The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

‘Abd al-Rahman, ‘Umar (b. 1938)

‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman was born in 1938 into a modest family of the rural region of Egypt’s northern Nile Delta region. Having lost

his sight at a young age, he was placed in the Qur’anic school of his village and followed the customary educational path of rural children at that time. By the age of 11 he had memorized the Qur’an, and after finishing his primary and secondary education, he enrolled in Azhar University in Cairo. In 1965, he graduated from Azhar’s Department of Theology and was appointed imam of a provincial mosque by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Influenced by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in particular by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, he became after 1967 openly critical of the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser; when Nasser died in 1970, ‘Abd al-Rahman forbade in one of his sermons praying on Nasser’s tomb. This was his first conspicuous opposition to the Egyptian government, and it earned him his first prison sentence.

Even as he was gaining a reputation as a political opponent, ‘Abd al-Rahman continued his theological studies at Azhar and obtained a PhD in 1972. Between 1973 and 1977, while teaching in the southern town of Asyut, he came in contact with the Islamist youth of al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya. In the early 1980s, after having taught for some time in Saudi Arabia, he was consulted in matters of Islamic law (fiqh) by the leaders of the Gama‘a, as well as by the leaders of al-Jihad al-Islami, the group that carried out the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was among the defendants in the trial of Sadat’s assassins, but in that case he was acquitted. During the 1980s, the Gama‘a Islamiyya, though a fragmented group, continued to refer to ‘Abd al-Rahman’s theological rulings in order to justify its strategy of undertaking violent attacks against practices it deemed un-Islamic and to defend its confrontations with the police and military forces. In 1990, ‘Abd al-Rahman left Egypt for the United States and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he continued to preach and criticize the Egyptian regime and American foreign policy. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City brought him again to the limelight through his trial over this attack with other codefendants. He was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” and sentenced to life in prison in the United States.

‘Abd al-Rahman did not write any books, and his ideas are mainly accessible through his sermons and the transcripts of his testimonies at his trials in Egypt and the United States. Often referring to the body of legal rulings (fatāwā) of the influential jurist Ibn Taymiyya, ‘Abd al-Rahman holds views of the ideal polity that are similar to those held by Sayyid Qutb and that view parliamentary democracy as a contradiction to the principle of God’s sovereignty (ḥākimiyya). For him, impious leaders must be eliminated and divine sovereignty implemented through the shari‘a in order to realize the ideal polity. The legitimacy of political power is exclusively defined through the concept of obedience (ṭā‘a) to God and disobedience (ma‘ṣiya) to whoever fails to obey God, thereby opening up the possibility of political rebellion. He is more precise than Qutb concerning his conception of jihad, which he describes as an armed war against the enemies of Islam and against those societies that, according to him, claim to be Muslim but are in fact societies of jāhiliyya, or “ignorance.” ‘Abd al-Rahman rejects modern interpretations of jihad as being exclusively a defensive war or as an inner struggle that takes place in the intellectual and spiritual domains. He also explicitly rejects the gradation of categories outlined in classical Islamic legal thought between permissible and impious behavior. For him, there is no category between impiety and Islam. This is why impiety can be immediately recognized and corrected “by the hand,” as it is discernible by humans and is not exclusively identifiable by God. ‘Abd al-Rahman’s ideas, thus, legitimize the possibility—and even the duty—for any Muslim to intervene in the public sphere to correct behavior that does not conform to Islamic norms.

‘Abd al-Rahman’s influence on certain radical Islamist groups in Egypt and beyond has been significant. It seems that, in the eyes of members of a few radical groups in the 1980s and 1990s, he was a legal and theological counsel who played the role of a legitimizing figure: as a shaykh educated at Azhar, he was asked to provide religious justifications for political action. It was extremely rare, however, for scholars educated at Azhar in 20th-century Egypt to express such a radical opposition to the government and to associate themselves with groups advocating violence. Azhar University exemplified the tradition of naṣīḥa, the act of speaking the truth—often in subtle ways—to the political sovereign without necessarily acting against him. On the other hand, like many ‘ulama’, ‘Abd al-Rahman envisions the role of the ‘ulama’ as independent from any official religious institution. He conceives of his own function as that of a scholar belonging to an intellectual and religious elite characterized by its access to religious knowledge and piety rather than by its professional or institutional status. The case of ‘Abd al-Rahman also illustrates the division of labor common in Sunni Islam between the carriers of religious knowledge and political activists: scholars might devise and publicly articulate political theologies, but they rarely participate in their implementation.