Nasr Abu Zayd

It's proving to be a busy week for obituaries: Nasr Abu Zayd has died in Egypt. More here, and his Wikipedia entry here.

Although something of a minor player in the Islamic culture wars, Abu Zayd, an important scholar of the Qur'an, became a lightning rod in the 1990s when his studies — which sought to understand the Qur'an in terms of the era of its composition — came under attack and a hisba case was brought against him, declaring him an apostate. Since a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate, the court also declared the Abu Zayds divorced, forcing them into European exile. Seen by many as a martyr to rigid Islamic rules, he always insisted he was nonetheless a Muslim.