Nasr Abu Zayd, one of the leading liberal Islamic thinkers, died in Egypt yesterday at the age of 66. (Reports: Reuters and al-Masry al-Youm.) In the 1990s, he was at the centre of a notorious "hesba" divorce case after being targeted by Islamists.

The trouble started when Abu Zayd, who was teaching Arabic literature at Cairo University, applied for a professorial post and the Standing Committee of Academic Tenure and Promotion considered three reports on his work. Two reports were favourable but the third, prepared by the Islamist Dr Abdel-Sabour Shahin, questioned the orthodoxy of Abu Zayd's religious beliefs and claimed that his research contained "clear affronts to the Islamic faith". The committee then rejected his promotion by seven votes to six.

Not content with that, Shahin later wrote an article for an opposition newspaper accusing Abu Zayd of apostasy. This in turn inspired a group of Islamist lawyers to file a lawsuit at the end of 1993, seeking to divorce him from his wife, on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate. In 1994, a court in Giza threw out the case but in 1995 the Cairo appeals court then reversed its decision, declaring the marriage null and void.

"After the verdict was handed down, I was accompanied by a police guard at every step," Abu Zayd told al-Ahram Weekly. "My last visit to Cairo University after that was to take part in debating a PhD dissertation in the Faculty of Arts, Islamic Studies branch. The university was turned into a military fortress to protect me. The question was, 'Will the university be able to take these measures every time I go there to teach?' It was impossible to teach like this and, at the same time, I could not imagine not teaching. 

"On the way home, I told [my wife], 'This is not going to work out.' She nodded ... When some of our neighbours asked our guards why they were with us, they responded, 'because of the kafir [the infidel]'."

In July 1995 Abu Zayd and his wife flew to Madrid for a conference and decided not to return to a life under siege in Egypt. They settled in the Netherlands, where he took up a professorial post at the University of Leiden. Although continuing to live and work in exile, he had made various trips to Egypt in recent years.

I met him in Leiden two years ago, to interview him for my book, What's Really Wrong with the Middle East. He told me then that he believed the Islamist campaign against him had also had backing from the Egyptian government: "It's very hard to make the distinction. It was not from the government as an official body, but the Islamist who made the case was part of the ruling party ... The entire affair came out of the university, and the university is a government institution."

His alleged "affronts to the Islamic faith" were not the whole story, he said. There was a political dimension too because he had been analysing the way presidents made use of religion. He explained:

Sadat [president of Egypt from 1970 to 1981] wanted to have his own legacy. He wanted to fight against Nasserism and to fight against socialism and communism. It's well known he had to make a pact with Islamism. His discourse - if you saw how Sadat liked to look - with jallabiyya[AW1],[Unp2] with the sebha [prayer beads] most of the time ... He was a man of everything but he presented himself as "the believing president" (al-ra'is al-mu'min). It's very very important, this kind of symbolism. Nasser was just Nasser, the president, and when Sadat presented himself as the mu'min [believer] it meant Nasser was not mu'min. It was a game.

My real crime in Egypt was that most of the time I was busy analysing this discourse. In analysing religious discourse I did not mean the people who are in al-Azhar, I meant religious discourse in politics: the speeches of the president and how the president started his speeches by quoting the Qur'an, ended his speeches by quoting the Qur'an, presenting himself as something like the Mahdi, the imam. Whether he was a good Muslim or not, this was the discourse.