from Islam to follow rival prophets. After success-
fully prosecuting these wars, he authorized the
sending of Muslim and arab tribal armies into
Syria and Iraq, thus inaugurating the first Muslim
conquests outside the Arabian Peninsula. The first
collection of the Quran in written form was also
initiated at his order.
See also aUthority; caliphate; fitna.
Further reading: Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the
Age of the Caliphates (London: Longman, 1985); Wil-
ferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of
the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
Abu Hanifa See hanaFi legal school.
Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid (1943– )
influential Egyptian intellectual who was forced
to leave his native Egypt because of his secularist
approach to interpreting the Quran and other
Islamic texts
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born in a small village
near Tanta, a city in egypt’s Nile Delta. His father
was a grocer, and his mother was the daughter of
a professional qUran reciter. He graduated from
technical school in 1960 and worked as an electri-
cian in a government ministry. In 1968, he moved
to Cairo and enrolled at Cairo University, where
he obtained a B.A. degree in Arabic language and
literatUre four years later. He earned a masters
degree and a doctorate (1980) in Islamic studies
from the same institution. Abu Zayd’s master’s
thesis was on the Mutazili interpretation of the
Quran, and his doctoral dissertation was about the
famous Sufi mUhyi al-din ibn al-arabi (d. 1240)
and his mystical interpretations of the Quran. His
first academic appointment was to the Depart-
ment of Arabic Studies at Cairo University. His
published works deal with the modern interpreta-
tions of the Quran, Islamic law, Ibn al-Arabi, and
women’s rights. He has studied and taught in the
United States, Japan, and the Netherlands, where
he has been a professor of Arabic and Islamic
studies at Leiden University since 1995.
The main reason Abu Zayd left Egypt in 1995
was that his secular theories about how to inter-
pret sacred Islamic texts upset influential Muslim
conservatives who then caused such a public
uproar in the media that he felt his life was in dan-
ger. His fears were justified, because Farag Foda, a
leading critic of political Islam in Egypt, had been
assassinated in 1992 because of his views, and
Egyptian Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz
had barely escaped a fatal stabbing in 1994. Abu
Zayd’s trouble began in 1992, when he submitted
his publications to a tenure review committee at
Cairo University. Despite very positive evalua-
tions, the committee recommended that he not be
granted tenure, which sparked a national debate
over academic freedom and defending Islam and
Egypt from the threat of secular values. An influ-
ential member of the tenure committee, who also
preached at a major mosque in Old Cairo, accused
Abu Zayd of “intellectual terrorism” and said that
his works were a “Marxist-secularist attempt to
destroy Egypt’s society” (Najjar, 179). Aside from
minor technical flaws, what really upset Abu
Zayd’s critics was his liberal secularist approach
to reading Islamic literature. He argued that in the
modern period Muslim extremists and authoritar-
ians promoted misguided understandings about
Islam as eternal truths that cannot be disputed. He
concluded that such notions were self-serving and
did not stand up to the light of rational analysis.
A small group of closed-minded zealots, therefore,
were preventing foundational Islamic texts such
as the Quran and hadith from being debated and
understood in terms of context, historical change,
and universal values. In an unprecedented action,
Abu Zayd’s opponents took his case to court and
were able to convince the Cairo Appeals Court,
backed by the Egyptian Supreme Court, to rule
that he was an apostate (a Muslim who had aban-
doned his religion), and because of this he could
no longer remain married to his wife, Ibtihal.K 10 Abu Hanifa