Seventeen years after Egyptian Islamists decided his religious views were suspect, Nasr Abu Zayd is still paying the price. Arriving in Kuwait last week with a valid visa, he was turned away at the airport on the orders of the State Security department.

He had been due to give two lectures at the Kuwaiti Tanweer ("Enlightenment") Centre – one on religious reform, the other on women and the Qur'an. It is thought that the interior minister had succumbed to pressure from Islamist MPs not to allow him into the country.

Abu Zayd then travelled to Cairo to attend a conference but was barred from entering the Journalists' Syndicate building where the event was being held. The Egyptian daily, al-Masri al-Youm reports:

According to Mohamed Abdel Qoddous, head of the syndicate's freedoms committee, the order to bar Abu Zayd from syndicate premises was issued last year. "Only the syndicate president can rescind the order, but he's out of town," said Abdel Qoddous, without explaining why the order had been issued in the first place."

In 1992, Abu Zayd – who was then 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 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. The Cairo appeals court eventually declared his 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 went 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 "ex-wife" left Egypt and settled in the Netherlands, where he took up a professorial post at the University of Leiden.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 24 December 2009.