They Need to Get Rid of Some People

One measure of Egypt's current political dilemma is that, while the Interior Ministry and the state security prosecutor process arrestees through interrogation rooms, prisons, special courts, and the gallows, other parts of the legal system actively aid the partisans of the Islamist opposition. Egypt's Constitution declares that the Islamic shari‘a is the nation's main source of legislation. It should not be very surprising, then, when the courts issue rulings that appear to advance an Islamist cultural agenda. On 14 June 1995, an appeals court ruled that a controversial literary analysis of the Qur’an written by Cairo University professor Nasr Abu Zayd, implicitly questioned the book's divine origins, and therefore made Abu Zayd an apostate who could not legally be married to a Muslim woman under Egyptian personal status law. The court—acting on a two-year-old suit brought by Islamist lawyers—ruled that Abu Zayd should be separated from his wife. But once it issued its ruling, in effect declaring Abu Zayd an apostate in the eyes of the Egyptian state, former Parliament member Shaykh Yusuf al-Badri called on the state not only to remove him from his wife, but to execute him. Conversion from Islam to other religions has been construed as illegal by the courts, and according to some Muslims, the penalty for apostasy should be death. This notion was made famous, of course, by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 opinion that Anglo-Pakistani author Salman Rushdie was liable to execution for his alleged insults to Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses, and later by the 1992 assassination of Egyptian writer Farag Foda. One team of human rights lawyers seeking to appeal the Abu Zayd ruling withdrew after a month when al-Badri and one of the lawyers who had brought the original suit threatened to have them declared apostates as well.^[38] Abu Zayd's colleagues at Cairo University feel the intellectual chill, and have coined a new term for it: cultural terrorism. A meeting of faculty in July to organize a defense of Abu Zayd was broken up by the University Club president, and other faculty at the university have been told by their department chairs to alter sensitive parts of the curriculum to avoid criticism by Islamists.^[39]

Two years before this, in April 1993, Abu Zayd had been denied promotion to full professor because ‘Abd al-Subur Shahin, a colleague in the Arabic Language and Literature Department, and a member of the university's academic review committee, objected to portions of his work. In interviews with reporters, Abu Zayd suggested that the conflict would have remained restricted to the university except that Shahin denounced him from a mosque pulpit on 2 April, and by the following Friday mosques “all over the country” were repeating his charges. In terms eerily reminiscent of Sir Eldon Gorst, Abu Zayd explained that

such a situation could only have arisen within a context that involves the hammering home of a message by constant repetition before an illiterate audience, be that a real or cultural illiteracy. I would have liked to have been treated like the repentant terrorist who was given an opportunity to appear on television and talk to the nation. I would have liked to have been able to debate my views with whomever on television. But television has contrived to ignore my case. Yet, of course, the broadcast media open their doors wide to the discourse of all those who have declared me an apostate.^[40]

By this he does not mean the same people whom the state so assiduously hunts down in Upper Egyptian sugarcane fields—these are usually denied even mention on television and radio—but rather “moderates” like the Muslim Brotherhood and conservative sympathizers within and without the state's own religious establishment. In other interviews he has pointed out that while the state has been depending on “moderate” Islamists for support in marginalizing militant groups, it is precisely these moderates, who prefer to work for change through the courts and the Parliament, who opposed his promotion and sought to end his marriage, both tactics aimed at intimidating intellectuals in ways more subtle than that chosen by writer Farag Foda's assassins in 1992. “Silencing is at the heart of my case,” Abu Zayd told interviewers. “Expelling someone from the university is a way of silencing him. Taking someone away from his specialization is a way of silencing him. Killing someone is a way of silencing him. They need to get rid of some people.” ^[41]