Ahmed Subhy Mansour

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Sheik Ahmed Subhy Mansour is an exiled Egyptian cleric who founded a small Egyptian sect that is neither Sunni nor Shiite, the so-called "Quranists".

Bio and Thinking

An Egyptian national now living in the U.S., Dr. Mansour is a distinguished scholar of Islam with expertise in Islamic history, culture, theology and politics.

He was an advocate for democracy and human rights in Egypt for many years, during which time he was isolated and persecuted by religious extremists and by the regime, including having served time in prison for his liberal political, religious and social views.

Having graduated with honors from Al Azhar University of Cairo, one of the oldest and most well respected centers of Islamic thought in the world, he later received his PhD with highest honors from Al Azhar as well. In May 1985, Dr. Mansour was discharged from his teaching and research position there due to his liberal views that were not acceptable to the ultra-conservative religious authorities who controlled much of university policies and programs.

In 1987 and 1988 he was imprisoned by the Egyptian government for his "progressive" views, including the advocacy of religious harmony and tolerance between Egyptian Muslims, Christian Copts, and Jews, his own freedom was greatly restricted.

In 1996 Dr. Mansour established a weekly conference at the Ibn Khaldoun Center – headed by Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim – in order to discuss Islamist dogma, religion-based terror and other issues. It functioned until 2000, when the Center was closed down by the Egyptian regime.

Sheikh Mansour sought and was granted political asylum in the United States in 2002.

Recently he has served as a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Mansour has authored 24 books and some 500 articles in Arabic, dealing with many aspects of Islamic history, culture, and religion. They include a history of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia; a critique of the concept of Jihad, bigotry and dictatorship in Muslim thought; women’s rights in the Muslim world; the reform of Egyptian education; and various pieces of prose fiction and screen plays. [http://www.religionandpolicy.org/show.php?p=3.1.84] Sheik Mansour claims about 10,000 followers in Egypt, many of whom are part of his extended family.The sect members call themselves Quranists because they believe that the Koran represents the single authentic scripture of Islam. They especially anger Sunni Muslims by rejecting the Hadith and Sunna, purported sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad.Mansour is a former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he was expelled in 1987 as the Muslim equivalent of a "heretic" and was briefly imprisoned by Egyptian authorities. After subsequent waves of persecution, he finally fled Egypt just months after the September 11, 2001, attacks and received political asylum in the United States the next year.More recently, in May and June, Egyptian authorities arrested five leaders of the movement, including Sheik Mansour"s brother, on charges of "insulting Islam" and began investigations of 15 others.Paul Marshal analyzes in the Weekly Standard:"These arrests are part of the Egyptian government's double game in which it imprisons members of the Muslim Brotherhood when the latter appear to become too powerful, while simultaneously trying to appear Islamic itself and blunt the Brotherhood's appeal by cracking down on religious reformers, who are very often also democracy activists."

Mansour laments:"Killing people just because they are not Muslims, they have a Hadith for this. To kill a Muslim like me after accusing him to be an 'apostate," they have a Hadith for this. To persecute the Jews, they have a Hadith for this. All this is garbage. It has nothing to do with Islam. It contradicts more than one-fourth of the Koranic verses.", "We find Islam has the same values as the West: freedom, unlimited freedom of speech, justice, equality, loving, humanity, tolerance, mercy, everything. This is our version of Islam, and we argue that this is the core of Islam according to the Koran." and "Few Americans understand that the battle against terrorism is a war of ideas. It is a war that is very different from the military in its tactics, its strategy and its weapons."

Operations in the U.S.

He and his sons operate the Quranic Center in Northern Virginia, which includes an elaborate Internet site in Arabic and English. On its Web site at www.ahl-alquran.com, the organization is republishing dozens of Sheik Mansour"s books and hundreds of articles he has written over the years.Since arriving in the states, Sheik Mansour has held a number of academic posts. In 2002, he was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, where he wrote on the roots of democracy in Islam.The next year, he received a visiting fellowship at Harvard Law School"s Human Rights Program.

External links

* [http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070926/FOREIGN/109260030/1003 Washington Times Article]