Arab-West Report

 

Egyptian intellectual Nasr Hāmid Abu Zayd, who is likely to remain a symbol of the showdown between rationality and fundamentalism in Egypt, passed away on July 5, 2010 at the age of 67.

 

Abu Zayd died of an unknown brain virus he caught during a visit to Indonesia last month. He spent his last days at the intensive care unit of the Sheikh Zayed Specialized Hospital in western Cairo after physicians failed to treat him.

 

He was buried in his birthplace village of Qohāfa, near the city of Tanā, 90 km north of Cairo.

 

Abu Zayd, who graduated with a BA in Arabic language studies from Cairo University in 1972 and was awarded the Intellectual Order of Merit from the President of the Republic of Tunisia, failed to obtain a PhD from the Egyptian university after a report by Dr. ^cAbd al-Sabūr Shāhīn, one of the panel discussing his thesis, that accused Abu Zayd of being a kāfir.

 

The crisis intensified into a resounding battle that moved from inside the rooms of the university into mosques, where Abu Zayd was accused of being "atheist and kāfir” during a speech by Shāhīn inside ^cAmr Ibn al-^cĀs Mosque in early 1994 and from there to other mosques.

 

Abu Zayd's adversaries managed to obtain a court ruling from the Court of Personal Status Affairs in Egypt based on the principle of hisbah, and consequently called for the annulment of Abu Zayd's marriage to Dr. Ibtihāl Yūnus, on the grounds that a Muslim woman should not remain married to a kāfir.

 

The court ruled in favor of the annulment between Abu Zayd and Yūnus, a professor of French literature, prompting the couple to emigrate to the Netherlands in the mid-1990s.

 

Dr. Rif^cat al-Sa^cīd, the leader of the leftist opposition party al-Tajamu^c, said Abu Zayd paid a heavy price of his enlightened ideology. "The Islamic thinking and Muslim intellectuals have lost a unique thinker with the death of Abu Zayd".

 

Abu Zayd worked in the Netherlands as a professor of Islamic studies at Leiden University before holding the held the Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam teaching at the University of Humanistics in the Dutch city of Utrecht in 2002.

 

The embattled thinker remained optimistic about the possibility of change in Egypt, an idea he openly expressed during a lecture in Amsterdam late last year. However, he said that he would pin his hopes on the new generations, which he urged to walk the path of renowned 19th Century reformists like Imam Muhammad ^cAbdo.

 

Abu Zayd is the author of many books including works focusing on the contemporary interpretation of the Qur'an and critiques on religious discourse. Instead of the traditional literal interpretation of the Quran, Abu Zayd used contemporary methodology, including linguistics, to interpret Islam's holy text.

 

His writings on Quranic studies, especially his renowned book "A Critique of Religious Discourse," drew the wrath of Muslim fundamentalists who accused questioning the Quran's divine origins and therefore being a disbeliever.

 

In an interview in 2000 he said: "I would like to tell the Muslim nation that I was born, raised and lived as a Muslim and, God willing, I will die as a Muslim."