Author : Nadia Oweidat
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0197744109
Reform and Its Perils in Contemporary Islam by Nadia Oweidat Pdf
"Who speaks for Islam? What role, if any, does scholarship play in defining the contours of Islamic law and theology? Are all Muslims equal in their right to interpret the Quran? The answers to these questions bear on both intellectual and practical concerns across the globe. For centuries, only specialized scholars and jurists ulama could adjudicate matters related to Islamic theology and jurisprudence. However, with the advent of modernity and mass education, the ulama have lost much of their exclusive interpretive control to an ever-widening group of intellectuals, academics, and even activists. The ramifications of this shift in authority gained global attention in 1995, when Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010), an Egyptian scholar of Islamic thought at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Cairo University as well as a practicing Muslim, was declared an apostate by the Egyptian Court of Appeals. Beyond earning Abu Zayd international fame, however, this declaration had serious consequences for his life and his career. Since the punishment for apostasy in the Islamic tradition is the death penalty, Abu Zayd's life was in danger. Furthermore, his marriage to his wife, Ebtehal Younes, a professor of French literature at Cairo University, was annulled by the court, as a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim man. Younes equated the ruling with rape. Abu Zayd's experience of the highly publicized trial and the slander that accompanied it only strengthened his conviction that intellectual freedom is a prerequisite for progress"--
