In 1926, Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razeq found himself in real trouble because of his small, yet influential book Al-Islam Wa Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Principles of Government). The
In 1926, Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razeq found himself in real trouble because of his small, yet influential book Al-Islam Wa Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Principles of Government). The book came under heavy attack from Islamic scholars, and was consequently confiscated by the Egyptian authorities. Abdel-Razeq was accused of being an infidel, defrocked of his al-Azhar Alamiya degree, dismissed from his scholarly position at al-Azhar, and forced to stay out of the public eye until his death.
The following year, 1927, Taha Hussein—today acknowledged as the doyen of Arabic literature and one of the most prominent figures of the Egyptian renaissance and enlightenment movement which emerged in the 20th century—faced a situation similar to Abdel-Razeq’s because of his book Fil-Shier al-Gahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry). He was harshly attacked in religious circles in Egypt and was accused in the media and in court of being an infidel, but was later acquitted. The huge psychological pressure to which he was exposed compelled him to delete four chapters of the original book, rewrite a large portion of the rest, and republish it under a new name: Fil-Adab al-Gahili (On Pre-Islamic Literature).
Continued tradition
Even before Abdel-Razeq and Hussein, the 1903 book Ibn Rushd wa Falsafatuhu (Ibn Rushd and his Philosophy) by Farah Antoun came under fire because it depicted the ideas of this Muslim philosopher as the foundations of modern secular thought. Antoun was obliged to shut down Al-Gamia, the newspaper he published.
The tradition of accusing intellectuals of infidelity and branding their books as anti-Islamic has gone on uninterrupted to the present day. In 1978, there were demands before the People’s Assembly to burn such classics as Alf Leila Wa Leila (The Thousand and One Nights) and Al Fotouhat al-Mekkiya (The Meccan Illuminations) by the great 13th-century Sufi Mohieddin Ibn Arabi, on the grounds that they included ‘immoral’ passages. A court resolution, however, ruled that heritage may not be judged according to present-day values, and the books were not banned.
The 1980s witnessed mass confiscation of books and literary works by the State, according to rulings by the Islamic Research Academy (IRA), a subordinate of the venerable, topmost Sunni Islamic authority in Egypt and the Islamic World: al-Azhar. Abdel-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1985 Al-Hussein Tha’iran. Al-Hussein Shaheedan (Al-Hussein, a Revolutionary and Martyr), Mahmoud Ismail’s 1987 Sociologiat al-Fikr al-Islami (Sociology of Islamic Thought), and Louis Awad’s 1993 Muqadima fi Fiqh al-Lugha al-Arabiya (Introduction to the Doctrine of the Arabic Language) all met that fate.
In 1989, the book Allah Wahid Fil-Thalouth al-Qodous (God is One in a Holy Trinity) by Father Zakariya Boutros was confiscated, even though it had been in circulation since 1965.
Political vs religious
The law 102 of 1985 restricted the role of the IRA to censoring works related to Qur’an and Sunnah. Even so, this role expanded to encompass books that tackle historical and intellectual issues related to Islam. The most prominent example is Anwar al-Guindy’s Al-Islam wal-Qarn al-Higri al-Khamis Ashar (Islam and the 15th century of the Hijra) which was confiscated following a recommendation by al-Azhar. Later, the court ruled against the confiscation after it was proved that the move was based on political rather than religious grounds.
In February 1988, the Research and Translation Administration at the IRA issued a resolution to confiscate books from the Cairo International Book Fair and ban them from circulation. The list included Hassan Hamed, Mohamed Abdel-Azim Ali, and Abdel-Fattah Yehia Kamel’s 1993 Muwagahat al-Fikr al-Mutatarif fil-Islam (Confrontations of the Radical Views in Islam); Khaled al-Anbari’s Qadiyat al-Hukm bi-Ghayr ma Anzal Allah (The Case of Ruling Against What God Has Divulged); and Safwat Hassan Lutfi’s 1987 Fitnat al-Asr al-Hadith—Tatbeeq al-Shari’a al-Islamiya bayn al-Haqiqa wa Shiarat al-Fitna (Modern-day Sedition—Implementing Islamic Law Between Truth and Sedition Slogans).
That same year, security officers raided the office of the publisher of Rasaa’il Juhayman al-Utaibi (Juhayman al-Utaibi’s Letters) to confiscate the book and take it out of circulation, according to a verbal statement issued by the IRA. Juhayman al-Utaibi was a radical Saudi religious activist and militant who led the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in1979. The siege lasted two weeks and ended after Special Forces raided the mosque and arrested al-Utaibi and his followers. Juhayman’s justification was that the house of Saud had lost legitimacy through corruption and imitation of the West. He and the surviving insurgents were beheaded in 1980.
Assassinating the ‘infidels’
The nineties coincided with the rise of radical Islamic currents, and witnessed a fierce wave of chasing and incriminating the followers of liberal thought, basing on charges of apostasy. It started with the assassination of the secular intellectual Farag Fouda in 1990, and went all the way to the attempted assassination of Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz in October 1994.
Dr Fouda, a prominent secular thinker, ardently defended freedom of thought and faith, and the rights of minorities, and refuted the thought of political Islam. He was assassinated in June 1990, a few days after a seminar at al-Azhar issued a statement which amounted to a flagrant license to kill him, since it branded him as a non-believer and an enemy of Islam. After the assassination, a spokesman of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya announced that they had carried out the “lawful penalty” suggested by the bill of indictment of al-Azhar.
Also in the 1990s, Nasr Hamed Abu-Zeid, then assistant professor in the Arabic language department at Cairo University, was deprived of his right to promotion to professor because of the [liberal] ideas expressed in his researches. His liberal theology was pronounced by al-Azhar scholars as an “affront to Islam”. A wide defamation campaign was directed against him in newspapers and mosques, and a sentence was issued to separate him from his [Muslim] wife on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man. Dr Abu-Zeid left the country together with his wife, and lived in self-exile in Holland. He only returned to Egypt in 2010, and died in July that year of a rare infection he had contracted on a visit to Indonesia three weeks earlier, which doctors said crept to the brain.
Nobel laureate
The attempted assassination of Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz took place in October 1994 when a member of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya stabbed him in the neck. The writer had been facing a fierce campaign which supported the banning of his novel Awlad Haretna (Children of the Alley). The campaign reached its peak after Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman issued a fatwa condemning him to death as an infidel and for failing to atone for the novel, which was written and confiscated more than 35 years earlier. When his assailant was asked by the court whether he had read Awlad Haretna, he answered in the negative; his attempt to kill Mahfouz had been based on the fatwa, he said.
In 1994, a committee from the Islamic Research Academy directly seized a number of books from the Cairo International Book Fair. This act violated the freedom of opinion and expression, which is a basic human right, and assaulted the constitution and the law, including the law of al-Azhar itself. Among these books were five written by the judge Mohamed Saïd al-Ashmawy: Usoul al-Sharia (Rules of Islamic law) published in 1979; Al-Islam al-Siasi (Political Islam), 1987; Al-Riba Wal-Faeda fil-Islam (Usury and Interest in Islam), 1988; Al-Khilafa al-Islamiya (The Islamic Caliphate) and Maalem al-Islam ( The Characteristics of Islam), both published in 1990.
Also confiscated by the same committee were Qanabil wa Massahif (Bombs and Qur’ans) by writer and journalist Adel Hammouda, published in 1985, and Khalf al-Hijab – Mawqif al-Gamaat al-Islamiya min Qadiyat al-Mar’a (Behind the Veil – The Stance of Islamist Groups on Women’s Issues) by Sanaa’ al-Masri, published in 1989.
Space in a man’s mind
Earlier, in March 1990, the censorship police had confiscated the novel Masafa fi Akl Ragul (Space in a Man’s Mind) by Alaa Hamed, based on a warrant issued by al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy. The secretary-general of the Academy demanded the trial of the writer, claiming that his book included “atheism, apostasy and denial of religions”. The novel had been published in 1988 and was distributed by al-Ahram establishment.
In December 25, 1991, the State Security Court sentenced the writer Alaa Hamed to eight years’ imprisonment and fined him EGP2,500 on the charge that his novel constituted a threat to national unity and social peace. The trial lacked the minimal legal guarantees; the judge did not even allow the lawyers to defend their case. Sentences were also issued against Mohamed Madbouli and Fathy Fadl on the charge of publishing and printing the novel.
The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) sent a petition to the then Prime Minister Atef Sidky to lift the prison sentences which constituted a violation of literary creativity and the freedom of opinion and expression. The petition was rejected in the case of Hamed, but the sentence on the publisher Madbouli was lifted for humanitarian reasons.
In 1990, the censorship police confiscated Ghareeb fi Wadi al-Molouk (Stranger in the Valley of the Kings) by Ahmed Osman following a request issued by al-Azhar. This book discussed in reportage style the issue raised in Egypt concerning the discovery of a skeleton which was thought to belong to the Biblical character of Joseph.
State security join in
At the same time that al-Azhar and radical Islamic currents were confiscating freedom of thought and creativity, the State security apparatus was confiscating books that criticised the ruling regime, or were considered a threat to national security. Among these books were Rifaat Sayed Ahmed’s Al-Nabi al-Musallah (The Armed Prophet) and Al-Islamboly wa Ru’ya Gadida li-Tantheem al-Jihad (Al-Islamboly and a New Vision of al-Jihad Organisation). The former examines the evolution of Islamist groups in Egypt, while the latter unveils details of the assassination of President Sadat. Both books were confiscated and banned from circulation in 1991.
Also banned was Limatha Naqoul La li Mubarak fil-Estefta’ al-Ri’assy al-Qadem (Reasons for Saying No to Mubarak in the Coming Referendum) by Helmy Murad and Adel Hussein, and Omar Abdel-Rahman al-Zilzal Allazi Haz al-Alam (Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Earthquake that Shook the World) by Essam Kamel Ahmed. This was confiscated on allegations of adopting and promoting extremist ideas, offending the state security apparatus and questioning its patriotism. In reality, the book traces the rise of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya in Egypt and its connection to the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1970s to the present.
Limaza Namqut al-Yahood (Why Do We Hate Jews?) was written by Ahmed Abdel-Azim Ibrahim, who was arrested by the State Security Investigations in August 1994. The book was confiscated from the printing house and the author was accused of joining an illegitimate group and possessing leaflets calling for the deactivation of the constitution. In reality, the book contained a criticism of the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, and recounted the history of the Jews.
WATANI International
15 July 2012