurisprudential schools (Madhahib). It offered a simplified presentation that seemed close to people, but in reality it lacked solid scholarly and methodological grounding, and laid the foundations for a fragile approach not based on the principles of fiqh, nor on the established tools of ijtihad (independent reasoning).
Therefore, scholars warned against relying on this book in jurisprudential formation, emphasising that jurisprudence is not built on cherry‑picking and compiling opinions, but rather on in-depth study and mastering the fundamental principles. They affirmed that the four schools of thought upon which the ummah’s legal knowledge has settled are the fruit of centuries of trustworthy ijtihad and precise scholarly review. Thus, renewal in religion is not achieved by demolishing madhhabs (the schools of thought) or dismantling the heritage, but by completing and developing the scholarly edifice – at the hands of scholars who combine a deep understanding of Sharia texts with a conscious awareness of reality and the higher objectives of Shari’ah. This path is in fact a continuation of the school of firmly grounded scholars like al-’Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, al-Ghazali, and others, who renewed understanding without severing the link to foundational principles.
The scholars of the Ummah realised the danger of (MB) ideology on religious consciousness. Therefore, they warned against its books, which sought to distort adherence to jurisprudential Madhahib, stigmatising it as a “restriction on religion.” In reality, however, the Madhahibs have always been – and remain – a scolarly framework that protects Shari’ah from intellectual chaos and the manipulation of legal texts. Furthermore, some of those works, such as “Fatawa Mu’asirah (Contemporary Fatwas)” by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, attempted to present the group’s ideas in a contemporary guise, exploiting people’s trust in religious discourse to promote views that depart from the straight path.
In its intellectual project, the group relied on “flattening knowledge”. It reduced major issues into flashy slogans that appeal to emotion rather than reason, and distanced people from the solid methodological study that has long characterised Al-Azhar. In fact, some of their writings even went beyond the jurisprudential field to address topics in the Prophetic biography, spiritual education, aesthetics, and refined sensibility, attempting to penetrate hearts by speaking about love for our Prophet (PBUH), so as to win over the masses to their ideology in the name of religion and the noble Prophetic presence.
As this soft form of intellectual influence spread, an urgent need emerged to rebuild religious awareness and correct the concepts that these books had distorted – by reaffirming sound Islamic values and reviving a scholarly method based on gradation, precision, and rigorous documentation. Major religious institutions have played a pivotal role in confronting this deviation, producing solid scholarly references that refute doubts, clarify facts, and expose the falsehood of the concepts on which deviant groups built their discourse, such as Hakimiyyah (legislative authority), Takfir, (label someone as an apostate), Jahiliyyah (ignorance/pre-Islamic belief), and the “Saved Sect.”
Protecting minds from this intellectual invasion requires a collective awareness that distinguishes between rigorous scholarship and manipulative propaganda, and between authentic and deviant discourse. It also requires supporting the scholarly institutions that truly bear the trust and work to spread religion in its tolerant form – one that builds rather than destroys, unites rather than divides, and calls to work and construction rather than clash and division.
Confronting the “soft threat” that infiltrated homes and minds for a period is not a battle against specific books as much as it is a battle of consciousness and awareness, aimed at protecting religion from politicisation, knowledge from misleading oversimplification, and society from division. It is a struggle to defend the collective consciousness and the moderate Azhari methodology that has remained for centuries a faithful guardian of the ummah’s creed and a voice of reason in the face of extremism and closed-mindedness.
