Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy was an influential Islamic scholar in Egypt. He graduated from Al-Azhar's faculty of religious studies in 1958 and went on to teach and research in various fields of Islamic studies. He obtained his PhD in Hadith and Tafsir, exegesis of the Qur'an, in 1966. He became a member of the faculty of Ausol Aldeen in 1968 and a member of the faculty of Arabic & Islamic Studies at the Islamic University of Libya in 1972. In 1980 he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he became chief of the Tafsir branch of the Postgraduate studies branch at the Islamic University of Madinah. He returned to Egypt in 1985, when he became Dean of the Faculty of Ausol Aldeen at the prestigious Alexandria Religious Institute. He was appointed as the Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1986, a position he held for almost ten years. In 1996, he was appointed by President Hosni Mubarak as the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, one of the most influential and important Sunni Muslim institutions. He completed a seven thousand page exegesis of the Qur'an, Al-tafser al-waset, which took over ten years to finish. He also led the funeral prayers at the funeral of Yasser Arafat in 2004. He was known for his moderate and tolerant views on various issues, such as women's rights, interfaith dialogue, and Islamic finance. He also issued several fatwas, or religious rulings, on various topics, such as suicide bombings, organ donation, and cloning. He died of a heart attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2010, while attending a conference. He was buried in Al-Baqi Cemetery in Medina. He was widely respected and mourned by Muslims around the world.