The divorce case was what made him famous, though it wasn't the usual kind of celebrity divorce and Nasr Abu Zayd was still in love with his wife. Abu Zayd, the liberal Muslim thinker who died yesterday, first came to the attention of Islamists while teaching Arabic literature at Cairo university in the early 1990s. They decided that his research contained "clear affronts to the Islamic faith" and accused him of apostasy.
That in turn inspired a group of Islamist lawyers to file a third-party ("hesba") case, seeking to divorce him from his wife on the grounds that a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate – and after a series of court hearings his marriage was declared null and void. [Guardian Cif] Read more
