Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (19 page)

In July 2009, in what appeared to be a brief liberalizing literary trend, the Ministry of Culture bestowed the State Award of Merit in Social Science on Al Qimni. As in the case of Hassan Hanafi, who was honored in the same month, conservative Islamists protested vigorously. Islamist Sheikh Youssef al Badri stated on televison that Al Qimni was more of a “disaster” than Salman Rushdie: “Salman Rushdie, everyone attacked him because he destroyed Islam overtly. But Sayyid al-Qimni is attacking Islam and destroying it tactfully, tastefully and politely.” Nabih al-Wahsh filed a suit demanding the award be cancelled as Al Qimni is “derisive of Islam.” The government-backed religious institution Dar-al-Ifta promulgated a fatwa that, while not identifying Qimni by name, has been interpreted by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies as “effectively declar(ing) him an infidel.”
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Ahmed Subhy Mansour taught at Al-Azhar from 1973 to 1987, and in 1980, he received his doctorate there in Muslim history. His troubles, both with fundamentalists and with the Egyptian regime, began in 1985. His work stressed the centrality of the Qur’an combined with skepticism about the hadith, or sayings of the prophet, and he was consequently accused of being against Islam. In November 1987, the government imprisoned him and
twenty-four associates for two months, asserting that he was calling on Muslims to abandon Islam. On November 30, 1987, an article in
Al Ahram
, Egypt’s most prestigious paper, claimed he rejected the Sunna and insulted the Companions of the Prophet. On December 5, 1987,
Akhbar Alyoum
described him as an “Enemy of the Sunna.”
⁹⁷

Farag Foda defended Subhy Mansour, and the two together sought to establish a new political party, the Future Party. After Foda was assassinated, Mansour helped establish the Egyptian Association for Enlightenment, one of whose goals was tolerance between Muslims and Christians. Between 1993 and 2000, he worked with several organizations, including the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and with a prominent democracy advocate, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, at the Ibn Khaldoun Center, chairing the center’s weekly debate forum and working on curriculum revision. On May 4, 1999, the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Alsha’ab
paper, described his educational materials as a Zionist project attacking Islam. On May 16, 1999,
Alsayasy Al Masry
described them as a “Conspiracy to teach Zionist ideology.”

After Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s arrest and the government’s closure of the Ibn Khaldoun Center in June 2000, Mansour and twenty of his associates, now labeled “Quranists,” were arrested in October 2001, and he escaped to the United States on October 15, 2001. On March 5, 2002, eight of his associates were convicted in a state security Emergency Court of violating Article 98(F) of the penal code, which forbids insulting a “heavenly religion.” Two received three-year prison sentences, and the others received one-year suspended sentences since they were not convicted of actually propagating Quranism.
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His books cover a wide range. His 1985
The Prophets in the Holy Qur’an
, which was banned, argued that the Qur’an shows that Mohammed was not infallible and that he would not intercede on the Day of Judgment. His 1990
The Qur’an: The Only Source of Islam and Islamic Jurisprudence
, also banned, argues that the Qur’an is properly the only source of Islam.
⁹⁹
In 1994, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights published his
Freedom of Speech: Islam and Muslims
, which argued that freedom of speech in Islam should be unlimited and that, historically, Muslims, beginning with the Umayyads and Abbasids, have restricted it for political reasons. Of his twenty-four books, he was unable to publish six, and seven were banned.
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Mansour has also argued that a penalty of apostasy “is a fabricated tradition created and applied two centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s death… to provide the totalitarian rulers with a religious justification to eliminate their opponents.…” In particular, he argued against the common Muslim belief that freedom of religion applies only to not being a Muslim or to joining Islam, but not to leaving Islam. Had God intended to confine compulsion to only joining religion, He would have said, “There should be no forcing INTO joining religion,” but He wanted to exclude all types of compulsion in all matters that are related to religion. So He said, “There is no compulsion IN religion.”
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Like many religious reformers, Mansour also advocates political and social reform. Consequently, he defends Middle Eastern minorities, including the Kurds and the Copts. Similarly, accusations of apostasy are often tied to political repression. In Mansour’s words, people suggesting “progressive opinions” will be accused of “opposing the application of Shariah. Such opposition will be interpreted as committing apostasy.”
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Attacks did not stop after his escape to the United States. On March 29, 2005, Islamist writer Fahmy Howeid wrote in
Al Ahram
that reformers, including Mansour, worked with Jews and were backed by neoconservatives and the CIA. Among those allegedly supporting the project, Howeid singled out Paul Wolfowitz, then assistant secretary of defense, and James Woolsey, past director of Central Intelligence Agency.
¹⁰³
In October 2009, Mansour was threatened on an Al-Qaeda-linked website that described him as “an infidel whose blood is
halal
to be shed” and an apostate.
¹⁰⁴

In Egypt itself, attacks on Quranists intensified. In May and June, 2007, five were arrested and charged with “insulting religion.” They were beaten and also held in the same cells as Islamists, which placed their lives in danger. One was Amr Tharwat, who had worked for the Ibn Khaldoun Center in monitoring elections. Later, two additional defendants were added—Mansour himself, resident in Virginia, and his cousin, Osman Mohamed Ali. Investigators examined Mansour’s books, including the ones rejecting the killing of apostates.
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In October 2008, Quranist blogger Reda Abdelarahman Ali, a relative of Mansour, was arrested and faced charges of defaming Islam. He was released three months later, after the High National Security Court ruled that “arresting people solely on the basis of their religious beliefs is not acceptable.” Mansour reports that in detention prisoners have been “severely beaten and humiliated” and “electrified” to make false confessions.
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Given the range of Egyptian cultural life, many other examples can be given. Salah El Din Mohsen, whose
Lecture of the Heaven
and
Memoirs of a Muslim
and
Shivers of Enlightenment
were banned, was sentenced on January 27, 2001 to three years in prison with hard labor for insulting a heavenly religion. Also in 2001, Manal Manea, an outspoken atheist, received three years in prison for blasphemy against Islam.
¹⁰⁷
Metwalli Ibrahim Metwalli Saleh, whose unpublished research rejected the idea that apostates should be killed and that a Muslim woman could not marry a non-Muslim man, was arrested in May 2003 and, although the Supreme State Security Emergency Court ruled eight times that he should be released, was held until April 23, 2006.
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Dissident intellectuals are also harassed through religious litigation. Islamist lawyer Nabih el Wahsh has filed over a thousand
hisba
cases, though the majority of these were dismissed by Egypt’s prosecutor general. He initiated a suit seeking to revoke the State Award of Merit given to Sayed Al Qimni on the ground that
Qimni’s writings “deride Islam” and urged that Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni be removed for permitting the award. In 2001, El Wahsh sought, but failed, to have feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi forcibly divorced from her husband, arguing that her opinions proved that she was “an infidel,” and, in 2007, he sought the revocation of her Egyptian citizenship. In 2008, El Saadawi won this case and returned to Egypt from the United States, to which she had fled. In October 2009, Naguib Gobraiel—a defense lawyer allegedly assaulted by El Wahsh during the Hegazy case—turned the tables and took El Wahsh to court for abuse of
hisba
charges. Gamal Eid of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information described
hisba
cases as “a threat hovering over the heads of all intellectuals in Egypt.”
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Egyptian novelists have also suffered. The most notable was Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world’s only winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1989, he called Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini a terrorist over his death fatwa against Salman Rushdie and asserted, in a joint declaration with eighty other intellectuals, “No blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer.”
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On October 14, 1994, he was stabbed by a member of Gamaat Islamia after Omar Abdel Rahman, the “spiritual leader” of the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, issued a fatwa against him because of his 1959 novel
Children of the Alley
. The novel had been banned in Egypt, and Rahman claimed that if Mahfouz had also been punished “in the proper Islamic manner,” that is, killed, then Salman Rushdie would not have dared to publish his
Satanic Verses
. Mahfouz survived the attack but was permanently disabled.
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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has shown some weakness in recent years but remains the most powerful opposition force in the country. One reason for the Brotherhood’s strength is that the regime has choked off civil society for decades, thus preventing any challenges and ensuring that the short-term choice is either the Brotherhood or the government. Egypt’s reformers are often connected through formal and informal networks. Those described in this chapter, Foda, Al Banna, Al Qimni, Abu-Zayd, and Mansour, as well as others, such as blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, have major differences from one another, but most have sought to be faithful Muslims; they have suffered similar fates, and they have usually supported one another despite their differences.
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They have also been democracy advocates—several have cooperated with Saad Eddin Ibrahim and his work for human rights, democracy, and an open society. They have advocated freedom of religion and speech and been defenders of the Baha’is and the Copts. In particular, they have criticized civil penalties for apostasy, which, in the vicious circularity of radical Islam, is one reason that they have been labeled apostates. Hence the regime’s policies have also choked of the possibilities of religious freedom and religious renewal.

Egypt faces an uncertain future. If it is to have political renewal, one necessary avenue is through religious freedom and thus open religious debate.

As Magdi Khalil has written:

The advocates of terrorism live comfortably—most of them are rich. Advocates of enlightenment live in hardship, and fund their writings from their own pockets. Some of them are not able to pay their own health bills… advocates of hatred and terrorism distribute their books in abundance, sometimes for free; the advocates of enlightenment oftentimes have a hard time finding a publisher. If they do find a publisher or pay the costs of publication themselves, their books get banned… the advocates of terrorism are stars in Arab societies, and are sometimes given forums in mosques, schools, colleges, newspapers and satellite stations.… Violence may recede as a result of security measures, but terrorism first and foremost is ideas, and it cannot be defeated except through opening windows of light to scatter this obscurantist thought.
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On February 5, 1997, a torn Qur’an was found in a mosque about a mile from the predominantly Christian village of Shanti Nagar. Some locals maintained that the book was torn by Raji Baba, a Christian resident of Shanti Nagar, since his name and address were written on some loose pages, even though Baba himself was illiterate. Speeches on mosque loudspeakers in nearby Khanewal city and other villages accused the Christians of Shanti Nagar of having burned a copy of the Qur’an. They demanded that faithful Muslims unite to take revenge on the Christians for this alleged act of blasphemy. Shanti Nagar was attacked by a mob of tens of thousands of enraged Muslims. Despite the presence of 300 to 400 police, the rioters burned 326 houses and fourteen churches
.
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There is evidence that at least seventy people were abducted, most of them young girls and women. These hostages were forced to spend one or two nights in the custody of Muslim culprits; several were raped, and some were forcibly married
.
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In January 2008, in Punjab province, four Ahmadi boys and one man were arrested without any evidence. The accused—three fourteen-year-olds, one sixteen-year-old, and a forty-five-year-old man—had received permission to pray at the local mosque. However, when offensive graffiti was subsequently found on the walls of the mosque’s bathroom, the Ahmadis were arrested and charged with blasphemy. The accuser, Liaquat Ali, was among those who saw the graffiti and decided that the act must have been committed by an Ahmadi. A local teacher and leader of an anti-Ahmadi movement, Shahbaz Qasim, agreed and accused the four boys of drawing the graffiti on the instructions of the forty-five-year-old man, Mubashar Ahmed. According to the official complaint, “only they could be responsible for the offense” as they were the only “non-Muslims” in the mosque. The inspector in the case, Khalid Rauf, confirmed that the police did not have any substantial evidence linking the boys with the crime, but, nevertheless, they raided the boys’ and Ahmed’s homes on January 28 and arrested them all. Within four hours of the arrests, all five had been charged under Article 295-C
.
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