Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd - Critique of Religious Discourse

Critique of Religious Discourse

World Thought in Translation

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Series editors

Steven Angle

Andrew March

Ian Shapiro

Critique of Religious Discourse

Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

Translated by Jonathan Wright

With a Scholarly Introduction by Carool Kersten

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London

This publication was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

Introduction and English translation copyright 2018 by Yale University.

Originally published as Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini in 1990 by Dar al-Thaqafa al Jadida. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942336

ISBN 978-0-300-20712-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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Contents

, by Carool Kersten

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

An Introduction to His Life and Work

Carool Kersten

It is not often that a relatively obscure academic specializing in the literary study of sacred scriptures comes to the attention of audiences beyond that of the select and erudite company of his or her peers. But this is exactly what happened to the author of this book, the late Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (19432010). When, in the early 1990s, a dispute about his promotion to full professor at the University of Cairo exploded into a full-blown political scandal, it did not just turn him into a scholarly cause clbre; sadly, it also eventually forced Abu Zayd into exile abroad. His advocacy of subjecting the Quran to rigorous scholarly investigation using innovative methods and techniques of textual criticism and discourse analysis

In this he has not been alone: Abu Zayd is part of a group of contemporary intellectuals from the Arabic-speaking part of the Muslim world known as the turthiyyn, or heritage thinkers. This strand of Islamic thinking developed in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the traumatic outcome of the 1967 war between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries.of the Afghan mujahideen to the invading Soviet Army. They became further emboldened when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by members of a violent Islamist cell after he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Islamist organizations, including the mass movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, rally around the slogan al-Islam huwa al-hall (Islam is the solution), presenting it as a totaland totalitarianway of life. By contrast, the heritage thinkers have a very different comprehensive understanding of Islam. Instead of presenting Islam as a political instrument, they celebrate it as a civilization with important and wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and artistic achievements that should inspire Muslims to reassert themselves. For that purpose, the heritage thinkers encourage a critical examination of the Islamic legacy: interrogating dominant discourses, challenging the hegemonic orthodoxy, and protesting the repression of so-called heresies. In this they are helped by a double intellectual genealogy: intimate familiarity with the Islamic tradition combined with solid knowledge of the advances made in the humanities and social sciences in the Western academe.

Pioneered by intellectuals like Zaki Naguib Mahmud and Mahmoud Amin al-Alem, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd belonged to a younger generation that rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, which also included the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, his Egyptian colleague Hasan Hanafi, and the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun. Except for Arkoun, who writes mainly in French and English, the works of the others are almost exclusively available in Arabic and therefore are by and large unknown to the wider public without knowledge of that language. The present integral translation of one of

The Life Story of an Exilic Intellectual

Originating from the village of Quhafa near Tanta in the Nile Delta, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was the archetypal son of Egypt. He was raised in a pious peasant family, although his father was not a farmer but a shopkeeper. In line with family tradition, Nasr was sent to the Quran School, the kuttb, which offered basic religious instruction revolving around memorizing the Quran. A talented pupil, Abu Zayd had by the age of eight mastered the Quran and become a hfidha person who knows and can recite the whole text by heart. In his autobiography, Abu Zayd relates how this experience taught him the appeal of recitation, because the written text cant quite capture the aesthetic, let alone the sensory, aspects of the Quran. Turning the Quran into an acoustic work of art also affirmed to Abu Zayd that a religion without the physical experience of ritual is no more than a mental construct. However, he also ventures the opinion that this may contribute to an explanation for the fear harbored by many Muslims regarding text-critical engagements with the Qurana worry Abu Zayd never shared.

Abu Zayds later education did not follow the conventional trajectory of modern Egypt. By the time he had memorized the Quran, he was too old to be enrolled in a state primary school. Also his father did not want him to continue a religious education, since it could potentially take up to the age of thirty to earn the highest credentials from Al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo. So instead, Nasr Abu Zayd completed his primary education at a private Coptic school, which was not considered that unusual, becauseon the village level, anywayrelations between Muslims and Copts had always been cordial. Only in 1956 did he enter a secular state school, where he quickly passed the junior high school exams. However, Abu Zayds father rejected his ambition to prepare for the state examinations that could secure him admission to university in order to study humanitiesmore specifically, Arabic. With his father insisting that his son learn a trade, Abu Zayd began training as a radio technician. When his father died just a year later, the fourteen-year-old now faced responsibility for looking after his mother and four younger siblings. After scraping through three years of training, in 1960 he was hired by the Ministry of Communications, where he would work for the next twelve years.

Not wanting to give up on his dream of studying Arabic, Abu Zayd continued to read voraciously. This also included the works of Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed by the Nasser regime. His childhood membership in the Young Lions, the Brotherhoods scout movement, and his general sympathy for the movement notwithstanding, Abu Zayd never joined the Brotherhood. While he developed doubts about the hardening of Qutbs viewpoints, in particular the totalitarianism underlying his principle of