Abū Zayd, Naṣr Ḥāmid

born Oct. 7, 1943, Ṭanṭā, Egypt

Egyptian scholar.

He attended Cairo University and received a Ph.D. in Arab and Islamic studies. His research and writings on Quranic exegesis, including his well-known Critique of Islamic Discourse (1995), offended some Islamic fundamentalists. In 1993 a colleague denounced him in a major Cairo mosque, and Islamic radicals successfully sought a nullification of his marriage from an Egyptian family court on the grounds that his writings demonstrated his apostasy (and under Egyptian law a Muslim woman may not be married to a non-Muslim man). Though the court declined to pass judgment, an appeals court divorced Abū Zayd and his wife, a decision confirmed by the Egyptian Supreme Court. The case attracted widespread concern among intellectuals and human rights groups. Since 1995 Abū Zayd and his wife have lived in exile in The Netherlands.

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▪ 2001

      Even five years after he was declared an apostate by a high court, ordered to divorce his wife, and, in effect, forced out of his homeland, Egyptian academic Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd continued to serve as a focal point for those concerned with the human and civil rights excesses of Islamic fundamentalism in 2000. Abu Zayd's case was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Indian-born author Salman Rushdie and Bangladeshi feminist Taslima Nasrin, both also unable to return to their homelands because their writings had been declared insulting to Islam.

      Abu Zayd was born in Tanta, Egypt, in the Nile Delta on Oct. 7, 1943. He attended Cairo University and received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1981. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the Andalusian-born Sufi Ibn al-ʿArabi (1165–1240), a mystic and philosopher who wrote in a multicultural (Provençal, Latin, and Arabic) and multireligious (Judaic, Christian, and Islamic) environment that he sought to reconcile in a universal love. Abu Zayd's thesis was published as The Philosophy of Hermeneutics in Beirut in 1983.

      From his studies Abu Zayd realized the importance of sociocultural factors in the interpretation of the Qurʾan and took the point that interpretation is human, not divine, into his own beliefs. Abu Zayd observed how Islam was being interpreted by fundamentalists in Egypt and elsewhere in ways that served political ends, a position he opposed in his 1992 book Naqd al-khitab al-dini (“Critique of Religious Discourse”). When in that same year he applied for promotion to full professor at Cairo University, the tenure committee split. One of Abu Zayd's colleagues resorted to the pulpit of a mosque in Cairo to denounce him as an apostate for his writings. The Abu Zayd case became a cause célèbre among Muslim fundamentalists, and even the newspaper of the ruling National Democratic Party called for his expulsion from the university and execution as a heretic. On June 14, 1995, a Cairo court ruled that Abu Zayd had to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis, a teacher of French culture at Cairo University, because he was a heretic and therefore a non-Muslim, and a Muslim woman could not be married to a non-Muslim man. The Court of Cassation upheld the ruling in 1996. Fearful for their lives, the couple fled Egypt and settled in The Netherlands. As his case continued to draw attention from international human rights organizations, Abu Zayd followed academic pursuits at the State University of Leiden, Neth., lectured throughout Europe and the U.S., and served on the editorial board for two forthcoming volumes of the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan.

Marius K. Deeb

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▪ Egyptian scholar

born Oct. 7, 1943, Ṭanṭā, Egypt

      Egyptian scholar. He attended Cairo University and received a Ph.D. in Arab and Islamic studies. His research and writings on Quranic exegesis, including his well-known Critique of Islamic Discourse (1995), offended some Islamic fundamentalists. In 1993 a colleague denounced him in a major Cairo mosque, and Islamic radicals successfully sought a nullification of his marriage from an Egyptian family court on the grounds that his writings demonstrated his apostasy (and under Egyptian law a Muslim woman may not be married to a non-Muslim man). Though the court declined to pass judgment, an appeals court divorced Abū Zayd and his wife, a decision confirmed by the Egyptian Supreme Court. The case attracted widespread concern among intellectuals and human rights groups. Since 1995 Abū Zayd and his wife have lived in exile in The Netherlands.

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