Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, the ultraconservative Sheikh Abdulaziz Al Asheikh, died on Tuesday after having served as the kingdom’s top religious authority for more than two decades.
Sheikh Abdulaziz was appointed in 1999 to the head of the Council of Senior Scholars, a government body that issued religious edicts.
The council once held considerable sway, both in Saudi Arabia and for Muslim communities around the world. But its authority has waned over the past decade as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud has remade the kingdom, loosening social and religious restrictions while consolidating power under himself.
The Saudi royal court announced the mufti’s death in a statement. It did not include his age or cause of death, but he was believed to be in his early to mid-80s. His replacement has not yet been named.
The death was the symbolic end of an era for Saudi Arabia, which has transformed rapidly over the past decade.
Like many Saudi religious scholars, Sheikh Abdulaziz espoused a strict and deeply conservative interpretation of Islam. In 2004, he made headlines after he criticized the mixing of unveiled women with men at an economic forum in Jeddah, calling their behavior a cause of “evil and catastrophe,” Reuters reported at the time.
The belief system of clerics like him long defined the kingdom’s religious and cultural life. But over the past 10 years, the influence of Prince Mohammed, now 40, has rendered Saudi Arabia nearly unrecognizable. One of the prince’s first major actions, in 2016, was to strip authority from the religious police, who had roamed the streets hunting for unmarried couples, forcing cafes to turn off background music or shouting at women to cover their hair.
In 2018, the prince ended a ban on driving by women. In 2019, he opened the kingdom to foreign tourists, did away with a stipulation that women wear long robes in public and abolished a requirement for women to obtain the permission of a male guardian before traveling abroad.
The group of scholars that Sheikh Abdulaziz led was essentially an advisory body, while true decision-making power rested with senior members of the royal family. But for decades, Saudi rulers had shown a degree of deference to conservative clerics, allowing them to shape education, social life and religious scholarship in the kingdom.
Alongside the sweeping social changes, Prince Mohammed has overseen a widespread crackdown on dissent, shrinking the meager political freedoms that once existed in the kingdom. That has included stifling criticism by religious conservatives, many of whom have been detained after speaking out against rapid societal change. Official clerics like the mufti have generally fallen into line.
As mufti, he ran a popular call-in radio show that received queries from listeners, issuing religious edicts on the spot. His views were often in sharp contrast to the kingdom’s reality today.
In one ruling, he described the game of chess as the “work of Satan.” In another, he denounced Twitter as a source of “evil and harm.”
However, in 2005, he issued a ruling banning forced marriages, and in 2018, he formally backed the decision allowing women to drive.
After his death, Saudi religious figures extolled his legacy in social media posts.
“The Islamic world has lost one of its most prominent figures, who dedicated his life to serving the faith, spreading knowledge, and providing guidance,” Saudi Arabia’s minister of Islamic Affairs, Abdullatif Al Asheikh, wrote on X.
Mohammed Alazzam, a retired Saudi professor and researcher in heritage and history, said that he knew the mufti when he was a student. Sheikh Abdulaziz had been blind from the age of 14.
“Throughout his entire life, he was distinguished by his faith, high moral character, virtue, and righteousness, as well as his dedication to seeking knowledge,” he wrote.
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting.
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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