Liberal Koran expert dies in Egypt, after exile

By Alastair Sharp and Marwa Awad

CAIRO (Reuters) - Religious liberal Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Koranic scholar declared an apostate for challenging mainstream Muslim views on the holy book, died on Monday in a Cairo hospital, aged 66.

Abu Zayd held a liberal, critical approach to Islamic teachings that angered some Muslim conservatives in his homeland in the 1990s, a decade when President Hosni Mubarak's government was combating an uprising by armed Islamic militants.

Abu Zayd critiqued the use of religion to exert political power. He argued the Koran was both a literary and religious text which clashes with Islamic teaching which sees the holy book as the final revelation of God.

"I am anti-dogma," he told Reuters in 2008. "It's a meaning produced by humans, and I don't find that I am going outside the domain of religion if I challenge this dogma."

Analysts said his approach challenged Egypt's mainstream Islamic thinkers and popular sentiment in a country where conservative Islamic trends have been on the rise, reflected in part by the prevalence of the Islamic veil.

Islam should be understood in its historical, geographic and cultural background, he argued, adding that "pure Islam" did not exist and even the Koran was "a collection of discourses".

In 1995, an Egyptian sharia court declared Abu Zayd an apostate from Islam, annulled his marriage and effectively forced him and his wife into exile.

Abu Zayd and his wife moved to the Netherlands after he received death threats, notably from the Islamic Jihad group led by Ayman al-Zawahri, who has since become deputy leader of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.