An Overview: Shaykh Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī’s Aḥsan al-Kalām

by Hussam Bteibet

Shaykh Muhammad Bakhīt al-Muṭi’ī (d. 1354/1935) wrote a short book called Aḥsan al-Kalām fī mā Yata’allaqu bil-Sunnah wal-Bid’ah min al-Aḥkām. Shaykh al-Muṭi’ī was a student and eventually a teacher at al-Azhar and Qāḍī of Cairo. Interestingly, he was alive when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and watched secularism rise in Egypt. His relative proximity to us in history makes him an interesting scholar to read.

He briefly categorizes bid’ah into broad categories with many subcategories. He differentiates a bid’ah lexically from the rebuked bid’ah within the Shariah. He defines each category, then follows up with practical, modern case studies to show the reader how he evaluates whether each event would be categorized as bid’ah.

Shaykh al-Muṭi’ī passionately discusses fireworks and classifies them as a bid’ah due to their widespread use for celebration along with their wasteful nature. He also firmly rules upon the practice at the Noble Ḥaramayn of an announcer (mukabbir) repeating certain calls within the prayer after the imam as being a bid’ah. He mentions that the mukabbir’s role is a practical one, unneeded in the presence of microphones.

Despite the brevity of the book, he goes into a lot of detail to describe the origin of the “mawlid” concept in Islamic history. He paints the picture of Fatimid Egypt in the early tenth century, where the leader declared multiple annual national holidays for each of the Prophet, Fatimah, Ali, Husayn, and the current khalifah. He elaborates in exhaustive detail how ornate and wasteful the mawlid parties were under the Fatimids. The khalifah would spend the two or three weeks leading up to the mawlid party building grand towers to house the royal guests, which would come from far and wide. Every day, the lavish food and drink would increase in quantity, with the excess being sent to the zāwāyā of the sufīs. Every day, herds of animals would be slaughtered for the guests’ meals. The actual mawlid celebration would last for a few days with not much more than a mention of worship. Shaykh al-Muṭi’ī surprisingly does not consider mawlid celebrations a bid’ah if they are devoted to worship and ḥaram and makrūh actions are avoided. What is surprising is the length of time he took to describe the mawlid celebrations, considering the brevity of the book, then not considering them to be bid’ah, although he does rebuke the immoral and irreligious acts that take place at mawlid celebrations. What also piqued my interest were the celebrations of the kiswah of the noble Ka’bah that he describes in Egypt. The kiswah would be designed and crafted in Egypt, then after the Hajj every year, a caravan would return the kiswah. During the sendoff and the reception, people would celebrate in the streets, so Shaykh al-Muṭi’ī mentioned the same ḥukm with regards to this celebration.