A life of one argument

In March 1987, a man stood before Al-Azhar's canonical court to answer for what he had written. The institution was the oldest center of Sunni learning in the world; he had spent fourteen years inside it, the last seven as a member of its faculty. The argument he was being tried for was, in its simplest form, that the Quran is sufficient on its own terms. The court expelled him.

Seven months later, in Cairo, he was arrested. The arrest was followed by a second the following year. He was not a politician and he was not, by any reasonable measure, a danger; he was a historian who had spent two decades reading texts, and what he had read had pushed him toward a position he could not unsay.

By the time the United States granted him asylum in 2002, he had already produced the body of work that would mark the rest of his life: books, articles, fatwas, recorded talks — written first in Arabic, increasingly also in English, addressed to two reading publics at once. Fifteen years in exile would follow before the United States offered the kind of institutional recognition that Egypt had withheld. Harvard called. The Wilson Center called. The Senate called.

{{ FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW }} The defining quality of the work, read in sequence across the decades, is patience. Mansour is not a polemicist. He is closer in temperament to a careful teacher who has decided to address a difficult subject and has agreed to take however long that requires. The same argument — that the Quran was given complete, and that what came after must be read as the work of human communities — is made and re-made, year after year, in different registers, addressed to different audiences. It is a position rather than a campaign.

The argument is not abstract. It opens onto the politics of apostasy law, the architecture of Hisbah, the rights of women in Muslim societies, the historicity of early Islamic political conflict, and the contemporary critique of Wahhabism, Salafism, and political Islam. Each of these subjects is treated at length, with citations, with the care of a scholar who knows that being wrong on a detail would discredit the larger position.

{{ FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW }} What the library tries to honor is not a personality. The point of this archive is to keep the work readable — every link resolving, every text loading, every footnote findable — for the people who will need to read it a decade or a century from now. The hope is that some of them will be Egyptian, and that the conditions of their reading will be better than the conditions of the writing.

The figure at the center of the work is a man born in the village of Abu Hariz, in the Sharqia governorate, in 1949; who entered Al-Azhar in his early twenties and left it, against his will, in his late thirties; who lost a country and built a corpus; who has, by any honest accounting, been right about most of what he set out to argue. The argument continues.

“And what comes after is up to those who read.”

From a 2014 article on the public reception of the work