Mustafa Al-Sibaie was born in 1334 AH, corresponding to 1915, in the city of Hums in central Syria. His father, Husni Al-Sibaie was a scholar of eminence in his hometown, well-versed in the Hanafi school of Islamic Fiqh. When Mustafa was still a young boy, his father recognized that he had a son of high promise. Therefore, he took extra care of his education. He ensured that he memorized the Qur’an at a young age, and that he studied Arabic and various Islamic disciplines. This enabled the young scholar to complete his primary and secondary schooling in religious schools, which had a different curriculum to that of state schools, when he was only 15 years of age. Moreover, his father trained him in speech making. As a young boy, Mustafa was taught to stand on a chair and give a speech to his family. This enabled him to express his thoughts with fluency and to organize his thoughts. Moreover, the father used to delegate to his son the Friday speech in his mosque on a number of occasions. All this attention and careful upbringing was very influential in shaping the future character of Mustafa Al-Sibaie, the finest public speaker in Syria in the middle years of the twentieth century.
What his father gave him, in addition to the personal education and proper schooling, was the fact that he took him along to attend the informal gatherings of the prominent scholars in his hometown. This enabled Mustafa to develop at an early age a keen interest in scholarly debate and in looking at questions and issues in a holistic way, overlooking no relevant factor.
Mustafa Al-Sibaie reached his youth at a time of great turmoil in the Arab and Muslim youth. He realized that the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the dissection of its provinces and the colonial rule over many of these provinces clearly worked against the interests of the Muslim communities. He was keenly aware of the importance of keeping up the feeling of Muslim unity among all Muslim peoples. Syria was brought under French colonialism in 1920, while Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were French colonies much earlier. Mustafa Al-Sibaie was outspoken in raising public support for the independence of those areas. Hence, he was arrested by the French colonial authorities in 1931, when he was only 16, for distributing leaflets denouncing French colonialism in the Maghreb countries. His arrest caused much popular uproar and the authorities felt compelled to release him, but he was arrested again the following year when he spent six months in prison. His charge this time was that he tried to raise popular opposition to the colonial rule in Syria in his Friday speeches in his hometown’s main mosque.
After his release, he traveled to Egypt, where he joined Al-Azhar, the main seat of Islamic learning in the Muslim world. He graduated in Islamic studies with excellent grades. But during this period, he met a large number of Islamic scholars from Egypt and other Muslim countries. He was impressed by Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he then joined. He was also very active in the popular struggle against the British occupation of Egypt. He was arrested twice by the British in Egypt, in 1934 and 1941. Two months into his second imprisonment, the British authorities handed him over to the British occupying authorities in Palestine where he was put in prison again for four months. After his release, he went back to Hums where he again was in the forefront of anti-colonial activities. Once more, he was arrested by the French, and his imprisonment this time continued for two and a half years, most of which he spent in a Lebanese jail.
After his release he resumed his struggle, while he was working as a high school teacher in Hums. He then moved to Damascus, as he felt that it would be better to be close to the political center. While he continued his struggle against foreign rule of Muslim countries, he also felt that there was need to set education on a proper Islamic footing. Together with a number of teachers, he established Al-Ma’ahad Al-Arabi Al-Islami, a private institute teaching students from pre-elementary to high school, with separate facilities for boys and girls, and several branches in Damascus and other Syrian cities. The institute placed strong emphasis on religious teaching, while covering the national curriculum in all disciplines.
Mustafa Al-Sibaie also established in this period several social and charitable organizations with strong Islamic leanings, but in 1945, he started the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, with a strong link with its mother movement in Egypt. He was elected as its leader for life. In the same year, he led the armed struggle in Hums against the French occupation, which continued until Syria gained its independence the following year.
What is amazing about Mustafa Al-Sibaie is the way he worked on too many fronts at the same time, achieving excellent results. Thus, we see him in 1948 at the head of the Muslim Brotherhood volunteers who went to Palestine to take part in defending the country against the Zionist forces.
These volunteers concentrated their efforts on protecting Jerusalem and defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They were successful in doing that, despite the defeat of the Arab regular forces and the establishment of the Jewish Zionist state in a large portion of Palestine.
In 1949, he completed his studies, and was awarded his Ph.D. degree in Islamic studies. His thesis on the Sunnah and its role in Islamic legislation, later published as a book, was a fine study, defending the Sunnah against repeated attacks from different quarters aiming at reducing its position in Islamic life. In the same year he contested the first parliamentary elections in Syria, winning a seat in Damascus, which was not his home constituency. In 1950 he was appointed as a lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of Damascus, and was subsequently chosen to be the head of the Department of Islamic Law in the faculty.
His academic career, which was concurrent with his political struggle, took a great step forward when he succeeded in persuading the university and the government of the need to establish a Faculty of Islamic Shariah to give Islamic studies their appropriate position at the university. He was appointed the first dean of the new faculty. He was also the author of the project to establish Mawsoo’at Al-Fiqh Al-Islami, which was later to continue in Kuwait where it produced very good result. This is a mammoth project of Islamic research which aimed to bring the great scholarship of past generations within an easy reach of Muslim scholars in our modern times.
In 1949 and the early fifties, Syria witnessed a series of military takeovers which undermined the parliamentary system. Thus, the fifties were years in which civilian and parliamentary politics struggled against military influence, which meant an alternation of civilian government and military dictatorship. Mustafa Al-Sibaie was always in opposition to dictatorship and this led to his imprisonment and eventual exile when Gen. Shishakli was in power (1951-1954). When the leftist grouping, led by the Communists, were on the ascendance from 1955 onward, Mustafa Al-Sibaie was leading the fight against communism.
In 1957, he contested by-elections against a leftist candidate supported by the left grouping government, but because of clear irregularities, he lost the elections. After the elections, he traveled to Moscow to visit its universities and gain an insight into how Orientalist studies are run there.
This was a second part of an extensive trip he made the previous year when the University of Damascus organized a trip for him in which he visited a large number of European universities to gain a first hand experience of how they conducted Islamic studies and research.
Soon after his return from Moscow, he suffered partial paralysis which seriously affected his movement. However, this allowed him a chance to concentrate more on his academic writings and research. In the following seven years, he wrote several books and delivered a large number of lectures. He published a monthly Islamic magazine, Hadharat Al-Islam, and wrote its editorial and main feature in every issue. His academic contribution will be the focus of our third article, God willing.
(To be continued)