Egypt on fire! A five-year prison sentence for lawyer and researcher in Islamic heritage affairs.
Posted: 26 Nov 2021, 23:22
- بتوقيت مصر : لقاء المستشار أحمد عبده ماهر بعد الحكم عليه بالسجن بتهمة ازدراء الأديان
Egypt time: Meeting with Counselor Ahmed Abdo Maher after he was sentenced to prison on charges of blasphemy.
Ahmed Abdo Maher, an Egyptian human rights activist and researcher, is led by the four imams to prison.
| A. Hafez |
A five-year prison sentence for lawyer and researcher in Islamic heritage affairs, Ahmed Abdo Maher, on charges of contempt of Islam a few days ago, caused an uproar in human rights and cultural circles, considering that this accusation is supposed to end as long as the Egyptian state needs renewers of religious discourse, and works to undermine extremist ideas. . While others said that the man deserves punishment because he questioned many of the constants and insulted the Qur’an itself, and raised confusion in some of its verses, which contradicts the nature of the serious researcher, because what the man said did not touch only what was entrenched in the minds, but rather gave deliberately false interpretations.
Maher fought the religious establishment in Egypt for more than 11 years, during which he sought to change the convictions of jurists and clerics about heritage, and said that it contained texts and hadiths alien to the tolerant faith, but they ignored it and turned their backs on it, and dealt with it as looking for fame at the expense of distorting Islam and imams The four and their books inherited from them, until his decision to write a book “The Misguidance of the Nation with the Jurisprudence of the Imams” came to throw him in prison, which questioned all the legacy and jurisprudential texts of the imams.
He is known as one of the most authoritative researchers in the heritage who stirred endless controversy. He did not leave a small or a large one in the books of the four imams except to challenge them, and he was the first among those who opened fire on Sahih al-Bukhari, and he lied most of what was stated in it, until some felt that he was hostile to al-Bukhari for a personal position, which Al-Azhar treats as sacred.
Since he decided to fight his battles to convince the religious establishment of the inevitability of renewing religious discourse and revising the heritage from the texts trampled on it, he insisted on transcending all red lines, not recognizing the language of conciliation or softness in speech, and he used to open fire on those who lie to his words.
Courage or perversion?
The crisis of Al-Azhar and its supporters is that they used to not respond to the mujtahids with arguments, instead of inciting them
The crisis of Al-Azhar and its supporters is that they used to not respond to the mujtahids with arguments, instead of inciting them
Maher, 77 years old, inherited his boldness and courage in criticism from his previous work for years as a former officer in the Egyptian army, he participated in the War of Attrition in 1967 and the Sixth of October War in 1973, and his participation was among the forces assigned to fight on the front lines, i.e. in Face the enemy directly.
After that, he joined to work as an officer in the Military Intelligence, then he retired from the service due to lack of medical fitness.
He did not sit much in his home after he retired and joined the Bar and then became a lawyer in the shortage, and his condemnation prompted him to read in jurisprudence books and discover the concepts, texts and hadiths they contain that are attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and have nothing to do with true Islam, especially those that spread extremism and allow bloodshed and women’s captivity .
He decided to lead the task of renewing religious discourse on his own, and began to feel his steps at the end of Hosni Mubarak's rule, and was attacked by the Brotherhood, Salafis and Al-Azhar, and many believed that with the rise of Islamists to the political scene after the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, he would remain silent for fear of hardliners retaliating against him .
Maher disappointed these people and went on his way indifferent to the threats that affected him, to the point that some of the Salafi sheikhs squandered his blood and disbelieved him. Humanity that people deal with sanctity.
The slanderer and slandered
The crisis of Al-Azhar and its supporters is that they used to not respond to the mujtahids with arguments, instead of inciting them
He filed lawsuits explicitly asking Al-Azhar to blow up its school curricula because they are violent and taken from pre-Islamic heritage books and offend the Islamic religion, and extremists have graduated.
He used to appear on people through some television channels and write on newspaper pages at the height of the street's escalation against the Islamists and their rule, but he disappeared from the scene because he felt that people became resentful of him because he was more than reasonable. The society is mostly religious, and the voice of extremism is louder, so he decided to address his audience through the platforms.
He has authored several books challenging what Al-Azhar and the four imams market about true Islam, including “Our Islam and Heritage.. Towards Correcting Religious Discourse,” “The Prophet’s Sunnah between Deception and Misrepresentation,” “Illusions of the Torment of the Grave,” and “How Was His Creation?” The Qur’an,” and “The Qur’an is the miracle of the statement,” in search of relative popular support for his vision and ideas he presented.
In the midst of all these skirmishes, the religious establishment was satisfied with silence, and did not respond to him officially, but it released some of its sheikhs to challenge his ideas and accuse him of contempt of religion and causing a wedge between Muslims and Copts, inflaming public opinion, insulting sanctities, distorting religious symbols, insulting the Prophet Muhammad, and questioning the Sunnah and Quranic verses.
The man submitted an official request to the Al-Azhar Institution to nominate the scholars it chooses to engage him in an ideological confrontation with him. Either she wins the battle in her favour, and then remains silent forever, or she believes that he is speaking the truth, and she must review her positions, revise her curricula against extremism, and speed up the pace of renewal of religious discourse.
Al-Azhar did not respond and was satisfied with press statements made by Abbas Shoman, his former agent, calling on Maher to produce one evidence of the involvement of any student or graduate of Al-Azhar in a terrorist operation or accused in a case related to extremism, to suggest that he is lying and trying to distort the image of Al-Azhar and spread liberation and immorality and eliminate education. religious.
Shoman’s statements came on a plate of gold for the man, as he prepared a long list, by name, age and college, of Al-Azhar students and graduates who had already been convicted in terrorism cases, and proven to be members of extremist organizations and helped and plotted armed elements to kill Copts, and assassinate judges and security men, and Al-Azhar demanded to make sure From the correctness of his words back to the records of the security services.
The crisis of Al-Azhar and its supporters is that they are accustomed to not responding to the mujtahids with argument, thought and proof, and they find it easy to attack and incite the opposing party to mobilize public opinion against them, and to suggest that what they are marketing is a deliberate distortion of Islam to serve hostile parties.
Enemy of human heritage
Some Salafist sheikhs squander Maher’s blood and blaspheme him. Perhaps he will remain silent or retract his words and actions, but he explicitly declares that he will not rest until after the heritage is cleansed of bloody texts.
Maher believes that any heritage is the product of human thought that is challenged and must be criticized with reason, but this method contradicts the convictions of Al-Azhar, which deals with any inherited jurisprudence as if it were a revelation that came down from heaven, that is, on the rank of the Noble Qur’an, although the man repeatedly said that he did not want to destroy the heritage. And he wants to take his advantages and leave his negatives because he is not holy.
What ignited the anger of the religious establishment and its defenders was that Maher put him in critical situations wholesale when he used to go out in the media on communication platforms and his channel on “YouTube” to reveal in the name of the book and the page number, how much Al-Azhar’s curricula encourage extremism and extremism and explicitly call for the infidelity of Copts, and anti-women, Which is offensive to Islam.
When the ruling was issued for his imprisonment, he recorded a video and published it on his official accounts on social media, addressing the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to intervene to do justice to him, saying to him, “I am the researcher and the renovator who implemented your request, and responded to you, by thinking about my religion, and looking into it, and when I thought, they punished me with imprisonment, Those who punished me are the most dangerous people to Islam.”
He added, “Oh, President of the Republic, there is no killing of the apostate, no abandonment of prayer, no captivity of women, and no breastfeeding of the elderly. This is what they teach at Al-Azhar. They teach our students that no church is built in Islam, and if it is built, it will be demolished. This is an approach in Al-Azhar. This is the jurisprudence of violence, intolerance and oppression. How do I believe in whoever wills, let him believe, and whoever wills, let him disbelieve, and there is no compulsion in religion, and at the same time I believe in a heritage that says whoever changes his religion, kill him, and that the Prophet was commanded to fight people until they believe, even though God is the one who told you your religion and I have a religion.”
The Egyptian human rights and cultural circles see that Maher's accusation of contempt for religion contradicts the state's trend towards renewing religious discourse
Regardless of his attack on the imams and Al-Azhar’s curriculum, what ignited the anger of the religious establishment and its supporters against him was that he openly called for the closure of Al-Azhar for ten years, and justified this by setting a line between the stale ignorance intellectually and jurisprudentially, and the generation that will present Islam to the world, so that there are approaches Contemporary, drawn up by moderate scholars known for their competence and objectivity, not extremism, accusing the Azhar curricula of paving the way for the terrorist organization ISIS to implement its texts.
What distinguishes Maher as a researcher in heritage and jurisprudence, is that he cannot speak and criticize unless he has what proves the correctness of his words and his position. Or the Qur'an?
When he was attacked because of his words about freedom of belief, he used a hadith attributed to the Prophet that says, “I have come to you with slaughter,” then he comes with a Quranic verse that reads, “We have not sent you but as a mercy to the worlds,” and another that says, “If you were rude and hard-hearted, they would have dispersed from around you,” meaning that Islam called for Tolerance and compassion, not violence, persecution and hatred.
And when some Al-Azhar men accused him of insulting Islam, by stabbing him in Sahih Al-Bukhari, because it became a valuable jurisprudential book after the Qur’an, he answered them in a way that reflects his moderate, moderate faith, and said that equating Al-Bukhari’s words with the Book of God is a disregard for the Qur’an. Al-Azhar states that it studies the religion of humans, not the religion of God, and deals with the defamation of the imams as defaming the religion.
What enshrined his conviction that Sahih al-Bukhari is “just a myth” is that al-Bukhari was born 200 years after the Prophet’s existence, and Egypt was opened in the year 14 AH and there was no Bukhari, and religion was established in the state without him, meaning that people lived without jurisprudence and hadiths that were inherited from him. These are not Muslims, and will the absence of Sahih Al-Bukhari end the religion, or will our practice of it be wrong?
Engagement with renewal
The religious establishment directs its anger at Maher for his explicitly calling for the closure of Al-Azhar for ten years
Maher built his dispute with Al-Azhar and its supporters from the Salafis and others, on the basis that they were the ones who said that the differences of the four imams are mercy, which always prompted him to ask: Why is our disagreement a crime that throws us into prisons?
The problem with the religious establishment is that it still believes that dealing with researchers in heritage in a manner of intimidation and imprisonment will make their ideas and proposals die. Although in reality, many people have come to believe in their words, especially if it is based on convincing foundations, and the conviction increases when the religious establishment remains silent when it is unable to confront.
Regardless of the implementation of Maher's five-year prison sentence, or his pardon by a presidential decree, the dilemma remains not in preventing the voice of a researcher, but in the minds that deal with heritage as Islam, and in the government that seeks to renew religious discourse and implement laws that intimidate anyone who approaches of renewal. In the face of that, there will be no sign of hope as long as Al-Azhar deals with renewal as an institution project, not a state project.
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