Faraj Fauda

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Farag Foda

Faraj Fauda ( Arabic فرج فودة, DMG Faraǧ Fauda , pronunciation in colloquial Egyptian Farag Foda , * 1946 near Damietta in the Nile Delta ; † June 7, 1992 in Cairo , murdered) was an Egyptian publicist and political activist who was critical of religion.

Life

Fauda was trained as an agricultural engineer and made a name for himself from the mid-1980s through his critical articles, including in the weekly magazine "Oktober", and his sharp satires on Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt . He dealt critically with the Islamist ideology in many newspaper articles . In his 1985 essay “Before the Fall. Dialogue on the Application of Islamic Sharia ”( Qabla suqūṭ. Ḥiwār ḥaula taṭbīq aš-šarīʿa ) he argued that the Sharia has never created a just state and does not help in solving today's problems in any way. The text was the target of heavy criticism in 1986 by the Madschallat al-Azhar , the journal of the Egyptian Azhar University .

In an article that appeared in al-Ahālī newspaper on March 23, 1988 , Fauda made grave allegations against the sheikh of the Azhar , Jad al-Haqq . This in turn reported Fauda in 1991 to the lawyers of the Egyptian State Security that he had insulted him by omitting the honorary title fadīla ("His Excellency") and also insulted the companions of the Prophet .

Assassination and Trial

On June 3, 1992 the magazine an-Nūr published a text signed by twelve lecturers from the Daʿwa Faculty of Azhar and another twelve lecturers from Cairo University , calling on President Husni Mubarak to ban the Mustaqbal party founded by Fauda . Four days later, on June 7, 1992, Fauda was shot dead in his office by members of the al-Jamaʿa al-islamiyya group . Secular intellectuals blamed the Nadwat al-ʿulamāʾ, a circle of clergymen in the Azhar's Daʿwa faculty, for the murder. ʿAbd al-Ghaffār ʿAzīz, the chairman of the Nadwa, responded with a 200-page pamphlet in which he condemned Fauda's murder, but made it clear that he believed Fauda to be an apostate deserving of death. In January 1993, shortly before the book fair, the publishing house of the al-Ahram newspaper removed all of Fauda's works from its program.

After Fauda's murder, at least 200 Islamists were arrested as suspects in raids in Cairo . Twelve people were charged with murder, membership of a secret society and possession of weapons. One of the killers, 'Abd al-Shafi Ahmad Ramaḍan, was born on December 30, 1993 sentenced to death , and on February 26, 1994 executed . A second was executed before the trial in connection with another attempted murder. Three other defendants received prison terms of between three and ten years (two of them absent) and eight were acquitted.

In the trial of killers of Faudas Azhar scholars said Mohammed al-Ghazali al-Saqqa as a witness in court of, it was the duty of the government to execute apostates; if the government fails to do this, others have the right to enforce this judgment. This has been interpreted as a particularly striking example of a kind of division of labor between Al-Azhar scholars and radical Islamists. Admittedly, Al Azhar distanced himself from parts of this testimony in a public manifesto: An individual has in principle no right to execute punishments for apostates, regardless of how great their deviation from Islamic teaching.

Works

literature

  • Malika Zeghal: Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al Azhar dans l'Égypte contemporaine. Paris 1996. pp. 329-337.
  • Ana Belén Soage: Faraj Fawda, or the Cost of Free Expression . In: Middle East Review of International Affairs 11 (2), June 2007. Online

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Cf. Zeghal 317f.
  2. ↑ a b cf. Zeghal 335.
  3. ↑ See Zeghal 329.
  4. ↑ See Zeghal 329f.
  5. ^ A b Amnesty International: Egypt - Human Rights Abuses by Armed Groups , September 1, 1998.
  6. ^ Tamir Moustafa: Conflict and Cooperation between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt . In: International Journal of Middle East Studies , 32 (1), 2000, pp. 3–22, here: pp. 14 and 32 (footnote 64).
  7. ↑ Meir Hatina: Identity Politics in the Middle East. Liberal Thought and Islamic Challenge in Egypt , Tauris, London / New York 2007, p. 69.
  8. ↑ This edition also as a special edition. the state center for political education North Rhine-Westphalia with the same ISBN. All editions are abridged versions of The Political Mission of Islam. Programs and Criticism between Fundamentalism and Reforms. Original voices from the Islamic world. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1994
personal data
SURNAME Fauda, ​​Faraj
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Foda, Farag; فرج فوده
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Arab publicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH near Damietta , Nile Delta
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1992
Place of death Cairo