Hisbah: A Historical Overview: Defending Dr. Nasr Abou Zeid

Authored by: Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour

Translated by: Dr. Marilyn Tadros

Edited and reviewed by: Ahmed Fathy

INTRODUCTION

Hisbah: A Historical Overview: Defending Dr. Nasr Hamid Abou Zeid

1- Dr. Nasr Hamid Abou Zeid (1943 – 2010) was an assistant professor in the Arabic Department, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, and he specialized in Islamic studies. In the 1990s, his case in Egyptian judiciary courts was a main episode in the Wahabism-Secularism struggle. Dr. Abou Zeid was persecuted by the terrorist MB group member, Dr. Abdel-Sabour Shaheen (1929 – 2010), who was a professor in Cairo University as well, who managed to prevent the promotion of Dr. Abou Zeid to become a professor and accused him of apostasy (or forsaking Islam) by suing him in court. Dr. Abou Zeid moved this intellectual conflict with Dr. Shaheen to the Egyptian press, and many debates ensued in the 1990s in Cairo about the struggle between secularism and Wahabism, until the conflict between both men moved from the academia circles to the Egyptian courts that declared Dr. Abou Zeid as an apostate. The Wahabis were intellectually defeated in all debates because the Quran contains no penalties at all to be exacted or enacted for apostasy or forsaking 'Islam'. The main figures of Wahabism in Egypt involved in such debates and sided with Dr. Shaheen were Dr. Ahmad Heikal, Dr. Muhammad Al-Beltagui, and Dr. Ismail Salem, and so many of the Wahabi (i.e., Salafists and MB members) Egyptian agents in Egyptian media and inside the judicial system and courts. Because the Egyptian Penal Code contains nothing at all about putting 'apostates' to death (as required in Sunnite religion sharia), the Wahabis managed to make use of a loophole in the Egyptian Law to punish Dr. Abou Zeid in a different way; since the Egyptian Law adopts the Abou Hanifa Sunnite doctrine regarding matters of religion, they managed to make the courts that declared Dr. Abou Zeid as an apostate (for allegedly defaming and insulting the Quran) issue another court ruling using the Hisbah concept (i.e., literally in Arabic, ''accountability'', a form of inspection and inquisition which means the assumed 'divinely' sanctioned duty of the ruler (government) to intervene and coercively impose 'good' and prevent 'wrong' as per Sunnite sharia) to separate him by forced divorce proceedings, without consent of both parties concerned, from his wife, Dr. Ibtihal Younis, as the Sunnite sharia laws prevent a Muslim woman from marrying a non-Muslim man. Since Dr. Abou Zeid was declared an apostate earlier, this forced divorce ruling was issued by the same court. Such forced divorce was a very serious precedent that indicated that the terrorist Wahabi MB members could anytime murder Dr. Abou Zeid and his wife, as she refused to leave her husband, and thus, to terrorize and intimidate all secular people and Quranists in Egypt by threatening them of accusations of apostasy using the Hisbah concept. Some Azharites (who were also Wahabi MB group members) demanded vociferously in public the execution of Dr. Abou Zeid, and he received death threats that led him, along with his wife, move to The Netherlands in 1995, where he worked as a professor of Islamic studies at Leiden University.              

2- The Wahabis won the war in courts, but were moralistically and intellectually defeated as we, Dr. A. S. Mansour, stood by Dr. Abou Zeid and refuted all the Wahabi claims regarding the so-called apostasy. The Wahabi MB group members could easily have defeated Dr. Abou Zeid intellectually, as he committed many big errors in his writings regarding the Quran (regarding it as a "cultural product", among other views of his so-called 'Quranic hermeneutics' field). Yet, we personally confronted and refuted claims of those Wahabi MB members and their trend from within Islam (i.e., Quranism) and NOT in the secular ways of Dr. Abou Zeid and his secular and Marxist supporters at the time. Their way of which we never have approved is summarized in the attempt to 'neutralize' the Quranic text, leaving ample room to attack and criticize the Quranic verses directly or indirectly.  

3- The Egyptian independent Marxist Cairo-based Al-Ahaly newspaper – which was popular and sold very well at the time – led the press campaign in defense of Dr. Abou Zeid within "the Abou Zeid Case", as Egyptian media called it in the 1990s. Dr. Shaheen, the foe and opponent of Dr. Abou Zeid, appeared many times in Egyptian TV channels and Egyptian media in general as if he were a star, and he was the Godfather of all Wahabis in Egypt who used his name, with his approval of course, to propagate the so-called 'Islamic' money-investment companies and the prohibition of banks' interests, which were the means to steal savings of many gullible Sunnite Egyptian citizens in an unprecedented crime of swindling that manipulated the name of Islam. At the time, our articles that refute the intellectual and theological basis of Wahabi money-investment companies and prove that the interests rates of bank are OK, based on our Quranist views, were published in the Cairo-based pro-government newspaper Al-Akhbar. We have grouped these articles in a book published, later on, on our website, titled "The Battle of Usury".       

4- Al-Ahaly newspaper used to publish our articles regularly, and journalists there asked us to join their seminar organized by the Marxist The National Progressive Unionist Party (or in Arabic, Hizb Al-Tagamoue, which owns the newspaper as well) to defend Dr. Abou Zeid and we readily agreed of course. We asked the journalists there to allow us some time to read some books of Dr. Abou Zeid and to meet personally with him. We were provided with three books authored by Dr. Abou Zeid, but after reading few pages of his book about the so-called 'moderate' attitude in religion of the scholar/imam Al-Shafei (one of the deities made 'holy' and 'infallible' in the Sunnite religion), we decided not to read anymore within this book. Upon reading the other two books, we disapproved of his views regarding the Quran as a "cultural product" and the so-called 'Quranic hermeneutics'. At the seminar, we met with Dr. Abou Zeid for the first and last time, at the headquarters of the Marxist Party. We asserted to him that he has justified in his book the doctrine and methodology of Al-Shafei just because of his being the opponent of the Umayyad caliphate and because the Umayyads persecuted him, and when he answered in the affirmative, we told him about the historical facts that Al-Shafei was born in 150 A.H., 18 years after the downfall and collapse of the Umayyad dynasty and caliphate, and he lived within the First Abbasid Era and died in 204 A.H. Looking surprised, Dr. Abou Zeid remained silent for few seconds before telling us that this was a misprint in his book, and he meant Al-Shafei was persecuted by the Abbasids. We asserted to him that this seemingly unintentional error is the basis of the whole book of his. We told him that we support his intellectual and religious freedom and his freedom of thought and expression and that we are against his intellectual foes that hate and limit such freedoms. In addition, we have participated in this seminar by defending Dr. Abou Zeid and his freedom while asserting our disapproval of his ideas in general. The seminar proved a success and its reverberations reached all Egyptian media after its being published in full detail in Al-Ahaly newspaper.      

5- Strangely, the intellectual foes of Dr. Abou Zeid (i.e., the Wahabis) never noticed before the errors of Dr. Abou Zeid regarding historical facts, and yet, after the seminar, they copied our criticism of his ideas; as the MB Azharite sheikh Muhammad Al-Ghazaly attacked ideas of Dr. Abou Zeid (in an article titled "The Little Apostate" referring to Dr. Abou Zeid, in the pro-MB newspaper Al-Mukhtar Al-Eslami) by copying our criticism verbatim regarding views of Dr. Abou Zeid regarding the ideas and the lifetime of Al-Shafei.

6- We continued to defend Dr. Abou Zeid during his intellectual struggle against the Wahabi MB members within our articles published in Al-Ahaly newspaper. Our defending him using the Quran itself to prove the Quranic principles of religious freedom and freedom of thought and expression has refuted the claims and intellectual grounds of Wahabis and exposed their enmity toward Quranic facts of Islam, especially our published research titled "Freedom of Opinion between Islam and Muslims" (later on, we replaced the word ''Muslims'' with the term ''Muhammadans'' when we published this research online, to indicate followers of the Sunnite, Shiite, and Sufi religions that have nothing to do with Islam). Wahabis who felt defeated intellectually had nothing left to do except to resort to the Egyptian courts that declared Dr. Abou Zeid as an apostate and later on issued a ruling to separate him from his wife without his or her consent. This led us later on to author our book titled "Penalty of Apostasy", which refutes the Wahabi claim that Islam (the Quran alone) includes any punishment for those forsaking or rejecting Islam as a faith. 

7- Meanwhile, secular and Marxist thinkers focused their endeavors at the time to defend views of Dr. Abou Zeid and to publish many editions of his books, and we have delivered our speech in another seminar in another cultural center (called Al-Nidaa Al-Jadeed, or ''The New Call'' in English), about the concept of the Quranic interpretation in the Quran itself in contrast to the same concept held by Shiites, Sunnites, and Wahabis as well as by Dr. Abou Zeid, while refuting their concepts that contradicts the Quranic one about interpretation. This speech and the book on the Quranic concept of Quranic interpretation are published later on our website of course. We have asserted in this speech and this book that freedom of expression and the freedom of belief and thought are absolute freedoms in Islam and part of rights and higher values granted by God in the Quran to all people, and we have proved from the Quranic verses how these freedoms do NOT at all imply inability of intellectual confrontation or refutation, but actually reinforce and support freedom of everyone to peacefully refute and criticize any thought or set of ideas.         

8- We have found within our old papers a photocopy of this book on Hisbah in Arabic along with this English translation, rendered by Dr. Marilyn Tadros in the 1990s. We publish here on our website the English translation after its being revised and edited.  

Signature:

Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour

4^th of March, 2017

Fairfax, VA, USA