the 1990s there were several assaults on liberal intellectuals and artists in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Ahmed Sobhy Mansour was dismissed from Al-Azhar University and imprisoned for six months. This was based on a verdict reached by the university itself on the grounds that he rejected a fundamental tenet of Islam in his research of truth of some of Muhammad's sayings, or Hadith. Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist in 1994, leaving him incapable of using his hand to write. Egyptian courts were the theatre of different lawsuits brought against intellectuals, journalists, and university professors such as Atif al-Iraqi, Ragaa al-Naqash, Mahmoud al-Tohami, and Youssef Chahine (for his film El-Mohager, The Emigrant). Abu Zayd's case has been described as demonstrating the "coercive impulse behind much Islamism, as well as the unintended consequences of making concessions in its direction", as those conservatives calling for his killing included religious figures and media supposedly co-opted by the regime. Other became suspicious of "collusion" between "violent rebels and the conservative Islamists" who held "senior positions in some of Egypt's public institutions." Gilles Kepel) noted the case as a demonstration of how moderate and extremists Islamists could "complemented one another's actions". Rather than the moderates undermining the extremists as some had hoped, "moderates" (such as Abdel-Sabour Shahin and The Islamic Banner) would singled out victims as "apostates" who were then executed (or in Zayd's case provided with a very credible threat of murder) by the extremists (such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad). The "moderates" would deplore fanaticism of the extremists in public, but plead "attenuating circumstance" on their behalf when the need arose. His case has been compared to controversies over interpretation of the Quran involving Taha Hussein in the 1920s and Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah in the 1940s. The fact that a well established/respected scholar like Abu Zayd "suffered more concretely" than the other two is an illustration of "the gains made by Islamists in the last half of the 20th century. Thought According to scholar Navid Kermani "three key themes" emerge from Abu Zayd's work: to trace the various interpretations and historical settings of the single Qur'anic text from the early days of Islam up to the present; to demonstrate the "interpretational diversity" (al-ta 'addud alta 'wili)<ref>Mafhum al-nass: dirasa fi 'ulum al-Qur'an. Cairo, 1990. , p.11</ref> that exists within the Islamic tradition; and to show