Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born on 10 July 1943 in a village near Tanta, Egypt, and died in Cairo on 5 July 2010. He studied and taught Arabic language and literature at Cairo University, with visiting positions in Japan and later in Europe.

In works such as The Concept of the Text (1990) and Critique of Religious Discourse he argued that the Qur’an, as a text revealed in a human language and historical context, should be studied with the tools of linguistics and hermeneutics, and he criticised the political uses of religious discourse. After his academic promotion was blocked, a Cairo court of appeal in 1995 declared him an apostate and ordered his marriage to Ibtihal Younis annulled. The couple left Egypt for the Netherlands, where he taught at Leiden and later held the Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam in Utrecht.