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Case file

Nasr Abu Zayd

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “born in tanta”. Today it says “egyptian quranic thinker”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2005 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2005

Nasr (Hamid) Abu Zayd was born in Tanta , Egypt on October 7 1943 and currently works and resides in The Netherlands . In 1981, he obtained his doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Highest Honours from Cairo University, where he worked until 1995. he specialises in Humanistic Hermeneutics . He suffered major religious persecution for his views on the Qur'an as a religious, mythical literary work. He was was declared an apostate by a high court, ordered to divorce his wife, and, in effect, forced out of his homeland. Since 1995 Abu Zayd and his wife have lived in exile in The Netherlands, holding now a chair at the University of Leiden and previously with the University for Humanistics, Utrecht , The Netherlands . At the time, he became something of a cause célèbre for people concerned about what they see as the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. v t e1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 16920508.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “born in tanta”. Today it says “egyptian quranic thinker”. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2005, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

born in tanta

Now

egyptian quranic thinker

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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