Nasr Abu Zayd

During a visit in Indonesia he was infected by an unknown virus, and was hospitalized in Cairo. He died at a Cairo hospital on July 5, 2010 at the age of 66. He was buried in his birthplace, on the same day.

In Europe he held the Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University for Humanistics, Utrecht, Netherlands, while still supervising MA and PhD students at the University of Leiden as well. He also participated in a research project on Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique in the Working Group on Islam and modernity at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). In 2005, he received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought, Berlin. His wife returned several times to Egypt for discussion on MA and PhD theses at the French department at Cairo University. Dr. Abu Zayd also returned several times to Egypt after 1995, but mostly to visit family.

On November 8, 1999, he filed a suit against the Egyptian justice minister, demanding that the 1996 ruling which annulled the marriage be declared illegal.

Filing cases of hisbah against Muslims who violated a "right of God" and thus disturbed the public order was at one time the function of an official known as the muhtasib before that function had lapsed. The lawsuit by the Islamists resurrected hisbah and had the advantage that the plaintiffs did not have to be directly affected by a defendant's alleged wrongdoing. The hisbah principles are stated in Article 89 and 110 of the Regulations Governing Sharia Courts in Egypt but were amended in 1998, too late to help Abu Zayd.

The Egyptian government "strived to ignore" the case. There were only brief mentions of it in the state-run media and no government official spoke in his defense. However, in 1998, the regulations governing Sharia courts in Egypt were amended making it impossible for individuals to file lawsuits accusing someone of apostasy, leaving the issue to the prerogative of the prosecution office.

On 23 July 1995, the couple fled their homeland for an indefinite sabbatical. They flew to Madrid, then decided to go from Spain to the Netherlands, where he was invited to teach as a Visiting Professor at the Leiden University. Abu Zayd explained,

On 27 January 1994, the Giza Personal Status Court rejected the demand because the plaintiff had no direct, personal interest in the matter. However, on June 14, 1995 Cairo's Court of Appeals reversed the lower court ruling in favor of the plaintiff, judge 'Abd al-'Alim Musa (who had worked for several years in Saudi Arabia) found Abu Zayd to be an apostate, and declaring the marriage of Abu Zayd and Ibtihal Younis null and void.

Despite the two positive reports, the Tenure and Promotion Committee voted against the promotion (seven votes to six), arguing that his works did not justify a promotion. The Council of the Arabic Department made a statement against the committee's decision, and the Council of the Faculty of Arts criticized the committee report. Despite all that, the Council of Cairo University confirmed the decision of the committee report on 18 March 1993.

In 1992 the process of his being considered for promotion to full professor at Cairo University morphed from a routine academic process into a "legal nightmare for him and his wife." While he was eventually promoted, he was sued by conservative Muslims and a Court of Appeals declared him an apostate and divorced him from his wife. This was followed by calls for his death and exile to Europe where he obtained the position of Visiting Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Leiden University. (see below)

The Nasr Abu Zayd case began when he was refused a promotion for the post of full professor. In May 1992, Dr. Abu Zayd presented his academic publications to the Standing Committee of Academic Tenure and Promotion for advancement. Among his thirteen works in Arabic and other languages were Imam Shāfi'ī and the Founding of Medieval Ideology and The Critique of Religious Discourse. The committee presented three reports, two were in favor of the promotion of Dr. Abu Zayd. But the third one, written by Abdel-Sabour Shahin, a professor of Arabic linguistics at the Cairo Dar al- 'Ulum, and a committee member, accused Abu Zayd of "clear affronts to the Islamic faith," and rejected the promotion.

The action against Abu Zayd was not isolated. During the 1990s there were several assaults on liberal intellectuals and artists in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Ahmed Sobhy Mansour was dismissed from Al-Azhar University and imprisoned for six months. This was based on a verdict reached by the university itself on the grounds that he rejected a fundamental tenet of Islam in his research of truth of some of Muhammad's sayings, or Hadith. Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist in 1994, leaving him incapable of using his hand to write. Egyptian courts were the theatre of different lawsuits brought against intellectuals, journalists, and university professors such as Atif al-Iraqi, Ragaa al-Naqash, Mahmoud al-Tohami, and Youssef Chahine (for his film El-Mohager, The Emigrant).

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Cairo University as an assistant professor. He became an associate professor there in 1987. From 1985 to 1989, he worked as a visiting lecturer at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

Shortly after the verdict was issued, a group of professors at al-Azhar University, the "theological centre of Egypt", issued a joint statement calling for Abu Zayd's execution. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization (which assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and was engaged in a guerrilla war with the government at the time) issued a statement saying the professor should be killed for abandoning his Muslim faith. But calls for his death were not limited to insurgents. Even a newspaper published by the ruling political party of the ostensibly secular anti-fundamentalist regime, The Islamic Banner, declared that `execution` was a fitting penalty if Abu Zayd failed to repent. In addition Abu Zayd received threats in the mail, one promising "No matter how much the police tries to protect you, you will not get away.".

Abu Zayd has been referred to as among "the big names" of the post-1967 Arab intellectual tradition.

At the age of 12, Abu Zayd was imprisoned for allegedly sympathising with the Muslim Brotherhood. He was also influenced by the writings of Muslim Brotherhood revolutionary Islamist Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by the Egyptian state in 1966, but moved away from the ideas of the Brethren and Qutb as he grew older. After receiving technical training he worked for the National Communications Organization in Cairo. At the same time, he started studying at Cairo University, where he obtained his BA degree in Arabic Studies (1972), and later his MA (1977) and PhD degrees (1981) in Islamic Studies, with works concerning the interpretation of the Qur'an.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (Arabic: نصر حامد أبو زيد, IPA: [ˈnɑsˤɾe ˈħæːmed ˈæbuˈzeːd]; also Abu Zaid or Abu Zeid; July 10, 1943 – July 5, 2010) was an Egyptian Quranic thinker, author, academic and one of the leading liberal theologians in Islam. He is famous for his project of a humanistic Quranic hermeneutics, which "challenged mainstream views" on the Quran, sparking "controversy and debate." While not denying that the Quran was of divine origin, Zayd argued that it was a "cultural product" that had to be read in the context of the language and culture of seventh century Arabs, and could be interpreted in more than one way. He also criticized the use of religion to exert political power. In 1995 an Egyptian Sharia court declared him an apostate, this led to threats of death and his fleeing Egypt several weeks later. He later quietly returned to Egypt where he died.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born in Quhafa, a small village some 120 km from Cairo, near Tanta, Egypt on July 10, 1943. Abu Zayd went through a traditional religious school system and was a Qāriʾ who could recite the Qur'an with the proper rules of recitation, and a Hafiz one who has memorized the Quran completely from a young age.

His case has been compared to controversies over interpretation of the Quran involving Taha Hussein in the 1920s and Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah in the 1940s. The fact that a well established/respected scholar like Abu Zayd "suffered more concretely" than the other two is an illustration of "the gains made by Islamists in the last half of the 20th century.