The Pen and the Knife

A learned man who names a heretic and an ignorant man who kills one are two halves of a single act, though each will swear he had nothing to do with the other. Where an idea may be answered with a blade, thinking stops, for the thinkers who are spared learn what happened to the ones who were not. A civilization goes dark long before its last free mind is killed.

The Debate

On a January day in 1992, at the Cairo International Book Fair, a crowd of thousands packed a hall to hear a debate. The motion was whether Egypt should be a religious state or a civil one.

On one side sat three of the most respected Islamic figures in the country, among them Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, a scholar revered across the Arab world. On the other sat Farag Foda.

Foda was forty-six, an agricultural economist by profession and a writer by compulsion. He was a Muslim who had made himself the wittiest enemy of political Islam in the Arabic language. He was not an elegant man. He was stout and rumpled and funny, and he used humor as a weapon in a culture that treated the subject with dread. He had gone back to the chronicles of the early caliphate, the supposed golden age to which the Islamists wished to return, and shown from the Muslims' own sources that it had been an age of civil war, assassination, and plunder. If you want that state, he asked his opponents, tell me which year of it you would like to live in.

That day he did it again, to their faces, before an audience that had come largely to cheer the other side. By most accounts he won. He was certainly the one people quoted the next morning.

Five months later a committee of scholars at al-Azhar published a statement denouncing Foda as an enemy of Islam. A few days after that, on the eighth of June, two young men on a motorcycle pulled up outside his office as he was leaving with his son and shot him dead.

At the trial, one of the killers was asked which of Foda's books had moved him to act. He replied that he had read none of them. He could neither read nor write. He had been told that the scholars had ruled the man an apostate, and that was enough.

Sheikh al-Ghazali was called as a witness. He testified that a Muslim who abandons his faith deserves death, and that if the state fails to carry out that sentence, an individual who does so has committed no crime worth the name, only the offense of acting ahead of the authorities.