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When I interviewed Dr Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid in 1995, then professor of Islamic Philosophy at Cairo University and his partner Dr Ibtihal Younis who taught French Literature, they tried to put a brave face on their predicament. ‘When we lived in sin no one paid attention,’ joked Dr Younis, who became Mrs Abu-Zaid two months earlier, ‘ now we are respectably married, they [ Muslim fundamentalists] want us divorced.’
The couple were targeted in a test case designed by Islamists lawyers to sneak Sharia (Islamic code) into Egyptian secular legal system historically secular based on French law.
The applicants, a group of Islamists lawyers unearthed a forgotten ninth century court ruling known as Hessba which permits any group of Muslims three or more to seek injunctions or force action against people or activity if they prove in a court of law that they acting to avert harm befalling Islam. Sharia, the plaintiffs argued, forbids Muslim women marrying non Muslims since their children will be born non Muslims as they automatically follow their father’s faith in Egyptian traditions, hence they wouldn’t act if it was a Muslim man marrying a non-Muslim which defence lawyers in several cases later illustrated its contrast with article three of Egyptian constitution of equality between sexes.
Although the court initial rejected the application since the applicants could prove they were affected in person by the Abu Zaid’s academic activities or marriage, the plaintiffs reapplied to court under another judge who accepted that they were representing majority of Muslims’ interests. This time the court accepted the applicants’ argument that Muslim Dr Younis shouldn’t have married her atheist boyfriend in the first place.
Abu Zaids’ marriage was nullified by the court setting a precedent that aided Islamists to form a Hessba each time they wanted to silence a secular intellectual. The late filmmaker Youssef Chahine, internationally acclaimed feminists Dr Nawal -ElSaadawi and her husband novelist Sheriff Hattattah, were among scores dragged before courts under Hessba. Horrified by Islamists discovery of 1100 old Hessba, scores of celebrities, among hundreds of mixed faiths couples (it has been normal for generations) fled Egypt, including the Abu Zaids (although the appeal court turned the ruling in their favour) who settled in the Netherlands where he became professor of Humanism and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University.
The Hessba ruling was overlooked by parliament during when in 1922 great constitutional reforms confirming independence from Ottoman rule and introducing secular European laws to replace outdated codes dating back to last Egyptian independent kingdom ruled by Queen Cleopatra (69-30 BC) and accumulation of codes from oppressive Arab colonial rule (639-1250), rul of the self-indulgent Mamluks (1250 - 1517), Ottoman Empire laws (1517- 1805) and autonyms Mehmet Ali modern rule (1805-1922).
Islamists targeted Abu Zaid when his seminars encouraged students to think outside the frame of rigid 13th century interpretation of Islamic texts considered by fundamentalists as the ultimate reference on Islam. Islamists’ influence grew in 1980s and by mid 1990s they openly intimidated women to give up western fashion that was the norm since Europeanization of Egypt’s social and culture life by Ismail Pasha ‘ the Magnificent’ ( 1830-1895) around the time of opening of Suez canal in 1869.
Traditional Islamists who believed Quran ( Mohammedian Bible) to be the words of Allah delivered to their prophet by the Arch angel Gabriel, were shocked by Abu Zaid’s philosophical analysis of the text in his books, ‘ The concept of the text: a Study of Quranic Theology’ and ‘ Studying the false interpretation of Quran’.
His research in ancient texts 1980 – 1992 was published in four volumes: ‘The Philosophy of Hermeneutics’, ‘Critique of Islamic Discourse’, ‘Text, Authority and the Truth’ and ‘ Women in the Discourse of Crisis,’ challenged the orthodox assumptions about the Quran’s textual authority within the Islamic tradition as he advocated interpretation taking into account social and historical context which were irrelevant to 20th century life.
Fundamentalists’ crusade against Abu zaid was lead by head of Islamic Studies the Islamist Dr Abdul Sabour Chahine who handpicked a committee to evaluate Abu Zaid’s works as candidate for professorship of Islamic Philosophy. It condemned the research as ‘blasphemous’ calling Abu Zaid ‘an infidel’ and Chahine lost no time announcing the ‘ verdict’ to a 700 strong congregation during a Friday prayer at a Cairo mosque controlled by radicals.
Earlier in the year writer Farag Fouda was assassinated following condemnation during Friday prayer; and late Naguib Mahfouz, 1988 Noble laureate was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist who heard his condemnation during a Friday lesson.
Born in July 1943 in Qahafah 82 miles north of Cairo, Abu Zaid’s peasant family had no money for his schooling, but Vocational Studies grants enabled him to obtain communication diploma securing employment in 1960 with Telecommunication Authority. He saved for eight years to join Cairo University to read Arabic and history. Graduated with honours in 1972 he became a fellow at Islamic Studies Department, working overtime to finance his MA ( 1977) and PhD (1981) in Islamic Philosophy while learning English and German language, which helped him as a visiting professor to universities of Ossaka and during lecture tours Islamic countries. In his last tour he contracted an unknown virus in Indonesia and fell ill when Cairo arrived on June 30. He was rushed to intensive care, but died of multiple organ failure on Sunday and buried in his village of Qahafah on Monday July 5.
He was survived by his wife Ibtihal
Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid, Islamic philosopher and scholar, Author of 13 books.
Born Qahafah, Egypt July 10, 1943
Died Cairo July 4, 2010
End
© copyrights Adel Darwish 2010 Not to be reproduced, reprinted or published in full or inpart without the written permission of the author.

When the Munich Olympic Games started in 1972, hardly any one heard of ‘Black September Organisation’ BSO( Ayloul al-Aswad) the Palestinian terror organisation, apart from a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services’ agents following the deadly game of assassinations and counter assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and Israeli intelligence service Mossad. The game, sometimes spectacularly violent, was often more about revenge rather than a pre-emptive step.
The BSO, a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO, was established ‘to avenge the blood of the martyrs of Black September’. The Name given by Palestinians and their Arab nationalist backers to Septembers 1970s ‘ battles of refugee camps’, when the mainly Bedouin Jordanian Army ( formally the Arab Legion of the British Aram), known for their unquestionable loyalty to King Hussein (1935- 1999) attacked Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO fighters who broke an agreement confining their activities to refugee camps (the 1969 Cairo Agreement established a framework of coordination between Palestinian guerrilla groups and governments hosting refugee following violent clashes in Lebanon and Jordan in 1960). Palestinian fighters challenged the late King Hussein’s sovereignty taking-over major cities, setting up checkpoints and collecting taxes from Palestinians who became Jordanian citizens. The Last straw for the Jordanian monarch came when groups belonging to Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine PFLP hijacked four civilian airliners, BOAC, Swissair, TWA and an Israel El-Al then landed them at Dawson airfield near Amman. The airport was totally controlled by Palestinian guerrilla blocking Jordanian security personnel from operating. BSO aim was to ‘ avenge the blood of 20,000 martyrs’, as the organisation literature circulated in refugee camps and university campus in the Arab world in 1970’s claimed (official figures by the Jordanians put the death toll at 1000). BSO, which was later aided by international terrorist groups like the German Bader Meinhoff, and the Japanese Red Army, targeted Arab regimes it accused of backing the Jordanian Army in September 1970.
In November 28, 1971, they assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan’s prime minister during the September refugee camps war, outside Sherton hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who later made peace with Israel, turning his back on Colonel Gamal Abdel Naser’s revolutionary Arab Nationalist agenda.
The chief of operation of Black September was a Mohammed Oudeh, a alestinan born former science teacher ( employed by the Jordanian ministry of education in 1960s), who was known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud (Abu is father of… and Daoud was his father’s middle name which he gave to his only son). It took him five months to plan the operation using his contacts within Syrian intelligence – who took advantage of diplomatic privileges- as well as the Stasi (former East German ntelligence service) to smuggle equipment, explosives and weapons to Munich, as he later told me (his admission was completed over a number of years in different locations, including Amman, Damascus and Beirut) .
Mr Oudeh spent the evening of September 4, 1972 at a restaurant attached to Munich central railway station complex, briefing 11 of ‘operators’ from his organisation over dinner, and going over the final details with them.
A few hours later, just before dawn, armed members of BSO scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes’ village, while the other three (who were never caught) helped them from outside. They managed to break into Israeli athletes sleeping quarters taking them hostages, and killing two who resisted. The Israelis’ say they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, but Mr Oudeh years later said they were ‘armed Israeli secrete agents’.
BSO offered to release the nine Israeli hostages in exchange for 236 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but Golda Meir ( 1898-1978), Israelis Prime Minister at the time refused to negotiate and for 20 hours a tense standoff ensued while television images of an empty balcony on a grey, modern dormitory where the group and their hostage made their stand-off, were beamed around the world.

Mr Oudeh has been consistent, over half a dozen of personal conversations, in media interviews and in his 1998 book (min al-Qudus Illa Munich ‘From Jerusalem to Munich’, published in English a year later as ‘Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist), that in planning Munich operation his instructions were clear ‘ to avoid killing or injuring any one, including Israeli hostages’ whom he wanted to use as a bargaining chip to release Palestinian comrades in Israeli jails. But later he added that he was deliberately prolonging negotiation in order to maximise publicity ‘alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances’, in his own words.

Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound (Since world TV cameras were transmitting live the image of the outside building, which was also seen by the hostage takers) the West Germans finally agreed to transport both captors and their hostages, in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck the military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (The Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers released in 2004).
To every one’s surprise, West German security staged a bungled attempt to rescue the Israelis at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages bodies were found on the tarmac, and on the plane.
Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught maths and physics in Westbank secondary schools (Administered by Jordan’s ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft PLO charter (constitution) and other legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (parliament).
He remained in East Jerusalem until captured by Israel in 1967 Six Day War when he moved to Jordan to join the PLO. He later admitted that he had been in contacts with PLO as a ‘ sleeper’ of the PLO largest Arafat lead subgroup, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to taking part in Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces using air cover attacked refugee camps run by the PLO, inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama, which was the first time Palestinian ‘resistance’ fought Israeli army face to face instead of hit and run or bomb planting operations they started in January 1965.
He had major disagreement with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes not aiding the Palestinians, or making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as ‘ enemies who should be fought before fighting Israel.’
He went underground moving into Lebanon via Syria after 1970s camps wars. He moved between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, then to Europe.
After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He changed residence to Ramallah in the West Bank following 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.
When his memorise on Munich was published, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria - the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime in the anti-peace Arab bloc.
Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (whom he claimed to be Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance where he collapsed.
He remained defiant to the end. In his last interview with Aljazeera 1999, he said he would do Munich all over again as he had no regret. “Today, I cannot fight you anymore,’’ he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure last week, “but my grandson will and his grandsons too.”
Abu Daoud is survived by his wife, five daughters and a son Daoud.