Instead of embracing its most profound and loyal thinkers, Arab culture has a propensity to silence innovation, the late Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid being a case in point, writes Salah Salem* Few people have the courage to go against the grain, to swim against the current. Those that do display such fortitude in the realm of politics are known as revolutionaries, in the realm of science as visionaries, and in the realm of ideas as beacons of enlightenment. Contemporary Arab culture is not lacking in persons with such potential, although it somehow manages to sideline them and keep them from generating an effective and durable tide. Four such individuals immediately come to mind. They were all 20th century Egyptian intellectuals who issued appeals to reason and calls for intellectual liberation. Sadly, their cries ran up against the implacable wall of tradition and intellectual stagnation, and faded into the wilderness of Arab culture. Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razeq ran afoul of both Al-Azhar and the political regime when he published Islam and Principles of Government in 1925. In this seminal work, Abdel-Razeq refuted the notion that the caliphate system of government and its means of exercising authority were grounded in the fundamental tenets of Islam. It was an open challenge to King Fouad who, at the time, was making a bid to re-establish the caliphate with himself as caliph. Taha Hussein championed a rational approach to the analysis of pre-Islamic poetry in an attempt to shed light on the authenticity of portions of that lore. His controversial book, On Jahiliya (pre-Islamic) Poetry, published in 1926, also precipitated the wrath of Al-Azhar and traditionalists, which vented in legal proceedings against the author. Mohamed Ahmed Khalafallah similarly overstepped the bounds of tradition in his application of the principles of critical analysis to the study of Quranic accounts of the prophets and events prior to the Prophet Mohamed. In 1948, in the face of the onslaught of pressure, he was forced to retract his doctorate thesis for Cairo University on The Narrative Art in the Holy Quran. His professor and supervisor, Sheikh Amin Al-Khuli, was barred from supervising other studies in that field. The fourth and most recent intellectual pioneer in this tradition is Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, who passed away this summer. Like his predecessors above, Abu Zeid uttered a cry for renovation and reform in the Arab cultural firmament, a cry that precipitated an ugly backlash. His took the form of scholastic studies on The Concept of the Text and The Critique of Religious Discourse. Abu Zeid's interest was driven by what he saw as the flagrant and deliberate confusion between religion as practised by the masses and a mode of exegesis that facilitates the political exploitation of religion by different ideological camps. He hoped to promote a more scientific and humanistic hermeneutical approach that would delve beneath myth and legend and sustain religion as a force that propels towards progress, justice and freedom. Abu Zeid's meticulous and courageous scholastic output was met, firstly, by the refusal of Cairo University's Standing Committee on Academic Tenure and Promotion to approve his advancement to the position of full professor. The report that swung the committee against Abu Zeid's application was that of Professor Abdel-Sabour Shahin, who levelled dangerous allegations against the scholar. These quickly spread outside the university grounds, reverberated throughout the media, and ended up in the Egyptian courts by means of a hisba suit charging him with apostasy. The court ruled against him and ordered his divorce from his wife on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate. Nasr Abu Zeid was thus forced to leave Egypt and live in exile. He ended up in Holland where he remained a faithful diplomat for, and dedicated contributor to, his culture, steadfastly refusing the lures of Western media to recruit him into the increasingly strident attack on his culture and religion. Indeed, he opened his first lectures in Leiden University with, "In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful," the phrase that opens almost all the suras (chapters) of the Holy Quran, and in one of his lectures there he pronounced the shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith), which he had refused to do in Egypt when ordered to do so by the court. He thereby reaffirmed his identity as an Arab Muslim thinker and a supporter of Arab-Islamic culture, as opposed to, for example, Salman Rushdi, who placed himself outside it with The Satanic Verses, or Taslima Nasrin who did not shrink from describing Islam as backwards. Nasr Abu Zeid was never one to be lured by media fame and cheap personal profit. After Nasr Abu Zeid returned to his homeland, which he had missed so deeply during his exile, fate sealed all avenues for renewing dialogue with him. With his death a great opportunity escaped Arab culture, which might have taken a major step forward if it had begun to listen to him and attempted to comprehend his methodology for the critique of religious discourse, his analysis of the concept of the text, and his appeal for a moderate political secularism that leaves a cherished place for faith. How refreshing it would have been to see a deep and serious debate unfold in the heart of Arab culture, the sort of respectful intellectual exchange that tends to temper extremes into moderation. Certainly if Nasr's adversaries had not behaved as judges and condemners and rather acted as true thinkers and interested interlocutors, they would have become more intellectually fecund as they developed an appreciation of his aspiration to stimulate enlightenment and free our culture from the grip of traditionalism and authoritarianism cloaked in religion, and he would have become more moderate, or their image of him as a maverick would have been softened by insight into what motivated his ideas, especially regarding his perception of what constitutes unambiguousness in the Quranic text, which represents to him the true concept of the text. In his scholastic quest, Abu Zeid devoted considerable attention to three imams who were instrumental in transforming the concept of the text, and expanding the boundaries of what constitutes a text and in the direction of tightening its control. The first was the Imam Mohamed Ibn Idris Al-Shafei (d 204 AH), a pioneer in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence who sought to mediate between the more conservative Maleki School of the Hijaz and the more liberal Hanafi School of Iraq. Such was the importance that Abu Zeid attached to the influence of this imam that he devoted an entire book to him. In The Imam Al-Shafei: The foundation of moderate ideology in Islamic thought, Abu Zeid came to the conclusion that rather than adopting a middle course, Al-Shafei leaned towards the conservative school and, thereby, worked to entrench the authority of tradition by elevating the sunna (the recorded living habits and sayings of the Prophet) to the level of an authoritative text, virtually on par with the Quran. The second was Abul-Hassan Al-Ashari (d 324 AH), a pioneer of the eponymous Islamic theological school that forged a path between the literalists and traditionalists, and the Mutazila School that accorded a higher role to the capacities of human reason, which is to say between the theory of divine decree and the theory of free will. Al-Ashari's theory of acquisition acknowledged a concept of free will, but one that kept his philosophy much closer to the determinist school. The Imam Al-Ghazali (d 505 AH) was a philosopher and Sufi mystic and, in Abu Zeid's opinion, the third Islamic theologian and jurist chiefly responsible for propelling Arab culture towards conservatism. In promoting the Ashari School of theology as the official creed of the state and Al-Shafei's doctrine as its basis of jurisprudence, Al-Ghazali effectively bolstered the authority of literalism and traditionalism in Islamic theology and jurisprudence. He simultaneously rejected the Mutazila School of theology and the philosophers whom he branded as unbelievers in his Tahafut Al-Falasifa (The incoherence of philosophers). According to Abu Zeid, the dissemination of Al-Ghazali's ideas, which appealed to the masses, played a crucial role in the inclination of Arab culture towards imitation. He also saw a connection between Al-Ghazali's theses, which came to dominate the realm of religious thought, and prevailing social and political structures. This observation continues to apply, to which testify the alliance between conservative religious thought and political despotism in the interest of obfuscating the truth and perpetuating the grip on power and wealth. After deconstructing the traditionalist text, which Abu Zeid discards as a "text", he turns to the Quranic text itself. This he subjects to the concept of historicity with the intent of demonstrating the dual nature of the religious text, in which divine and human elements intertwine. He further argues that a socio-historical analysis of the revelation phenomenon does not diminish the sanctity of the source of the revelation and that to understand the Quran as a linguistic structure and cultural mode is not to deny its divine aspect. In order to fully appreciate the Quranic message it is important to consider not only the speaker (God) but also whom He addresses (man) and its linguistic medium. In emphasising the historicity of the text, Abu Zeid by no means suggests that the text cannot speak to subsequent ages or other societies. A reading of the text in a later era, or in a different society, relies on two mutually complementary mechanisms: foregrounding and backgrounding. Societies in different times and places background or ignore textual elements that are not of essential significance to them, and foreground those that are. Both religious and non-religious texts are governed by such fixed laws. Nor does divine origin exempt a text from these laws once the text is "humanised", which is to say once it materialises historically and linguistically, and once its words and meanings are addressed to human beings in a particular historical setting. Like other texts, it is governed by the dialectic of immutability and change: it is immutable in what it says, variable in how it is understood. Only the Quranic text in its narrow sense remains aloof to this historical context. This quality Abu Zeid restricts to the unambiguous Quranic verses ( Al-muhkamat ), which are self-explanatory and are neither open to interpretation nor in need of it. It does not, in his opinion, apply to the ambiguous verses ( Al-mutashibihat ) and even less to the sunna. While this conception came as such a shock to the accepted convictions of contemporary religious discourse that it precipitated the famous campaign against Abu Zeid, it was not entirely new. We find echoes of his notion of the historicity of the text in the works of another prominent Arab thinker who also exercised his intellectual faculties from within the prevailing Arab-Islamic culture: Malek Bin Nabi. In The Quranic Phenomenon, the Algerian philosopher and historian addresses the phenomenon of tanjim, or the revelation of the Quran in instalments over various intervals. The Quran itself justifies this phenomenon, as for example when God says to the Prophet: "The unbelievers ask, 'Why was the Quran not revealed to him all at once?' It was sent thus so that we may keep your heart resolute. So we enunciated it in steps and distinctly." (Al-Furqan: 32) No one could imagine how the Quran could perform its function of demonstrating to Muslims divine care, strengthening their resolve and inspiring their spiritual betterment when its revelation was preceded by the battles of Hanin and Ahad. Why did its verses not explicitly honour this martyr or praise the sacrifice of that hero? What would it be like if they did not supply urgent consolation for every pain, reward for every sacrifice, hope after every defeat, and a lesson in humility after every victory? Bin Nabi responds, "If the Quran had been revealed in one go, it would have quickly become a silent holy word, a dead idea, a mere religious document, instead of a font of life in a nascent culture." Many share Nasr Abu Zeid's belief in the need to re-examine Islamic legacy, dismantle the authority of tradition, and subject contemporary religious discourse to scientific critique. Many others take issue with his narrow definition of what constitutes an unambiguous verse in the Quranic text. Yet such differences should have compelled Muslim scholars to engage him in debate in good faith, instead of isolating him and attacking him so as to obstruct the smooth access of his profound intellectual project into the stream of Arab culture. Perhaps what happened to Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, and to Ali Abdel-Razeq, Taha Hussein and Mohamed Khalafallah before him, not to mention their counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world, explains why the discourse of the modern Arab renaissance has remained so feeble and why the road for this revival has never been smooth throughout the two centuries of our modern awakening. The issues we need to contend with today (such as rationalism, democracy, modernism and the relationship with the other) are exactly as they stood at the beginning of the 20th century. Over time, our controversies and battles between antitheses have grown more complex and obdurate, as the consequence of the power of Arab culture to suppress every new idea in deference to the reign of the familiar, and prevailing custom, and to drown the voice of innovative thinkers in its arid wilderness. * The writer is a political analyst.
