Concerning the Baha’i cases described above, Al-Banna argued, “I believe that it is in their right that they are documented as Baha’is in the ID Card and official documents.”74 He also defended the right of Mohamed Hegazy to convert from Islam to Christianity: “There is not one word in the Quran dictating the death penalty on those who depart from the Muslim faith. The Quran never mentions a worldly punishment…”; such punishment, for Al-Banna, was invented as a political tool to protect rulers.75 He also continues to criticize Al-Azhar: “The problem is that the Islam propagated now by religious institutions… is the Islam of the Jurists… these Islamic thinkers were geniuses,” but they “cannot be liberated from their time.”76
Al-Banna remains highly critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, saying: “There is no such thing as an Islamic state. It is impossible to create.…”77
Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd
In 1955, Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, though only twelve years old, was imprisoned on suspicion of sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1981, with support from the Ford Foundation and after studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he received a doctorate from Cairo University for research on Qur’anic interpretation and began teaching there in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature.78 In May 1992, seeking promotion to full professor, he presented the tenure committee with two of his academic books, Imam Shafai and the Founding of Medieval Ideology and The Critique of Religious Discourse, in addition to eleven journal articles. Two referees’ reports recommended promotion. However, the third, by the influential Abdel Sabour Shahin, an advisor to President Mubarak, said his research was an affront to Islam. There is some speculation that Shahin’s hostility was partly due to the fact that The Critique of Religious Discourse criticized Islamic investment companies for which Shahin worked as a consultant.79 Based on Shahin’s negative report, the committee ruled seven to six that Abu-Zayd did not deserve promotion. The Arabic department and the Faculty of Arts both objected to this ruling, but the Council of Cairo University adopted it. Abu-Zayd appealed to the administrative court to overturn this decision but lost his appeal in 1993.80
Abu-Zayd’s major troubles began when, in a front-page story, a pro-Islamist newspaper accused him of abandoning his faith in Islam.81 At the end of 1993, Islamist lawyers, led by Youssef El Badry, former member of Parliament and imam of a Paterson, New Jersey, mosque from 1992 to 1993, filed a lawsuit demanding the breakup of Abu-Zayd’s marriage to Ibtihal Younes. The case was based on the claim that Abu-Zayd was an apostate and a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim.82 On January 27, 1994, the Giza Personal Status Court rejected the suit because the plaintiffs lacked a direct interest in the case, but, on June 14, 1995, the Cairo Appeals Court ruled that Abu-Zayd was an apostate and that, therefore, his marriage was null and void. Six days later, a group of Al-Azhar scholars urged the government to compel Abu-Zayd to repent by applying the “legal punishment for apostasy.”83
On June 21, 1995, Islamic Jihad declared that, under Islamic law, the professor should be killed.84 He was condemned during mosque prayers, and many sheikhs, particularly in Cairo, called for his death. Facing these threats, on July 23, 1995, he and Ibtihal went to Leiden, Netherlands, where he had a standing offer to teach at the university. He later stated, “I’m not afraid of death. What I’m afraid of is a disability that may result from an assassination attempt, like what happened to Naguib Mahfouz.”85
The court battles continued even after he left the country. On August 5, 1996, the Court of Cassation, the highest court, sustained the Court of Appeals verdict and announced “the separation of the first defendant Dr. Abu Zayd from his wife, the second defendant, because of the former’s apostasy and because she is a Muslim.” It also called on him to repent and return to Islam, which was “a light to the people.” The verdict further stated that apostasy was a crime that could be punished in accord with “Quranic punishments,” that this might be grounds for a further judicial case, and that the “exiting from Islam is a revolt against it and this is reflected upon the person’s loyalty to Shari’a and state”86 The ruling also condemned Abu-Zayd’s positions on Christians paying additional taxes (jizya) and slavery. It stated, “The defendant’s proposition, that the requirement of Christians and Jews to pay jizya constitutes a reversal of humanity’s efforts to establish a better world, is contrary to the divine verses on the question of jizya,” which are “not subject to discussion.” It also said that his denunciation of the ownership of slave girls was “contrary to all the divine texts which permit such.”87 The divorce ruling was suspended in September 1996 by the Giza Court of Emergency Matters, but the declaration of apostasy remained in place.88 This led to a flood of cases in subsequent years wherein Islamist lawyers “filed some eighty lawsuits against the Egyptian government, against artists and intellectuals, academics and journalists, all in an attempt to make Sharia law the law of the land,” and often won.89
When asked about the death threats against Abu-Zayd, Abdel Sabour Shahin, who helped initiate the witch hunt against reformers, said, “The prescribed penalty for apostasy is execution, but an apostate has to be given a chance to repent.… Let him renounce his ideas. Let him publicly burn his books.”90 In some kind of rough justice, Shahin himself soon faced apostasy charges. His book Adam, My Father concluded that Adam was not the first human form, but the first human being. El Badry, his former ally against Abu-Zayd, then proclaimed that Shahin is “more dangerous than Al Qimni or Abu Zayd, because everyone knows that they are non-believers, whereas Shahin has the status of a preacher.”91
Ibtihal returned to Egypt several times to review theses at the University of Cairo, but Abu-Zayd himself stayed away until the last years of his life, when he visited quietly, since he remained a target for Islamists. He died in a Cairo hospital on July 5, 2010. His books remain unavailable in Egyptian university libraries and even in the Alexandria Library, and he maintained, “I criticized the religious discourse and its social, political, and economic manifestations, and this threatened the interests of some institutions.”92
Sayed Al Qimni
Sayed Al Qimni, born in 1947, has published thirteen books on themes including mythology, such as Moses and the Last Days of Tal El Amarna, Prophet Abraham, The Story of Creation, The Legends and the Heritage, Ozories, and God of Time; Islamic history, such as Islamic Issues, The Hashemite Party and the Establishment of the Islamic State, and The Wars of the Prophet’s State; and attacking Islamic political movements and the religious establishment, such as Thank You Bin Laden, The People of Religion and Democracy, and The Ghosts of Heritage and the Heritage of Ghosts.93
He analyzes early Islam from the perspective of myth and avoids being labeled an apostate by using only sources approved by Al-Azhar. However, as one commentator has said, “Many of his conclusions would make Nasr Hamed Abu-Zayd blanch.” Despite being banned by Al-Azhar and, until recently, virtually unobtainable in Egypt except as photocopies, his books have provoked widespread debate, and outraged Islamists label him an apostate and call for his death. He has been shot at but says, “I had kids with me. It was a warning. If they wanted to kill me, they could have.”94 On August 17, 1997, the High State Security Court, on the IRC’s recommendation, ordered the confiscation of his God of Time. On July 7, 2004, the IRC recommended the confiscation of his Thank You Bin Laden, accusing its author of apostasy and insulting the Companions of the Prophet.95 In 2005, on Al Jazeera’s highly-rated show The Other Direction, Al Qimni was widely regarded as having defeated an Islamist in a debate subsequently posted on YouTube, leading to renewed death threats.
In July 2009, in what appeared to be a brief liberalizing literary trend, the Ministry of Culture bestowed the State Award of Merit in Social Science on Al Qimni. As in the case of Hassan Hanafi, who was honored in the same month, conservative Islamists protested vigorously. Islamist Sheikh Youssef al Badri stated on televison that Al Qimni was more of a “disaster” than Salman Rushdie: “Salman Rushdie, everyone attacked him bec
ause he destroyed Islam overtly. But Sayyid al-Qimni is attacking Islam and destroying it tactfully, tastefully and politely.” Nabih al-Wahsh filed a suit demanding the award be cancelled as Al Qimni is “derisive of Islam.” The government-backed religious institution Dar-al-Ifta promulgated a fatwa that, while not identifying Qimni by name, has been interpreted by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies as “effectively declar(ing) him an infidel.”96
Ahmed Subhy Mansour and Quranism
Ahmed Subhy Mansour taught at Al-Azhar from 1973 to 1987, and in 1980, he received his doctorate there in Muslim history. His troubles, both with fundamentalists and with the Egyptian regime, began in 1985. His work stressed the centrality of the Qur’an combined with skepticism about the hadith, or sayings of the prophet, and he was consequently accused of being against Islam. In November 1987, the government imprisoned him and twenty-four associates for two months, asserting that he was calling on Muslims to abandon Islam. On November 30, 1987, an article in Al Ahram, Egypt’s most prestigious paper, claimed he rejected the Sunna and insulted the Companions of the Prophet. On December 5, 1987, Akhbar Alyoum described him as an “Enemy of the Sunna.”97
Farag Foda defended Subhy Mansour, and the two together sought to establish a new political party, the Future Party. After Foda was assassinated, Mansour helped establish the Egyptian Association for Enlightenment, one of whose goals was tolerance between Muslims and Christians. Between 1993 and 2000, he worked with several organizations, including the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and with a prominent democracy advocate, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, at the Ibn Khaldoun Center, chairing the center’s weekly debate forum and working on curriculum revision. On May 4, 1999, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Alsha’ab paper, described his educational materials as a Zionist project attacking Islam. On May 16, 1999, Alsayasy Al Masry described them as a “Conspiracy to teach Zionist ideology.”
After Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s arrest and the government’s closure of the Ibn Khaldoun Center in June 2000, Mansour and twenty of his associates, now labeled “Quranists,” were arrested in October 2001, and he escaped to the United States on October 15, 2001. On March 5, 2002, eight of his associates were convicted in a state security Emergency Court of violating Article 98(F) of the penal code, which forbids insulting a “heavenly religion.” Two received three-year prison sentences, and the others received one-year suspended sentences since they were not convicted of actually propagating Quranism.98
His books cover a wide range. His 1985 The Prophets in the Holy Qur’an, which was banned, argued that the Qur’an shows that Mohammed was not infallible and that he would not intercede on the Day of Judgment. His 1990 The Qur’an: The Only Source of Islam and Islamic Jurisprudence, also banned, argues that the Qur’an is properly the only source of Islam.99 In 1994, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights published his Freedom of Speech: Islam and Muslims, which argued that freedom of speech in Islam should be unlimited and that, historically, Muslims, beginning with the Umayyads and Abbasids, have restricted it for political reasons. Of his twenty-four books, he was unable to publish six, and seven were banned.100
Mansour has also argued that a penalty of apostasy “is a fabricated tradition created and applied two centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s death… to provide the totalitarian rulers with a religious justification to eliminate their opponents.…” In particular, he argued against the common Muslim belief that freedom of religion applies only to not being a Muslim or to joining Islam, but not to leaving Islam. Had God intended to confine compulsion to only joining religion, He would have said, “There should be no forcing INTO joining religion,” but He wanted to exclude all types of compulsion in all matters that are related to religion. So He said, “There is no compulsion IN religion.”101
Like many religious reformers, Mansour also advocates political and social reform. Consequently, he defends Middle Eastern minorities, including the Kurds and the Copts. Similarly, accusations of apostasy are often tied to political repression. In Mansour’s words, people suggesting “progressive opinions” will be accused of “opposing the application of Shariah. Such opposition will be interpreted as committing apostasy.”102
Attacks did not stop after his escape to the United States. On March 29, 2005, Islamist writer Fahmy Howeid wrote in Al Ahram that reformers, including Mansour, worked with Jews and were backed by neoconservatives and the CIA. Among those allegedly supporting the project, Howeid singled out Paul Wolfowitz, then assistant secretary of defense, and James Woolsey, past director of Central Intelligence Agency.103 In October 2009, Mansour was threatened on an Al-Qaeda-linked website that described him as “an infidel whose blood is halal to be shed” and an apostate.104
In Egypt itself, attacks on Quranists intensified. In May and June, 2007, five were arrested and charged with “insulting religion.” They were beaten and also held in the same cells as Islamists, which placed their lives in danger. One was Amr Tharwat, who had worked for the Ibn Khaldoun Center in monitoring elections. Later, two additional defendants were added—Mansour himself, resident in Virginia, and his cousin, Osman Mohamed Ali. Investigators examined Mansour’s books, including the ones rejecting the killing of apostates.105 In October 2008, Quranist blogger Reda Abdelarahman Ali, a relative of Mansour, was arrested and faced charges of defaming Islam. He was released three months later, after the High National Security Court ruled that “arresting people solely on the basis of their religious beliefs is not acceptable.” Mansour reports that in detention prisoners have been “severely beaten and humiliated” and “electrified” to make false confessions.106
Other Reformers
Given the range of Egyptian cultural life, many other examples can be given. Salah El Din Mohsen, whose Lecture of the Heaven and Memoirs of a Muslim and Shivers of Enlightenment were banned, was sentenced on January 27, 2001 to three years in prison with hard labor for insulting a heavenly religion. Also in 2001, Manal Manea, an outspoken atheist, received three years in prison for blasphemy against Islam.107 Metwalli Ibrahim Metwalli Saleh, whose unpublished research rejected the idea that apostates should be killed and that a Muslim woman could not marry a non-Muslim man, was arrested in May 2003 and, although the Supreme State Security Emergency Court ruled eight times that he should be released, was held until April 23, 2006.108
Dissident intellectuals are also harassed through religious litigation. Islamist lawyer Nabih el Wahsh has filed over a thousand hisba cases, though the majority of these were dismissed by Egypt’s prosecutor general. He initiated a suit seeking to revoke the State Award of Merit given to Sayed Al Qimni on the ground that Qimni’s writings “deride Islam” and urged that Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni be removed for permitting the award. In 2001, El Wahsh sought, but failed, to have feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi forcibly divorced from her husband, arguing that her opinions proved that she was “an infidel,” and, in 2007, he sought the revocation of her Egyptian citizenship. In 2008, El Saadawi won this case and returned to Egypt from the United States, to which she had fled. In October 2009, Naguib Gobraiel—a defense lawyer allegedly assaulted by El Wahsh during the Hegazy case—turned the tables and took El Wahsh to court for abuse of hisba charges. Gamal Eid of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information described hisba cases as “a threat hovering over the heads of all intellectuals in Egypt.”109
Egyptian novelists have also suffered. The most notable was Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world’s only winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1989, he called Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini a terrorist over his death fatwa against Salman Rushdie and asserted, in a joint declaration with eighty other intellectuals, “No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer.”110 On October 14, 1994, he was stabbed by a member of Gamaat Islamia after Omar Abdel Rahman, the “spiritual leader” of the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, issued a fatwa against him because of his 1959 novel Children of the Alley. The novel had been banned in Egypt, and Rahman claimed that if Ma
hfouz had also been punished “in the proper Islamic manner,” that is, killed, then Salman Rushdie would not have dared to publish his Satanic Verses. Mahfouz survived the attack but was permanently disabled.111
Closing
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has shown some weakness in recent years but remains the most powerful opposition force in the country. One reason for the Brotherhood’s strength is that the regime has choked off civil society for decades, thus preventing any challenges and ensuring that the short-term choice is either the Brotherhood or the government. Egypt’s reformers are often connected through formal and informal networks. Those described in this chapter, Foda, Al Banna, Al Qimni, Abu-Zayd, and Mansour, as well as others, such as blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, have major differences from one another, but most have sought to be faithful Muslims; they have suffered similar fates, and they have usually supported one another despite their differences.112 They have also been democracy advocates—several have cooperated with Saad Eddin Ibrahim and his work for human rights, democracy, and an open society. They have advocated freedom of religion and speech and been defenders of the Baha’is and the Copts. In particular, they have criticized civil penalties for apostasy, which, in the vicious circularity of radical Islam, is one reason that they have been labeled apostates. Hence the regime’s policies have also choked of the possibilities of religious freedom and religious renewal.
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