Reform and Its Perils in Contemporary Islam

The Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010) was one of the 20th century's foremost Islamic modernists. A professor of Islamic thought in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Cairo University, as well as a practising Muslim, Abu Zayd became well known in Egypt and beyond when the Egyptian Court of Appeals declared him an apostate in 1995, a judgment that, in mainstream interpretations of Islamic law, can carry the death penalty. To protect his life and that of his wife, Abu Zayd fled to the Netherlands, a victim of "intellectual terrorism" carried out by the forces of religious extremism.

Reform and Its Perils in Contemporary Islam offers an intellectual history and critical analysis of Abu Zayd's work. Abu Zayd believed there could be a positive relationship between modernity and Islam. He sought to reinterpret central aspects of the Islamic tradition to render them more conducive to modern conceptions of religion, society, and politics. Nadia Oweidat situates this prominent Muslim scholar both within his modernist intellectual milieu and in opposition to his numerous critics, elucidating and providing summary translations of Arabic texts that, until now, have remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Abu Zayd's fate, Oweidat argues, illustrates the hostility faced by modernist intellectuals who attempt to subject the Islamic tradition to academic scrutiny.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of the most courageous, and controversial, Arab intellectuals of the late twentieth century. His ideas about the textual status and meaning of the Qur??an were so challenging to his Egyptian academic contemporaries that they provoked one of the most globally notorious scandals about free speech and the limits of academic inquiry of the past decades. Yet, despite his many years of exile in Europe and the international renown of his ideas and l'affaire Abu Zayd, there has, remarkably, been no book-length study of his intellectual career. Until now. Nadia Oweidat's Reform and Its Perils in Contemporary Islam is not only the first such book but is remarkable for its breadth and subtlety. It will remain the standard work on Abu Zayd indefinitely.

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