While at law school, Al-Sayyid made contact with influential people such as Muhammad Abduh and Hassuna al-Nawawi.
After Wadih el-Hage asked Essam al-Ridi to sell a private Sabre-40 jet on the Egyptian market, al-Ridi traveled to Khartoum where he met with Nawawi and the pair of them tried to repair the plane; however the brakes failed after a test flight with both men flying, and the plane crashed into a sand dune.
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L'Houssaine Kherchtou later testified in the United States that he had seen an Egyptian briefing Nawawi on air traffic control procedures, leading him to believe that an attack on an airplane, possibly in Saudi Arabia, was in the works.
Modern-day proponents of kalām such as Nuh Ha Mim Keller, a Sheikh in the Shadili Sufi Order, hold that the criticism of kalām from early scholars was specific to the Mu'tazila, going on to claim that other historical Muslim scholars such as Al-Ghazali and An-Nawawi saw both good and bad in kalām and cautioned from the speculative excess of unorthodox groups such as the Mu'tazilah and Jahmites.
Another prominent commentator was Muhammad ‘Ulaysh (d. 1299 AH/1881 CE) , the Highest Juridical Authority (Muftī) of the Malikites in Egypt. A further popular commentary was by the Sundanese scholar, Muḥammad Nawawī al-Bantānī (d. 1316 AH/1898 CE) , a Shāfi’ī jurist and sūfi who settled in Mecca.