Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (18 page)

In January 1992, the Cairo Book Fair held a debate between him and three Islamist thinkers, attended by hundreds of Islamic activists, and his rebuttal of Islamist arguments and championship of a free society were probably the primary reason for his subsequent murder. Though he received numerous death threats, he continued speaking undeterred, until, on June 8, 1992, he was shot dead by two men riding a motorcycle outside his office in Nasr City. The killers also injured his son Ahmed and a friend.
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The group Gamaat Islamia claimed responsibility for the murder, accusing Foda “of being an apostate, of advocating the separation of religion from the state, and favoring the existing legal system in Egypt rather than the application of Sharia.” Scholars at Al-Azhar denounced the way he was killed but still held that he was an apostate who deserved to die. During the murder trial, Sheikh Mohamed El Ghazali declared that it was the right of any Muslim to kill an apostate and that, although this usurped the role of the state, he should not be executed.
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Ahmed Subhy Mansour commented on the trial:

They have succeeded in converting the trial of Farag Foda’s killers to a trial for Farag Foda himself. They made out of that trial an occasion to terrorize their opponents. The defense in the case demanded that the testimony of some advocates of political Islam should be heard. Their leader gave his verdict that whoever opposes the application of Islamic sharia is an apostate who deserves to be executed, and that any person from the public who kills him should not be punished by the authorities, even though such a person has taken away the right of the state by taking the law into his own hands.… The newspapers of political Islam very happily welcomed it. No less enthusiasm was shown by their supporters working in the government official newspapers.
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The name Al-Banna is usually associated with Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, Gamal Al-Banna, born in 1920, rejected his famous brother’s ideology and has, himself, aroused controversy through more than forty books. In 1946, he published
A New Democracy
, with a chapter
titled “A New Understanding of Religion,” highly critical of the Brotherhood. After his book
Rationalization of Renaissance
was banned because of its criticism of the 1952 military takeover, Al-Banna stopped writing on Islamic matters and instead wrote extensively on workers’ issues. He also founded the Egyptian Association for the Care of Prisoners and Their Families, which brought him more problems with the government. In the 1980s, with the reemergence of political Islam, he returned to Islamic issues and published
Islam and Rationalism, No and No Again
, and
Islamic Movements: Pros and Cons
. One of his most famous books was
Towards a New Islamic Jurisprudence
, in which he called for a new Islamic theology. In 2005, his book
The Responsibility for the Failure of the Islamic State
was banned after an IRC ruling that it deviated from Islamic orthodoxy.
⁶⁹

Al-Banna’s major theme is that “no Islamic revival can be achieved without a direct return to the Holy Qur’an and a reexamination of the Sunna,” free from interpretations by ancestors influenced by the spirit of their age. He maintains that “a narrow isolationist position, taking the example of a long-gone society as the best example… contradicts the essence of Islam…” Al-Banna has maintained that the Sunna “should never have the same weight as the Qur’an” and “must be judged by the Qur’an, not the other way around.”
⁷⁰
Along with fellow reformers Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Sayed Al Qimni, he held a conference in Cairo on October 5–6, 2004, called “Islam and Reform.” It asked for reliance on the Qu’ran as the sole authentic source for reviewing the Islamic heritage and a radical revision of “Islamic scholarship relating to Islamic Jurisprudence and the Sunna, the Traditions of the Prophet.”
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Not least because of its call for institutional reform, the conference was heavily criticized by Tantawi, the late head of Al-Azhar, who said that research centers that participated in the seminar have a “destructive influence” and “must be stopped and brought to trial.” Tantawi, who participated in interreligious dialogues himself, also claimed that the “participation of Western research centers” in the discussion “is a mark of shame.” He called participants “a group of religious deviants, one of whom has already been indicted on charges of treason; thus it is forbidden to deal with them.…”
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Speaking on the topic of freedom and Islam at the Alexandria Library on May 26, 2007, Al-Banna emphasized that “the prophet stressed freedom in all his acts and dealings,” but the current religious establishment “decides the death penalty for an apostate.” He added that the Prophet did not punish apostasy and that [t] here is no contradiction between complete freedom of thought and religion because religion is built on belief.… This can only exist in an environment which allows liberal examination and pious scrutiny.” He added, “There is no freedom without the freedom to print and publish, to form political parties, organizations, trade unions and the rest of civil society’s organizations…” He has also advocated granting women equality with men. In
The Veil
, he challenges the dogma requiring women to wear headscarves and argues that it does not derive from Islam but from earlier cultures.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Al-Banna remains highly critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, saying: “There is no such thing as an Islamic state. It is impossible to create.…”
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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.
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Abu-Zayd’s major troubles began when, in a front-page story, a pro-Islamist newspaper accused him of abandoning his faith in Islam.
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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.
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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.”
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On June 21, 1995, Islamic Jihad declared that, under Islamic law, the professor should be killed.
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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.”
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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”
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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.”
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The divorce ruling was suspended in September 1996 by the Giza Court of Emergency Matters, but the declaration of apostasy remained in place.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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
.
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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.”
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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.
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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.