Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

Works

• 1990The Concept of the Text

  A study of the classical Qur’anic sciences: the Qur’an is a message in the Arabic language and culture of its time, and the text and its culture shaped each other.

• 1992Critique of Religious Discourse

  Islamists and the religious establishment share assumptions: they identify their interpretation with the text itself and claim to speak in God’s name; the book became central in the case against him.

Position

Abu Zayd’s work started from the claim that the Qur’an is a text: a message from God, but one communicated in human language, in Arabic, to a particular society, and therefore subject to the rules of language and interpretation. In “The Concept of the Text” (1990) he showed how the classical Qur’anic sciences had themselves dealt with the historical setting of revelation, and argued that the text was shaped by its culture and in turn reshaped it. He drew on the Mutazilite doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an, on modern linguistics and on hermeneutics; an essay of 1981 introduced Arabic readers to the hermeneutic tradition from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, and he adopted E. D. Hirsch’s distinction between meaning (mana) and significance (maghza). His “Critique of Religious Discourse” (1992) analysed the shared assumptions of the Islamist movement and the religious establishment, above all the identification of their own interpretation with religion itself. In his later work he spoke of the Qur’an as a set of discourses rather than a single text and called for a “humanistic hermeneutics”. He always described himself as a believing Muslim; his case became a symbol of the struggle over freedom of research in the Arab world.

Life & context

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born on 10 July 1943 in Quhafa near Tanta in the Nile Delta. After a technical training he worked as a telecommunications technician while studying Arabic language and literature at Cairo University, where he graduated in 1972. His master’s thesis dealt with the rationalist Qur’anic interpretation of the Mutazila and his doctoral thesis (1981) with Ibn Arabi’s philosophy of interpretation. He taught at Cairo University and spent periods at the University of Pennsylvania and at Osaka University of Foreign Studies. In 1992 his promotion to full professor was blocked after a report accused his writings of unbelief. Islamist lawyers then sued for his separation from his wife, the literary scholar Ebtehal Younes, on the grounds that he was an apostate, and in 1995 an appeals court granted their claim. Facing threats to their lives, the couple moved to the Netherlands, where he taught at Leiden University and later held a chair in Utrecht. He died in Cairo on 5 July 2010 after an illness contracted on a journey.

Further main works

• The Rational Trend in Exegesis (al-Ittijāh al-ʿaqlī fī al-tafsīr, 1982)
• The Philosophy of Interpretation (Falsafat al-taʾwīl, 1983)
• Imam al-Shāfiʿī and the Foundation of the Ideology of the Middle Way (1992)
• Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics (2004)
• Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam (with Esther R. Nelson, 2004)