“The government’s excuse was that they were unable to protect me since in my own country I had been declared an apostate. That was strange, because they knew that before faxing me a visa”, said sarcastically the intellectual, who believes these events were the result of political games. “Revoking my visa was necessary so as to avoid a government crisis. Islamist members of parliament, who had initially threatened to vote against the government, voted in favour the following day.” It is true that various members of the National Assembly congratulated the Minster of the Interior, Jaber Al-Khalid Al-Sabah, for having added the Egyptian philosopher to the list of those not welcome in the country. Praise also came from outside parliament. According to radical Islamist Mubarak al Bathali, for example, the government avoided allowing in a “dirty person who had no right to come and ruin the country.” The Watan Daily published an editorial by Abdullah Khalaf describing Abu Zayd as a fomenter and an immoral person.

The right to speak was in part returned to Abu Zayd through a phone conference organised by the independent NGO Tanwir, which had originally invited him to Kuwait. “I tried to speak of the symptoms of the decadence of contemporary Islamic ideas,” he said “ that result in rejecting others, whether they are non-Muslims, members of the opposite sex (women), members of another group (for example Sunnis against Shiites), or simply those expressing different ideas.” This last example is what the Egyptian intellectual experienced personally. Analysing the Koran as a text in which the word of God is mediated by human beings, and then placing it within its historical, socio-linguistic and cultural context, was all it took for Abu Zayd to attract a charge of apostasy from influential Egyptian religious leaders. These accusations were confirmed by the Court of Appeal in Cairo, which in 1995 declared his marriage void (because an apostate cannot be married to a Muslim woman) and obliged him to go into exile in Holland where he still lives and teaches.

After analysing the symptoms of the decadence of the Islamic school of thought, Abu Zayd studied the characteristics of the “disease” that is leading Islam to a “series of rules that only establish what is allowed and what is not, conflicting with the wealth of historical Islam in which the legal perspective of the world was linked to a philosophical, theological and mystical point of view.” Aseel al Awadhi, one of the four women who were for the first time elected to parliament last May, described the manner in which Kuwaiti authorities treated Abu Zayd as an insult to the State’s prestige and reputation, as well as an affront to freedom of expression. While Lulwa Al-Mulla, president of the Women’s Cultural Social Society, said that denying entry to her country is an act of intellectual terrorism.

Although some in the small Emirate, including women, sided with him, Abu Zayd cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. “Islamists throughout the Arab world are against women. Their interpretation of Islam is medieval and their hegemony is everywhere. Kuwait is no exception.”

Translated by Francesca Simmons