I first met Nasr Abu Zayd at Reset Istanbul Seminars in 2009. We never really knew each other, but we ended up exchanging views on Islam and Iran and having the same interests about interreligious dialogue. Nasr was anything but an ordinary person about whom one could easily make a rapid judgment. He probably had many enemies among those who believed in a hard reading of Islam, but he certainly provoked a lot of fear among those who practice Islam in particular and religion in general with a childish orthodoxy. There were some who questioned his insights and his courageous remarks about the textuality of the Qur’an. But now, as we come to see his writings more clearly and to recognize that his search for truth was the source of all his inspiration, this fear and misunderstanding can be put aside.

Nasr’s lifeline reads like one long relationship with truth. One might honestly characterize Nasr Abu Zayd as a truth seeker. He was a scholar who had risked everything to restore the tradition of truth seeking in Islam. His approach always reminded me of that of Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript when he cites a passage from Lessing which imagines that God approaches a human being and offers him the opportunity to transcend himself. Kierkegaard wrote: “If God held closed in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand a persistent, ceaseless, active passion for truth, although with the proviso of one’s continual and eternal erring, and he spoke to me, saying: “Choose!” I would fall before his left hand in humility and say: “Father, let me have that! Pure truth is only for you alone.”

Here is the context: if religion is thought as absolute truth, one has misunderstood religion and what gives rise to it. Religious texts emerge out of the social condition of being human, and religious language is that speech which arises in the context of the historical meaningfulness of one’s being. However, when Abu Zayd suggested to use the hermeneutic approach and to qualify the Qur’an as a ‘text’ he was considered as an apostate by both the religious establishment and fundamentalist organizations.

Usually, we think that religion is something marked by a God given worldview and certain devotional practices. Thus we characteristically exclude under the rubric “religion” a pursuit of critical truth. Religious people accede to absolute truth and forget that religion has roots in the philosophical pursuit of the truth itself – the person misses what it is that gives rise to religious ideas in the first place. Nasr’s thought was suffused with a Socratic concern for an individual’s relationship with truth. As in the case of Socrates, it was the practice of Nasr Abu Zayd to ask questions but not to give final answers, for he confessed that there is no such thing as a religious text without a context.

I think that Nasr’s quest for truth was a quest for freedom. In this quest, he cheerfully investigated any type of limitation inherent in any type of religious belief, only to show the lack of solidity of these limitations and fixed conclusions. With this quest Nasr deviated from traditionalist interpretations by taking a hermeneutic view of the Qur’an and placing himself firmly in the tradition of those in the Islamic world who saw the textuality of the Qur’an woven with the call of critical reading and evolutionary interpretation. In this respect, his work is an indispensable tool for Muslims themselves so they can wage their struggle for enlightenment and reform of their faith tradition.

I often thought of Nasr Abu Zayd as a twenty first century Ibn ar-Rawandi, a Medieval Islamic thinker who by pursuing a rational path in religious debates was banned and cursed by many Muslim authors and authorities, not only because his reading of the Qur’an was rooted in his own Socratic quest of truth, but also because he had developed a style that spoke to a great number of his contemporaries—and, I am sure, will continue to speak to many more throughout the world in the years to come.