by Kim Ghattas
Nasr was not starting from scratch: he was building on a great inheritance that went back to the eighth century. His master’s thesis had been about the Mu’tazilah, the rationalist Islamic movement drawing on Greek philosophy that had first stirred a big debate between reason and dogma barely two hundred years after the founding of Islam.
The Mu’tazilah first emerged in the eighth century, in Basra, in today’s southern Iraq. They believed that while God’s speech was uncreated and revealed to the prophet, the writing of the Quran was an earthly phenomenon: words, ink, paper. Furthermore, the writing had happened well after the revelation and the death of the prophet. The Mu’tazilah applied reason to the study of the holy book and believed in free will. Their movement reflected the times they were living in —the Abbasid era was the golden age of Islam, the time of science and philosophy, of Abu Nuwas’s libertine poetry about love and wine, the thousand and one days and nights of Scheherazade, and the Abbasid caliph Haroun al Rashid. Baghdad’s famed library, the House of Wisdom, became the repository of world knowledge, overflowing with original and translated works. At the same time in Baghdad, also under the Abbasid caliphate, was Ahmad ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence: resolutely orthodox, literalist, and opposed to the Mu’tazilah doctrine, which had become state doctrine. His opposition landed him in jail, and his following surged. Hanbalis believed Muslims had lost their way, and as the Abbasid caliphate weakened, the followers of Ibn Hanbal became more organized, leading the fight against rationalism and anything that could distract from the purest form of the original faith, including music. They “set up in fact a kind of ‘Sunni inquisition.’”
As the four major schools of jurisprudence slowly crystallized, orthodoxy also settled in. Some Sunni religious leaders believed most major religious matters had been settled and began to restrict the gates of ijtihad, independent reasoning, to give precedence to emulation. Reading, understanding, and explaining the Quran would have to rely on the body of knowledge accumulated up until then—the Mu’tazilah period was over. Hanbalism would later soar and spread to Persia and the area around Palestine, where Ibn Taymiyyah was one of its stars, before declining again during the Ottoman era, under the weight of its own rigidity and intolerance. Its geographical influence would slowly be reduced to the austere interior of the Arabian Peninsula, the arid plateau of Najd, home of the first Saudi kingdom—where Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab took it to another level.
Fast-forward twelve centuries, and Nasr was pushing his foot through that door of ijtihad. Shaheen’s takedown was vitriolic: he accused Nasr of an “atrophy of religious conscience,” passing judgment over his faith rather than his work. Shaheen described him as a heretic, an atheist leading a “Marxian-secularist attempt to destroy Egypt’s Muslim society.” The preacher also hoped that “God would make a place for him in paradise because of his good work against the academic who had lost his way.” The desire to be rewarded by God for showing others the right path in Islam would become a recurrent theme in years to come in attacks, verbal and physical, against progressive thinkers or anyone labeled an apostate, no matter the reason. In Pakistan, it was being used as the justification for forced conversion of Hindus and Christians to Islam.
By early 1993, the university had caved and denied Nasr’s promotion. On Friday, April 2, using his pulpit at the Amr ibn al-As mosque during midday prayers, the victorious Shaheen declared the scholar an apostate. Like a pinball, the word “apostate” bounced from minaret to minaret across Cairo, and by the following Friday, in sermons across the country, preachers went after Nasr—even in his own village. As an apostate, under Islamic law, he had lost the right to live and—perhaps even more precious to him as a newlywed—the right to be married to a Muslim woman. His wife was Ebtehal Younes, the French literature student who had silently approved of the killing of Sadat in 1981.
Theirs was a story of unconventional love in a traditional society, rebellious in an age of conformism, quiet in an age of simmering turmoil. They were an unlikely couple in more ways than one. Ebtehal was now an assistant lecturer in French literature at Cairo University. Nasr was all about Islamic studies and the Quran. He was a poor village boy, she was an upper-class Egyptian; his father was a grocer, hers a diplomat; she was petite, he was big. She was fiery and, at thirty, already a spinster by Egyptian standards; he was fifteen years older and divorced, still a stain on anyone in a conservative society.
She didn’t care. They were different but they spoke the same language, dreamed the same dreams. Their friendship grew into love, and when they married, just before his troubles started, Nasr felt as though his life finally made sense, that he had finally arrived at his destination. Suddenly, fundamentalists who didn’t know them or their love for each other were ripping them apart. The charge of apostasy wasn’t even on the books in Egypt, so Nasr was sued for separation in the family affairs court under a principle in Islam known as hisba, which allows any Muslim to sue in court if he believes Islam is being harmed—a loophole Islamists had just discovered and would abuse for years. Under Islamic law, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim, and Nasr was now considered an apostate, which meant Ebtehal had to be separated from the heretic.
The legal battle dragged on for two years. Never before had such theological debates taken place. It was a turning point for Egypt and Islamists, with the Muslim world watching. Meanwhile in Cairo, there had been a run in the bookshops on all of Nasr’s publications. The headlines were focused on Nasr, but Ebtehal was deeply wounded, too. She felt morally raped, reduced to an object that Islamists were using to hurt Nasr, an object that was back on the market: Shaheen had even offered to find her a new husband.
Ebtehal’s devotion never wavered. If anyone was serving Islam, it was her husband, she insisted. They were both devout, practicing Muslims, so who were these people to declare him an apostate, to judge who was a good Muslim and who wasn’t? In some ways, “these people” were part of the same movement that had paved the way for Sadat’s assassination. She understood now it had never been about Palestine. Sadat’s killing was a religious assassination dressed up as a political act, and now she was a victim of the very trends it had unleashed and the fundamentalism that was sweeping the Egypt of the 1990s.
Farag Foda, Egypt’s most vocal secular intellectual, had seen it coming well before she did. While Nasr came to the debate about Islamic fundamentalism from a historical, theological, and linguistic angle, Foda was an agronomist, a scientist with a methodical approach to the defense of a secular state in the face of creeping fundamentalism in Egyptian society. A decade prior, in 1985, his bestseller Before the Fall, a short but incisive political essay, had neatly summarized the trends that were shaping the rising Islamic fervor in a society searching for answers after the repeated, searing defeats of Arab nationalism in the face of Israel.
Foda had identified three Islamic trends in Egypt. The first was the traditional political one of the Muslim Brotherhood, with historical roots in Egypt—it was the weakest but the most pragmatic, according to Foda. Then came revolutionary Islam, inspired by Iran, the kind that wanted to overthrow systems wholesale, the one that Nageh Ibrahim, Abdelsalam Farag, and other young Egyptians had embraced in the 1970s. In Foda’s view, this was the most dangerous but the least widespread because it relied on a specific demographic: young hotheads. And finally there was what he described as the moneyed Islam, the Islam of riches—the Islam of petrodollars.
That third, moneyed Islam was the most powerful, according to Foda, because it looked modern and contemporary but was actually insidious, slowly infiltrating all aspects of society. Violence could be quelled, militants imprisoned, but once people’s minds had been altered by a new worldview, it could take generations to undo the damage. Moneyed Islam flaunted its wealth to promote new, supposedly more righteous ways: introducing Islamic banking and then demanding that female employees wear the veil; setting up publishing houses and offering huge sums of money for authors to wri
te books, but only those who promoted a specific outlook, a specific, puritanical understanding of religion; or hiring journalists to write for Saudi-funded pan-Arab publications like Asharq al-Awsat. A regular contributor to the paper could earn $3,000 per month, more than a year’s salary for the same job at Egyptian publications. But with the paycheck came political redlines, intellectual censorship, and self-censorship, the kind that atrophies the minds of vibrant societies. The strategy, according to Foda, was to make people dependent on those petrodollars, tying their financial security to the servicing of a Saudi vision for society and politics.
In 1990, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, in self-imposed exile in London, penned a ruthless, prophetic poem, “Abu Jahl Buys Fleet Street,” a critique of the rich men from the Arabian Peninsula in flowing white robes who had descended on the city and seemed to be buying it up. Abu Jahl means “father of ignorance” in Arabic, and the title of Qabbani’s poem was a nod to a contemporary of the prophet named Abu Jahl, a pagan who had fought Muhammad and rejected Islam.
In his poem, Qabbani asked: “had England become the capital of the Caliphate? And oil walked as a king on Fleet Street?” Mostly, the poem was a warning to Arab journalists and intellectuals not to become enslaved to philistine paymasters. Leftist intellectuals had “turned their backs on Lenin and were riding camels,” those who wanted to be successful editors “had to kiss, day and night, the knee of the prince.” Qabbani appealed to an unnamed ruler to take anything they wanted but to spare the word, the letters:
O long-lived one, you buy pens by the barrel,
We want nothing of you,
So keep on fucking your slave women as you wish
And go on killing your subjects as you wish,
And encircle the nation with fire and steel …
No one wants to steal the cloak of your caliphate,
So keep on drinking the wine of your petrol,
But leave us our culture, our letters.
Foda was deeply concerned about Saudi cultural imperialism setting the tone across the region. But the trends he identified were not operating on separate, parallel tracks. They reinforced each other: local attitudes and dynamics fueled by new factors, exacerbated by regional trends. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood were returning from Saudi Arabia and working to change the system and society from within, adding a new layer to the understanding and practice of religion in their home country. The Gama’a Islamiyya and the Islamic Jihad were a product of local factors, frustrated with the quiescent approach to those in power—they believed in violence; they had gone to fight in Afghanistan, where Saudi money and influence also reigned, and some were coming back. The two trends, moneyed and revolutionary, were now mixing in Egypt.
Foda was relentless in his attacks against all types of Islamists. A big man with a booming voice and worry beads threaded among his fingers, he harangued and mocked them, deconstructing their arguments piece by piece. He was a skilled debater, always ready to take them down, in interviews and in his acerbic writings. On January 8, 1992, he did it publicly, in front of fifteen thousand people—it was a fatal turning point.
The twenty-fourth annual Cairo International Book Fair had organized a public debate featuring Foda and three other speakers: Mohammad Khalafallah, who was a secularist, like Foda, and two Islamists. One of them, Mohammad al-Ghazali, was a leading Islamic scholar and graduate of Al-Azhar, a charismatic preacher who had taught at Islamic universities in Mecca and Doha as well as in Algeria during the 1980s. The other, Ma’moun al-Hodeibi, had lived in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s. He was the son of the Brotherhood’s second Murshid A’am (general guide) Hassan al-Hodeibi and would one day become general guide himself.
Even the event’s title had been hotly debated: “Egypt, a Secular or Islamic State?” was the Islamists’ preferred version. They wanted to box in their opponents as atheists. The book fair had settled for “Egypt: a Civil State or Religious State?” Egypt had never seen a public debate on this subject. The mood was febrile, the audience of men and women agitated. There were chants of “Allahu Akbar wal Jihad sabeeluna” (God is the greatest and jihad is our path). The conference hall was overflowing, and the doors to the fair itself had to be closed. Inside, it was standing room only, with people squeezed along the walls and even behind the speakers. There were no security precautions.
Ghazali and Hodeibi argued in favor of what they described as an Islamic democracy, ruled by the shari’a, as they decried the cultural invasion of the West. Foda defended his identity as a Muslim: “I can accept that communism be insulted, I can accept that socialism be insulted, but I cannot accept that Islam be insulted.” But, he asked, which Islamic state were his opponents suggesting as a model? There were no successful examples; Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan had been failures. He went further: Why this sudden obsession with an Islamic state? “For thirteen hundred years [since the first century after the prophet] only one percent of people have advocated for a religious state, while ninety-nine percent have advocated for what we are calling for, which is a civil state.” Even that idealized, halcyon time of the early days of Islam was imperfect, mired in disputes and violence, he continued. Three of the first caliphs, close companions of the prophet, known as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, had been assassinated.
Foda had been a thorn in the side of the Islamists for a decade at that point, ever since he’d made headlines with Before the Fall. He was working to build a secular political party, Al-Mustaqbal, the Future, bringing together Muslims and Christians. Now Foda was shredding the Islamists’ credibility in public. The time had come to get rid of him.
They couldn’t even face him when they killed him. It was a Monday afternoon, June 8, 1992, six months after the book fair debate. He was coming out of his office with his son and a friend, in a residential suburb of Cairo. Two illiterate men who had never spoken to him or read his work sped by on a motorcycle and fired seven bullets into his back. They shot and injured his fifteen-year-old son, too. They were simply following orders. Safwat Abdel Ghani, detained but never charged in the plot to kill Sadat, had passed on a message through his lawyers to recruit the killers.
Egypt had seen political violence and assassinations, but this was a first: intellectual terrorism. The country was shaken, the Arab world shocked. There would now be a before Foda and an after. The fearless agronomist and intellectual was described in newspapers as the martyr of the nation. Thousands of Egyptians attended his funeral. President Mubarak sent a representative; ministers, governors, the mufti of the republic, intellectuals, ambassadors all joined the procession through the streets of Cairo. As they carried the casket, draped in a green cloth embroidered with verses from the Quran, mourners calmly sang the national anthem. “My country, my country, to you I dedicate my heart and my love.” The sadness soon gave way to anger and the procession turned into a protest against terrorism. “No to the Jihad, to the Brothers,” “Long live the crescent, long live the cross.”
The country was split. And it was perhaps Foda’s sister who first expressed it in a heartfelt, anguished cry after his funeral: “Why did they kill him? He was a Muslim! How could they declare him an atheist divorced from his religion? Who gave them the right to divide us between Muslims and infidels?” That was precisely what was happening. Hardline Sunni Islamists were no longer simply separating Muslims from non-Muslims, or Sunnis from Shias, an approach that was already leaving a trail of dead bodies, ripping apart small communities with sectarian violence. They were now also asking within their own community: Are you a good Muslim?
Nonviolent, or political, Islamists deflected responsibility after Foda’s murder. The Muslim Brotherhood claimed the government was partly responsible, because it had allowed him access to the airwaves, to “stab Islam in the heart … [a] provocation of Muslim sentiments at a time when the whole world is hounding them with war.” Al-Azhar had condemned the killing when it happened, but earlier it had also criticized Foda’s plans for a secular party, describing t
he move as a danger to the Muslim nation and denouncing secularists like him as enemies “of everything that is Islamic.” His assassins would later say that Al-Azhar had spoken, so they had acted. The Sunni world’s highest religious authority had shown, tragically, how words could be an invitation to murder.
Even more shocking was the appearance of an Al-Azhar scholar as a defense witness for Foda’s assassins during their trial, in July 1993. Mohammad al-Ghazali, who had sparred with Foda at the Cairo book fair and inspired thousands of Islamists in Algeria, condoned the killing. His argument echoed in part the one made by the head of Al-Azhar in the Rushdie case: it was up to the state to carry out the sentence of death against apostates after a trial, but since the state had failed to curb Foda, the sentence could be carried out by righteous Muslims. Chillingly, Ghazali declared there was no punishment for a Muslim stepping in to carry out this deadly duty. Ghazali was the 1989 recipient of the King Faisal award, the prize first bestowed on Mawdudi, the founder of the Jamaat in Pakistan.
The Egyptian government had been trying to separate violent Islam from moderate, political Islam, the militants from the preachers, those wishing to overturn the system and those working within, like Al-Azhar. But Foda himself had warned that the government’s attempt to placate the radicals—for example by giving more airtime to those who appeared to be moderate Islamists—was feeding intolerance and playing with fire.
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Since the mid-1980s, under its Grand Imam, Gad al-Haq, Al-Azhar had become much more activist in its promotion of a conservative Islam, pushing back against secular values. It had banned books before, including Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’s 1966 novel Adrift on the Nile, but it was now increasingly involved in the censorship of literary works, films, anything cultural. The group issued fatwas condoning Islamic banking and female genital mutilation while banning organ donations and tinted contact lenses and condemning women who didn’t cover their hair.
