Dissident Spotlight: Farag Foda
Farag Foda was an Egyptian Muslim writer who was assassinated by Islamists for criticizing the government's role in privileging Islam over other religions.
In June 1992, Farag Foda was shot outside of his office. He had a long career as a critic of the cruelties that Egyptian governments inflicted on their people. Foda was a practicing Muslim who supported a secular Egyptian government and criticized Islamic fundamentalism. Some of Foda’s best work criticized fundamentalists for twisting Islam to suit violent political suppression.
In the last essay he published before he was killed, Foda accused the Egyptian government of fostering the hostile environment that led to a massacre of Christians in Egypt the year before. Near the end of his essay, Foda asks militant fundamentalists:
“…say it to us frankly. Do you want Egypt to be a religious state? Say it frankly. Then we will choose either to declare war on you or to emigrate from your rotten world. Say it without shame. Say that the country is now for the Muslims only, and I have the courage, and I am a Muslim, to put my finger in your eyes, for Egypt belongs to all Egyptians. Egypt has been Egypt before Christianity and will be after Islam.”
Identifying as a Muslim did not protect Foda from the fundamentalists. First, Foda’s books and works were banned and burned. Foda was assassinated a few days later.
Freedom to Write in the 1990s
Foda’s assassination came three years after the fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death on Valentine’s Day in 1989. Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise and primarily threatening other Muslim writers.
In a collection of Arab and Muslim essays supporting Rushdie, For Rushdie, writers from Syria to Tunisia invoked Foda’s murder to point to the growing strength of fundamentalists willing to kill their co-religionists to avoid challenge.
For example, a Tunisian sociologist, Khedija Ben Mahmoud Cherif, invoked Rushdie’s fatwa and the burnings of Foda’s work to criticize despots in North Africa and the Middle East:
“Such actions simply evidence failure on the part of regimes that pretend to legitimize themselves by imposing censorship as well as by carrying out political repression and other arbitrary acts. These measures have even been considered a privileged means of governing; but they really indicate the bankruptcy of the societies that employ them.”
Foda was more than a powerful writer and thoughtful critic. He was a symbol of the freedom of thought that many Muslim intellectuals supported in their own countries and across the globe.
Foda’s Prophetic Last Words
Foda was targeted by a different fatwa than the one issued by Ayatollah Khomeini from Iran. Another group of fundamentalist scholars based in Egypt’s Al-Azhar University accused Foda of blasphemy for having a different interpretation of Islam than that group of scholars did. The group then used a fatwa issued by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar to justify Foda’s assassination.
Advocating for the separation of church and state in Egypt was just a step too far for the fundamentalists.
In the final paragraph of his final essay, Foda expressed concern about the direction that Egypt was going. Foda’s assassins eventually served prison time for killing him. But Egypt’s government cracked down on all dissent, not just the fundamentalists who wanted to control the state. Foda wrote:
“Before, we used to say that the best of days are the ones that we haven't yet lived. I am sorry to say that it appears that the opposite is true. The truth is that the saddest of our days are the ones that we have not lived yet, the ones we will live if things continue on their present course.”
Reading these words three decades after Foda’s murder is a haunting reminder of how quickly fundamentalist rhetoric can become violent. It’s also a reminder that the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists don’t speak for the Muslim intellectuals striving for societies that can accommodate open dialogue.