Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, Sunni Islam’s most senior religious figure, has died during a visit to Saudi Arabia.

Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi

The 82-year-old Egyptian, who had previously undergone heart surgery, suffered a heart attack as he boarded a flight early Wednesday morning, Egyptian television said.
He was admitted to the Amir Sultan hospital in Riyadh where doctors proclaimed him dead.

Tantawi — who headed al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning — was known for his controversial ban of the niqab, which he said had no basis in Islam.

He also wrote a number of books, including a 15-volume, 7,000-page encyclopedia on the interpretation of Qur’an.

Appointed by President Hosni Mubarak as “Grand Sheikh” of the state supported al-Azhar Mosque and University in 1996, Tantawi had been Egypt’s chief state sheikh, the so-called mufti, since 1986.

He was a wily pragmatist, a man of his time whose fatwas, or religious rulings, separated him from his predecessor, who had also been appointed by Mubarak. In addition to the ban on niqab, Sheikh Tantawi had condemned female circumcision, whereas his predecessor, Gad al-Haqq Ali Gad al-Haq, had defended it.

While Al Haq had decided to grant the exalted title of “shahid,” or martyr, to an Egyptian member of a violent militant Islamic sect, the so-called Islamic Group, Sheikh Tantawi condemned suicide bombings and other murders by militant Islamic groups.