hence the decision was based on Qur'anic punishment. But the Egyptian Penal Code did not recognize apostasy, and Civil Law restricts the proof of apostasy to two possibilities: either a certificate from a specialized religious institution certifying that the individual has converted to another religion, or a confession by the individual that he has converted. Neither had been provided. Nasr Abu Zayd never declared himself to be an apostate. In an interview, he explained: I'm sure that I'm a Muslim. My worst fear is that people in Europe may consider and treat me as a critic of Islam. I'm not. I'm not a new Salman Rushdie, and don't want to be welcomed and treated as such. I'm a researcher. I'm critical of old and modern Islamic thought. I treat the Qur'an as a naṣṣ (text) given by God to the Prophet Muhammad. That text is put into a human language, which is the Arabic language. When I said so, I was accused of saying that the Prophet Muhammad wrote the Qur'an. This is not a crisis of thought, but a crisis of conscience. Exile On 23 July 1995, the couple fled their homeland for an indefinite sabbatical. They flew to Madrid, then decided to go from Spain to the Netherlands, where he was invited to teach as a Visiting Professor at the Leiden University. Abu Zayd explained, I couldn't take more than two months of around the clock security. Whenever someone came to visit they had to be cleared. Whenever I wanted to go out I had to coordinate with security. I couldn't just go to a coffee shop with my friends and play a round of backgammon. What kind of life was that? Though his books were not officially banned in Egypt, they were pulled from the library shelves of his alma mater. On November 8, 1999, he filed a suit against the Egyptian justice minister, demanding that the 1996 ruling which annulled the marriage be declared illegal. Legacy The Egyptian government "strived to ignore" the case. There were only brief mentions of it in the state-run media and no government official spoke in his defense. However, in 1998, the regulations governing Sharia courts in Egypt were amended making it impossible for individuals to file lawsuits accusing someone of apostasy, leaving the issue to the prerogative of the prosecution office. The action against Abu Zayd was not isolated. During