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 inter...