Dr. Louis Awad did not
conceal his enmity towards Arabism, Arabs, and Islam. Arabism for him was a
racial movement on an equal footing
with fascism. While we were at his office he said what we wrote about
Islam in Al-Ahram newspaper was really
dangerous. When I asked him what was dangerous about it, and
he replied that it was reviving Islam and prolonging
its age... religions in the traditional shape would
pass away and we would be freed from them forever. But what I
was doing was dangerous; as I was reviving and
renewing the religion...This was what Hassan Al-Banna had
done.
During another conversation…he told
me that people constantly reciting the Qur’an annoyed him. He
said that if you listened to any broadcast
anywhere in the world, you would hear music, but here you hear the
Qur’an, the Qur’an and the Qur’an.
Actually I felt pity for the man because he hated everything that
related to the Arabs and Islam... but he
has to live surrounded by Arabs, Arabic and Islam, as if he is living as a
tortured man until he meets his
end.
I reject and am against people like Louis Awad who go deep into the
field of Islamic studies and
Islamic reform. This is not because I am against freedom of speech, but because such
writing from non-
Muslims, with whom we share citizenship, stirs up special sensitivities that nourish sectarianism,
which we
all hate and fight against. For myself, while I was writing about intellectualism and criticizing myths
and
false traditions, I did not touch upon Christian divinity, the priesthood or the development of Christian
ideology. But Dr. Louis passed his limits, when he wrote about the Islamic reform, Gamal Eddin Al-Afghani
and the
language of the holy Qur’an. In this way he harmed national unity, in spite of the fact that his
Coptic
feelings were racial and not religious.
I am still saddened when I find people who follow the
same
devastating path. For example, there was an item in a Cairo magazine written by a Christian who
criticized the
Azhar, attacking its scholars and accusing them of backwardness and ignorance. Also in Al
-Ahali newspaper on
March 5, 1997 someone asked for the Azhar educational institutions, which have
spread all over Egypt, to be closed.
The writer differed not only with the Islamic groups or what some
people prefer to call political Islam, but also
with the nation, which built and adopted the Azhar
institutions to save its faith. He also put himself at odds with
the language and civilization that gathers
and unifies Egyptian Christians and Muslims.
My hope is that the
desire of non-Muslims to write about
Islamic topics fades away.
