Men Around the Prophet

Khalid Muhammad Khalid was a popular Egyptian writer on religious and political topics, and the author of more than thirty books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. He received his theological degree from the faculty of shariah at al-Azhar University in 1947, and then gained a teaching certificate, also from al-Azhar. He taught Arabic language, and then worked in the Egyptian Ministry of Education and in the Ministry of Culture. He became a supervisor in the Department for the Publication of the Heritage. His first book, 'From Here We Begin', published in 1950, was a forceful and controversial call for separation of religion from state, as well as for a democratic socialism, effective birth control, and furtherance of the rights of women. It was shortly translated into English, as was the Islamist response to it, Our Beginning in Wisdom, by his friend Muhammad al-Ghazali. These two books provide a good sample of the secularist-Islamist debate in Egypt at mid-century. Khalid expressed similar views in other passionately written books in the 1950s and early 1960s. Later he wrote a number of books on Muhammad and other heroes of early Islam. In his book al-Dawla fi al-Islam (The State in Islam), published in 1981, he revised his earlier secularist position, stating that Islam does have civil principles that should be applied by the state, although it does not prescribe a "religious government." According to Khalid, parliamentary democracy is the contemporary application of the Islamic principle of shura (consultation)