‘Abdullāh bin Bayyah and the Arab Revolutions: Counter-revolutionary Neo-traditionalism’s Ideological Struggle against Islamism

‘Abdullāh bin Bayyah (b. 1935) is a highly regarded Neo-traditionalist scholar based in Saudi Arabia and onetime senior politician in Mauritania.3 Born in 1935 in Timbédra, south-eastern Mauritania, he is recognized by his contemporaries as an Islamic jurist of the highest order.4 He is also noteworthy for having held several senior ministerial positions in the 1970s, in the first Mauritanian government after independence, including as the country’s Deputy Prime Minister.5 According to his personal website, Bin Bayyah was a “Member of the Cabinet and the Permanent Committee of the Ruling Mauritanian People’s Party from 1970-1978.”6 This would mean that his Mauritanian political career peaked as part of the authoritarian one-party state of the country’s first President, Moktar Ould Daddah (d. 2003), a French-trained lawyer.7 Bin Bayyah’s career in Mauritanian politics ended with the Mauritanian military coup of July 1978 that unseated Ould Daddah, three years after which Bin Bayyah was forced out of the country.8 In more recent years, Bin Bayyah has expressed his aversion to formal participation in politics which he had eschewed prior his relatively recent appointments in the UAE in 2014. In an interview in 2008, he somewhat humorously calls politics an “evil disease” and “like a drug” that he has unfortunately passed on to some of his children. Against his wishes, he says, his eldest son served as a minister in the Mauritanian government, and at the time of the interview was serving as the Mauritanian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.9

Bin Bayyah currently resides in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he served for many years as a professor of jurisprudence at King ‘Abd al-‘Azīz University. Alongside his academic activities, he has been active for many years in helping found various transnational institutions established and/or run by ulama to address Islamic questions arising in the context of modernity. These include the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) in the 1990s and 2000s, and since the Arab revolutions, he has departed from the former two and helped establish the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (FPPMS), the Council of Muslim Elders (CME), and the Emirates Fatwa Council (EFC), the last three of which are based in the UAE.10

These institutional affiliations signal his transforming political attitudes and allegiances over time as I discuss in more detail below. In the ECFR and the IUMS, he served under the presidency of the Qatar-based Azhari scholar with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (b. 1926).11 In the IUMS, Bin Bayyah served as a vice president to al-Qaraḍāwī, from its founding in 2004 until his resignation in September 2013 a few weeks after the Rabaa massacre in Egypt.12 At the ECFR, which was founded in 1997, Bin Bayyah remained a member until 2017 when his absence from meetings since 2012, rather than his political positions, were the basis for removing him as a member, in line with the association’s bylaws.13 The older al-Qaraḍāwī retired from his leadership of both the IUMS and the ECFR in 2018. In 2014, Bin Bayyah helped set up three new institutions, the FPPMS, MCE, and EFC, the first and last of which he continues to lead to the present. These three institutions mark Bin Bayyah’s most notable re-entry into politics. While these are not ministerial positions like those of his Mauritanian political career, these are highly politicized institutions, clearly set up for political purposes as I discuss below.