Mahmud Muhammad Taha and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd
Critical Thinkers from the World of Islam
© Karel Peter Leonard Gerard Kersten
Sep 6, 2008
Muslim thinkers often fail to find a suitable forum to express their ideas, or face severe criticism and even outright persecution.
This Sudanese Muslim thinker and activist paid the ultimate price for his claim to intellectual freedom. When his early political activism led to his imprisonment in 1946, he used his captivity as a period of retreat, subjecting himself to religious contemplation in rigorous austerity. With this practice Taha placed himself firmly in the well-established Sufi tradition and he gained the honorific Ustâdh or ‘Teacher’.
Taha’s thought was suffused with a humanist concern for an individual’s relationship with society and with the universe. In his view, Islam ‘s teachings provide a solution for the apparent conflict between absolute individual freedom and complete social justice in society through the concept of tawhîd, God’s absolute unity. Opening up this ‘mystical horizon’ is the key to the reconciliation between the individual’s human right of freedom and the demands of society for social justice. It entails a proper execution of man’s duty towards himself and society.
Taha deviated from traditionalist interpretations of the Sacred Scripture by taking an evolutionary view of the Qur’an. He saw a progression; a living, endless process instead of a doctrinal body consisting of fixed dogmas. Presented as part of a Hegelian triad, with Judaism as thesis, Christianity as antithesis, and Islam as synthesis or an oscillation from the ‘material’ extreme of Mosaic law to the ‘spiritual’ extreme of Christianity, in which the pendulum finally comes to rest in the balanced position of Islam.
Taha took an inverse view of the division of the Qur’an in the so-called early Meccan revelations and the verses revealed to the Prophet Muhammad later in life, while living in Medina. In the traditional interpretations the Medina verses are considered more ‘advanced’ than the Meccan ones. Not so for Taha, who thought the often deeply mystical Meccan verses aimed too high for most of the early converts. They were therefore followed by more detailed guidelines for leading a moral life, thus disciplining the soul in preparation for embracing the more demanding earlier teaching. He argued that these Medinan revelations contained what he called the ‘first message’ of Islam, whereas the Meccan or ‘original’ revelations embody the ‘second message’.
When expressing this view in a book entitled The Second Message of Islam, he ran into direct conflict with the orthodox establishment. Taha claimed that the subsidiary Medinan revelations were no longer relevant for present-day Muslims, backing up his argument by referring to regulations regarding issues which he considered obsolete in contemporary society: slavery, gender inequality, and Jihad. Charged with heresy and apostasy, in 1968, the Muslim Brotherhood convicted him in absentia of apostasy, but it was powerless to enforce the verdict. However, the coup by fundamentalist army officers in 1983 became Taha’s undoing, and he was condemned t death and executed in 1985.
When the Arabist and literary scholar Abu Zayd suggested to use literary criticism in examining the Qur’an, his proposals received a very hostile reception. In the 1980s and 1990s, qualifying the Qur’an as a ‘text’ was deemed unacceptable by both the religious establishment and fundamentalist organisations. In 1993 they resolved to silence Abu Zayd by filing a charge of apostasy against him. Based on that allegation a forced divorce from his wife was also demanded. When finally, during the 1995 appeal, a guilty verdict was pronounced, Abu Zayd-–in the meantime about to be promoted to full professor at Cairo University-–considered it expedient to go into exile. Being declared an apostate, now with legal backing, made him a virtual a outlaw. A similar pronouncement in 1992 had led to the assassination of the liberal writer Farag Foda. Abu Zayd was given sanctuary at Leiden University in the Netherlands and has been there ever since.
Cases like these show why intra-faith dialogue is often more acutely required than interfaith dialogue. As the historian of Islam Marshall Hodgson once observed:
It is often far easier for congenial temperaments to understand each other across the lines of religious and cultural tradition than it is for contrasting temperaments to make sense of each other’s faith even when they follow the same cult and utter the same creed.
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