This article titled “Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi obituary” was written by Trevor Mostyn, for The Guardian on Wednesday 10th March 2010 19.01 UTC

Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who has died aged 81 of a heart attack while in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, used his position as one of Islam’s leading spiritual authorities to champion Islamic moderation worldwide. In 1996, the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, had appointed Tantawi grand imam of the Al-Azhar mosque and head of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s pre-eminent centre of learning, a position he held until his death. He shared platforms with the Prince of Wales and, in 2008, spoke at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on the value of dialogue between civilisations.

At the same time, he provoked a fierce backlash from Islamic hardliners, not least for his condemnation of the niqab, or full-face veil, a position he broadcast widely last year during the debate over its prohibition in France. In 2009, he banned women wearing the full veil from entering Al-Azhar’s campus.

Crucially, he described the 9/11 attacks as “acts of terror directed against innocent people”, and went further. Countries harbouring terrorists, he insisted, should be “punished and held in contempt”. He told a conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2003: “Extremism is the enemy of Islam.” He condemned suicide bombings, telling the press: “If it is against… women, children and old men, then it is not resistance but infidelity.”

In November 2008, there were calls in Egypt for his resignation after he shook hands with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, at a UN-sponsored interfaith conference in New York. He initially astonished reporters by claiming that he was unaware that it was Peres approaching him with outstretched hand. Subsequently, he accused those who published the pictures of the handshake as being a group of lunatics. He then fanned the controversy by saying that if any Israeli officials wanted to visit Al-Azhar, he would welcome them.

The following month a Muslim Brotherhood MP, Hamdi Hassan, complained that “Tantawi acts like a government employee. He wants to please the regime. He does not represent himself, however, but Al-Azhar and Muslims as a whole. Tantawi has a habit of insulting those who disagree with him and he offends Al-Azhar in the process.” Tantawi then tried but failed to placate his critics by demanding that Israel end tyrannical practices against the Palestinians.

Tantawi had sparked intense debate in the Islamic world early in 2002 when he chaired a conference in Alexandria alongside Jewish rabbis. The conference was attended by the then archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. He had provoked similar anger when he met Israel Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, at Al-Azhar in 1997.

As grand mufti of Egypt from 1986 to 1996, he outraged hardline Muslims by ruling that fixed interest rates on bank deposits are halal (allowed), in the face of a traditional Islamic consensus that all interest rates are haram (forbidden). His critics accused him of acting as a puppet of Mubarak’s increasingly oppressive regime. Although Al-Azhar had been founded as a Fatimid seat of learning in 970, and later converted to Sunnism when Saladin expelled the Fatimids in 1171, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was in constant conflict with the hardline Muslim Brotherhood, all Al-Azhar appointments were made by the government and continue to be. Tatwani is likely to be replaced by his deputy, Mohammed Wasel, until the president has appointed a new head.

When Prince Charles visited Egypt in March 2006, shortly after the furore involving Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Tantawi quoted the prince telling the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in 1993: “It is odd in many ways that misunderstandings between Islam and the west should exist. For that which binds our worlds together is so much more powerful than that which divides us.” Tantawi told the Kuala Lumpur conference: “I do not subscribe to the idea of a clash of civilisations. People of different beliefs should co-operate and not get into senseless conflicts and animosity.”

He was born in the village of Selim ash-Sharqiyah in the municipality of Tama, Sohag, before joining a religious institution in Alexandria. After graduating from Al-Azhar’s faculty of religious studies in 1958, he went on to teach. In 1966 he was awarded a PhD in Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad, Islam’s second source after the Qur’an itself) and Tafsir, exegesis of the Qur’an. By 1980, he was the head of the Tafsir department of the University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, a position he was to hold until 1984.

In 1986, when he had been dean of the faculty of Arab and religious studies for a year, he became grand mufti of Egypt, a position he held for a decade until appointed grand imam. He is survived by two sons and a daughter.

• Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, cleric, born 28 October 1928; died 10 March 2010

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This article was written by Kim Willsher in Paris, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th April 2010 18.44 UTC

Few things define the traditional good life in France better than champagne and foie gras, but few would have thought them symbols of social integration – until now.

A boom in sales of halal products, including alcohol-free bubbly and goose liver paté approved by Islamic law, is being driven by the emergence of an affluent middle class of young Muslims.

Known as the beurgeois – a play on bourgeois and the word beur, slang for a French person of North African descent – these new consumers are behind a rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks.

With spending power worth an estimated €5.5bn a year, according to the opinion pollsters Solis, these under-40s are forcing international food suppliers to cater for their demands.

Yanis Bouarbi, 33, an IT specialist who started the website paris-hallal.com, which lists restaurants in France serving halal food, says young Muslims are at the heart of a mini social revolution.

"When our parents and grandparents came to France they did mostly manual work and the priority was having enough to feed the family," said Bouarbi, who arrived from Algeria at the age of three.

"But second or third-generation people like me have studied, have good jobs and money and want to go out and profit from French culture without compromising our religious beliefs. We don't just want cheap kebabs, we want Japanese, Thai, French food; we want to be like the rest of you."

The demand for halal products, currently increasing by an estimated 15% a year, has captured the attention of food giants such as the supermarket group Casino, which has stocked an increasing variety of halal foods – mostly meat products – for the last three years.

The fast-food chain Quick has a number of halal-only burger bars; the opening of the most recent caused a political storm before the regional elections last month, but the row has since blown over.

Muslim corner shops selling exclusively halal foods and drinks including eggs, turkey bacon and pork-free sausages as well as alcohol-free "champagne", known as Cham'Alal, are also flourishing.

Halal foie gras, first introduced into supermarket chains across the country two years ago at the end of the Muslim feast of Ramadan, has proved an unexpected success. "It's one of our best sellers; we have around 30 foie gras bought a day," Cyril Malinet, manager of a major Carrefour supermarket, told Libération.

Annick Fettani, head of Bienfaits de France, which specialises in halal duck, said: "Until now we've had to fight to sell our foie gras but today everyone wants it."

Bouarbi believes the halal boom is taking place because young Muslims have more money. His website now lists more than 400 restaurants in Paris and its suburbs, and he plans to expand it to other French cities.

In Paris's trendy 11th arrondissement, Les Enfants Terribles restaurant, run by brothers Kamel and Sosiane Saidi, serves halal French haute cuisine. "Before, Muslims wishing to eat halal would go to a restaurant and it was fish or nothing. Now we have a choice," said Sosiane, 28, who worked in the property market before setting up the restaurant three years ago.

"Young Muslims have money and want to eat out like everyone else but according to their religion. The food doesn't taste any different; we have many French customers who don't even know we're totally halal. To us, that is what integration is about."

Like Yanis and Sosiane, younger members of France's estimated 5 million-strong Muslim community – with whom relations have been strained by the recent debate on national identity and threats by Nicolas Sarkozy's right-of-centre government to ban the burqa – are asserting their economic muscle. As one French website put it, halal is "very good business" for French companies.

"Supermarkets aren't benevolent charities, they're in it for the money," said Bouarbi. "And they've discovered halal sells."

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