A recent landmark ruling -- long overdue -- of the Administrative Court essentially defends free expression on matters of religion, writes Salah Eissa After three years of winning the State Merit Award in Social Sciences, Hassan Hanafi and Sayed El-Qimni, two of our top writers on Islam, had their awards challenged in court. The individuals who challenged the awards belong, as you may expect, to the ultraconservative brand of Islam. They claimed in a lawsuit that both writers have flouted the proper thinking of Islam, challenged its talents, and were irreverent towards the faith. Thankfully, the Administrative Court of the Egyptian State Council threw out the case. In a landmark ruling handed down two weeks ago, the court found the decision by the culture minister to grant Hanafi and El-Qimni the award was flawless and devoid of any hint of impropriety. The decision went through the usual procedure, met with standard protocols, and was not defective in any manner. The court added, in the same ruling, that the plaintiffs made groundless allegations while asking for the awards to be annulled. This is not the first time ultraconservatives challenge intellectual work on the grounds of presumed ungodliness. The practice is now a century or so old, at least. In 1908, Mansour Fahmi, a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, wrote a thesis about the marriage customs of Islam. Critics immediately claimed that he was insulting the Prophet Mohamed. Their protests forced the Egyptian University to reverse its recognition of his doctorate. In 1925, Sheikh Ali Abdel-Razek published Islam and the Principles of Government (Al-Islam wa Osul Al-Hokm), a groundbreaking work exploring the modern interpretations of Islamic thinking. The author was immediately dragged before Al-Azhar's Senior Ulema Committee (Hayaat Kebar Al-Ulema), which annulled his academic title. The crisis was so divisive that the ruling coalition of the time was forced to disband. In 1946, Mohamed Khalafallah Ahmed submitted a thesis to the Faculty of Letters at Cairo University on "The Literary Aspects of Quranic Tales". In this thesis, he argued that Quranic tales are better understood as moral stories rather than exact history. He was about to be dismissed from his job, had it not been for the timely intervention by playwright Tawfik El-Hakim, who had him excise the offending chapters. Hanafi and El-Qimni can rest assured they are in good company. The two men, among the most innovative of our religious thinkers, face the same backlash from people who want our faith to stagnate and ossify. Hanafi, a professor of philosophy at Cairo University, is author -- among other things -- of From Faith to Revolution, a book of unquestioned scholarship, and one from which his detractors quoted several sentences, usually out of context, to prove him guilty of offending the faith. El-Qimni, who authored such mind provoking works as Prophet Ibrahim and the Unknown History, God of Times, Myth and Heritage and The Hashemite Party, is a man who doesn't flinch from confrontation. Unlike Hanafi, who feels comfortable ignoring his critics, El-Qimni takes them on in his articles as well as in public debates, exposing their simplistic ideas and challenging their outmoded convictions. The men behind the lawsuit are Youssef El-Badri, a hardline Salafi preacher, and Tharwat El-Kharbawi, a lawyer. El-Badri prides himself in having filed dozens of lawsuits against writers, artists and intellectuals. Since the early 1980s, he has demanded films be confiscated, television series be taken off the air, books be banned, and even film posters be removed from advertising boards. His argument is always the same: that the intellectual and artistic works in question are immoral, ungodly and non-Islamic. El-Kharbawi, who was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood until he resigned over "organisational" differences, claims to be a defender of the freedom of expression. No action of his, so far, seems to justify this claim. The court found that the two men, El-Badri and El-Kharbawi, misquoted the two authors in question or twisted their words, providing malicious interpretation of their thoughts and offering an unfair assessment of their views. In fact, the court stated, Hanafi spoke of the ability of Islam to adapt to modern situations, arguing that Islamic texts are capable of inspiring the kind of interpretation that would allow faith to survive the test of times. The plaintiffs, the court found, offered truncated quotations and out-of-context citations "with malicious intent" to defame the authors and misrepresent their intentions. In its findings, the court said: "It is the conviction of this court that no one on the face of the earth is entitled to question the faith of another or dig into his words for proof of apostasy or atheism." The court added: "No Muslim, however well-versed in religion, has the right to challenge another Muslim, however inferior in his knowledge, in matters of faith, except through kindly-worded advice." The case of Hanafi and El-Qimni reminds me of one involving Saad Zaghloul, the leader of the 1919 Revolution. An adversary of Zaghloul filed a lawsuit against him. The adversary, a prime minister, made certain allegations in his complaint that the court deemed to be fallacious. Once the court ruling was declared, Zaghloul reprimanded his adversary: "If a court of law had passed a ruling such as that against me, I would have fainted, fallen to the floor�ê� and died on the spot," Zaghloul remarked. The writer is editor-in-chief of Al-Qahera weekly newspaper.
