Muhammad Abduh

by Mark Sedgwick

  Afghani’s Paris group probably consisted of only a few people. He may have hoped that it would become as significant as some of the larger Ottoman émigré organizations, or as the group he had headed in Cairo, but this did not happen. The group may have been responsible for an attempt at intimidating some British officials in Egypt by sending threatening letters – the British authorities thought these probably came from Afghani – but its main activity was to publish a newspaper, also called Al-Urwa al-wuthqa, between March and October 1884. This newspaper was small (only four pages an issue), short lived (it published only eighteen issues), and with a limited distribution (some nine hundred copies), but nevertheless became well known in some circles in the Arabic-speaking world – though it is possible that it became better known in later years than it was at the time.

  Al-Urwa al-wuthqa was published from a small room near the Place de la Madeleine. The costs of printing, and presumably also Muhammad Abduh’s and Afghani’s living expenses, were paid by sympathizers, including the Irish activist Wilfrid Blunt, an exiled general living in Italy, and the deposed khedive Ismail, with whom Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi was closely connected. Ismail routinely subsidized activities of this sort, as did other exiled princes. Slightly more than half the copies of Al-Urwa al-wuthqa were mailed to Egypt, and most of the remainder went to the Ottoman Empire – notably to Beirut and Istanbul. After a few issues, a British official in India reported that “Within the limits of its four pages it contains nothing that is not anti-English. The paper in my humble opinion is not fit to be allowed into India, although fortunately, there are not many in this country who read Arabic.” The British in Egypt evidently came to a similar conclusion, since they prohibited the entry of further issues. It seems that at about this time Al-Urwa al-wuthqa also ran out of money.

  MUHAMMAD ABDUH AND WILFRID BLUNT

  Wilfrid Blunt, who had first met Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in Egypt during the Urabi Revolt, remained interested in them in exile, partly because of his own continued efforts to lobby the British government – to which his wealth and family connections gave him good access – to modify its policy regarding Egypt, and partly because of a new interest in the Sudan. The collapse of Egyptian power in the Sudan that was caused by the British occupation of Egypt had permitted a successful uprising against Egyptian rule there. This was led by an unusual Sudanese Sufi, Muhammad Ahmad, who presented himself as the Mahdi – the “guided one” who is predicted by Muslim eschatology to come at the end of time and lead the Muslims in the final battle against Satan that is expected to precede the day of judgment. The Sudan was a major concern for the British public, since a half-hearted and poorly organized attempt to defeat the Mahdi had resulted in the isolation of one of the British public’s greatest heroes, General Charles Gordon, under siege in Khartoum. Blunt was convinced that Afghani was in close contact with the Mahdi, which was not the case. Afghani evidently found Blunt’s mistake useful.

  Blunt visited Afghani in Paris. He described Muhammad Abduh at this time as “somewhat Europeanized already by a two months’ stay in Paris. He had left off shaving his head, and wore a fez instead of a turban, which rather detracted from his dignity as shaykh, though he was still dressed in a respectable fur pelisse [cloak].” Muhammad Abduh’s change of clothing may have indicated a change in the identity he wished to project, from Azhari to secular intellectual. Saad Zaghlul had made this change in 1880, dropping the religious title of shaykh as well as the turban, and adopting the secular title of effendi as well as the fez. Alternatively, it may have been for purely practical reasons. The fez was known to the French as standard modern Ottoman dress, and would have attracted somewhat less attention than a turban in the streets of Paris. It would also have been more useful in the rain. Afghani, however, continued to dress as a member of the ulema. Importantly for Muhammad Abduh’s subsequent career, the change of headgear and identity was not permanent.

  A further glimpse of the life that Muhammad Abduh was living in Paris is given by a discussion that Blunt observed with some visitors of his: “a Russian lady, an American philanthropist, and two young Bengalis who announced themselves as Theosophists” – that is, as followers of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, the headquarters of which had been moved from New York to India in 1880–82. In Europe, the Theosophical Society was associated with spiritism and a post-Christian religiosity that drew on both Western esotericism and Hinduism. In India it was also associated with Indian nationalism. Whether Muhammad Abduh’s relations with the Bengali Theosophists were based on a shared interest in nationalism or on a shared interest in alternative religion, then, is hard to say.

  Muhammad Abduh’s visitors expressed general sympathy with the Mahdi, but were worried about what they had heard of the Mahdi’s views on the slave trade. Resistance to British and Egyptian attempts to end the slave trade in the Sudan were, in fact, one of the major reasons for support for the Mahdi, and the Mahdi had ended restrictions on the enslavement of non-Muslim Africans. According to Blunt, Muhammad Abduh “explained how much slaves gained among Mohammedans in exchange for their freedom.” “This sent them away happy,” wrote Blunt, “but the poor shaykh was put to his last shifts to hide his amusement.” It is not clear what amused Muhammad Abduh most – the naivety of his visitors at accepting his rather weak justification for slavery, or the fact that he had been obliged to produce such a justification in the first place. Nothing else suggests that Muhammad Abduh was an enthusiast of slavery, a system that had been abolished in Egypt in 1877, though a few house slaves were still kept there until the end of the century.

  The following month, Blunt arranged for Muhammad Abduh to visit London to assist him in his lobbying. Muhammad Abduh arrived in London in July 1884, and was taken by Blunt to the House of Commons, where he was presented as one of the leaders of the Egyptian National Party (which was no longer really the case). Blunt was aware of the importance of public relations, and persuaded Muhammad Abduh to wear for this visit “his blue jibbeh [gown] and white turban” – not the fez Muhammad Abduh had adopted in Paris. “He created quite a sensation in the lobby [of the House of Commons],” wrote Blunt with satisfaction. This is the occasion on which Muhammad Abduh was photographed, probably for the first time. The photograph in question, which shows a grave and handsome religious figure, has since become one of the two best-known photographs of Muhammad Abduh. Few realize that the location of the photograph is the House of Commons, or that Muhammad Abduh’s religious robes had been pressed on him for the occasion by an Irishman.

  Over the next few days, Muhammad Abduh met a range of British opposition politicians. He started with George Howard, later the Earl of Carlisle, an aristocratic Liberal MP who had traveled in Egypt but was perhaps more interested in art than politics. He was introduced to Charles Stewart Parnell, the great Irish nationalist leader, and to Lord Randolph Churchill, a leading opponent of Prime Minister William Gladstone (and the father of Winston Churchill). Finally, he met Henry Labouchere, a wealthy radical MP who specialized in attacking Gladstone for his Egyptian policy, and advocated a British withdrawal from all of Egypt save the Suez Canal. Labouchere was the politician Blunt most wanted Muhammad Abduh to meet. He tried to persuade Muhammad Abduh of the usefulness of what would later have been called a campaign of civil disobedience in Egypt – a refusal to pay taxes under British occupation. Muhammad Abduh did not like the idea. He responded that it was more likely to produce British annexation than British withdrawal.

  In the event, there was never a tax strike, and Britain anyhow declared a protectorate over Egypt in 1914. Neither Blunt’s nor Muhammad Abduh’s activities in London had any significant consequences for either British or Egyptian politics. They must have had some consequences for Muhammad Abduh personally, though. At twenty-eight he had been in contact with the highest political levels of khedival Egypt. At thirty-five he experienced at first hand political levels of the British Empire that were important, if not the very highest. For most Egy
ptians, Britain was a monolithic and remote entity. Muhammad Abduh had seen that this was not the case. He had also experienced representative government in action, as well as read about it in theory.

  While in London, Muhammad Abduh stayed at Blunt’s house. Another guest at dinner one evening was Mirza Muhammad Baqir, a Persian friend of Afghani who knew English and Arabic. Baqir was unusual in having changed his religion twice – after converting from Islam to Christianity, he converted from Christianity back to Islam. Blunt records that during dinner Muhammad Abduh and Baqir discussed the nature of the Quran, Baqir arguing that it was “originally a book” and Muhammad Abduh arguing that it was “a compilation of oral sentences.” Blunt understood that Muhammad Abduh was arguing for a more historical and less divine understanding of the origins of the Quran than Baqir was. It is possible, however, that Blunt had failed to recognize the ancient and intricate debate over whether the Quran was created in time, or was uncreated – that is, existing from all eternity, from before time. Muhammad Abduh may have been arguing against the standard Sunni position that the Quran existed through all eternity (was a book originally), and for the alternative position, generally held by the Shi’a, that the Quran was created. He did, in fact, express this view on a later occasion. In that case, however, Baqir would have been arguing for the Sunni position – which would be strange in a Persian, even one who had spent a period as a Christian. Whatever Muhammad Abduh was actually arguing in London, however, it is clear that he had been reflecting on the nature of God’s revelation to humanity, and had perhaps come to conclusions which were unusual, either in Sunni terms or, perhaps, in Islamic terms.

  AL-URWA AL-WUTHQA

  More important for history than meetings in London was the newspaper Al-Urwa al-wuthqa. It is generally agreed that most of Al-Urwa al-wuthqa was written by Muhammad Abduh. Since the positions it took coincide with those Afghani was then taking, however, the final responsibility for the views expressed in it must to some extent be shared between Muhammad Abduh and Afghani.

  The basic line of Al-Urwa al-wuthqa was, somewhat surprisingly, support for the Ottoman sultan, Abd al-Hamid, as Caliph and leader of the Muslims worldwide, a role that Abd al-Hamid himself was promoting, using his religious role as Caliph to bolster his secular political role. This involved two significant shifts from the policy of nationalist constitutionalism followed by Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in Egypt. First, it required the abandonment of the earlier definition of the national community as being geographically based (for example, that of Egypt or India) and above religious divisions. Indian nationalists had generally condemned division along religious lines because it was necessary to form a common front against the British, and Afghani and Muhammad Abduh had previously taken a similar line with regard to Egypt, where the Coptic Christian and Jewish minorities constituted some one tenth of the population, and were especially significant because of their unusual prominence in commercial life, and – as we have seen – in journalism. “Can anyone doubt,” asked Muhammad Abduh rhetorically while under arrest in Cairo, “that our struggle was a national one when men of all races and creeds – Muslims, Copts, and Jews – rushed to join it with enthusiasm?”A similar emphasis on cooperation across religious boundaries was later to be found in the case of the Wafd, the highly successful Egyptian nationalist party formed by Saad Zaghlul after the First World War.

  Second, the line of Al-Urwa al-wuthqa required the abandonment of the fight against tyranny. Abd al-Hamid, known in opposition circles as “the red” for the quantity of blood he had on his hands, had become sultan in 1876 with the support of a constitutionalist movement similar to that which supported the khedive Tawfiq in Egypt, but had quickly moved against the constitutionalists, suspending the constitution and later killing the leader of the constitutionalist party. He then instituted an absolute autocracy along the most modern lines, complete with strict censorship, a ubiquitous secret police, and a system of denunciations that anticipated Stalin’s. By the time of his final deposition from effective power by a military coup in 1908, he had become so unpopular that the news of the coup was greeted by dancing in the streets of major cities across his empire.

  The support of Afghani and Muhammad Abduh for Abd al-Hamid was clearly opportunistic. Blunt reports that Muhammad Abduh spoke with feeling against Abd al-Hamid and the injustices of his rule in Syria in late March 1884, when Al-Urwa al-wuthqa had already started publication. The decision to support Abd al-Hamid was probably Afghani’s, since Afghani had written in 1882, in an émigré newspaper published in London (Al-Nahla, “The bee”), of the caliphate as “al-urwa al-wuthqa,” the firmest bond to which Muslims might hold, ascribing the British invasion of Egypt to British fear that Muslims might rally round the Ottoman sultan and so threaten Britain’s hold on India. In an 1883 article in Al-Basir (“Insight”), a Syrian émigré newspaper published in Paris, Afghani argued that what was urgently needed was unity among Eastern peoples, and that attacks on the sultan might weaken this unity. If the Ottoman government were overthrown, individual Eastern peoples would be defenseless against Europe. Reforms could come later. Although in the event the Eastern unity for which Afghani hoped never materialized (save perhaps in the form of the Bandung Conference of 1955), events after the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 proved him right: the overthrow of the Ottoman government and state did indeed result in the European occupation of almost the whole Arab world.

  A similar logic was expressed by Muhammad Abduh in an interview by Blunt, published in English in the Pall Mall Gazette. Before 1882, Muhammad Abduh explained,

  We wished to break down the tyranny of our rulers; we complained of the Turks as foreigners; we wished to improve ourselves politically, and to advance as the nations of Europe have advanced on the path of liberty. Now we know that there are worse evils than despotism and worse enemies than the Turks.

  The context makes clear that the “worse evils” are foreign occupation, and that the “worse enemies” are the British.

  Whether the support for Islamic nationalism – that is, for a definition of the community based on religion rather than geography – was also opportunist is not clear. One of the benefits of religion expounded in Afghani’s 1881 Haqiqat-i mazhab-i naichun was national and social solidarity, so it is possible that Afghani had indeed changed his mind on this point.

  Abduh too seems to have changed his mind, writing in favor of the religious community rather than the national one, and also – importantly – rather than the racial one. Since the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps, analyses framed in terms of racial communities have become unacceptable. During the nineteenth century, however, the ideas that were ultimately developed into Nazi racism were not only widespread but generally considered quite acceptable, as is indicated by Renan’s analysis of the relationship between Islam and science in terms of differences between the Aryan and Semitic races, explained during a lecture at the Sorbonne. Afghani rejected this type of analysis in his response to Renan, but many Persians – whose language was undoubtedly of Aryan rather than Semitic origin – enthusiastically embraced such ideas, which were generally flattering to them. Since there was no possible way of arguing that Arabic or ancient Egyptian were anything but Semitic, however, there was no way in which Arabs or Egyptians could take advantage of these ideas. An analysis that stressed religion rather than race, then, had clear attractions.

  Apart from the villainy of the British, the central arguments developed in Al-Urwa al-wuthqa were the importance of Muslim solidarity and the need for Muslims to adhere to “true” Islam. A favorite quotation from the Quran was the verse already used by Afghani at the end of his Haqiqat-i mazhab-i naichun, “Verily, God does not change the state of a people until they change themselves inwardly.” This sentence (from Q. 13:11) had generally been understood to mean the opposite of what Afghani and Muhammad Abduh took it to mean. For most Sunnis, it meant that God does not deprive a people of His grace unless they have altered the state of t
heir souls through an act of disobedience, but that when this happened “if God wills evil for a people there is no-one who can avert it, nor have they any protector save Him,” as the verse concludes. The Quran is full of stories of peoples who turned from God and suffered accordingly, from the time of Noah, when general disobedience resulted in the Great Flood. Anyone who knows the Quran is inevitably very familiar with the point that disobedience results in punishment, for peoples on earth as well as for individuals after death. It is not hard to conclude from this that punishment indicates disobedience, and thus to proceed to the further point – developed by Afghani and Muhammad Abduh – that obedience will lift punishment. This view has since become very widely accepted among Muslims, and is still frequently expressed today.

  As Muhammad Abduh wrote,

  Nations have not fallen from their greatness, nor have their names been wiped off the slate of existence, except after they have departed from those laws which God prescribed … Ruin overtook [previous, now vanished, nations] because they turned astray from the laws of justice and the path of insight and wisdom … and chose to live in falsehood rather than die in the aid of truth.

  The varieties of disobedience that Muhammad Abduh emphasized were generally social or political rather than religious or spiritual, however – as one might expect in a newspaper with a political agenda. He drew attention to the failure of Muslims in general to ponder over the word of God as required by Quran 23:68, and of failing to act with justice and kindness, as required by Quran 16:90. He also drew attention to the requirement in Quran 3:103 that Muslims should not be divided, and the requirement in Quran 60:1 that Muslims should not make friends of those who were their own enemies and the enemies of God (i.e. unbelievers such as the British). Muslim rulers were chided for exulting in the luxuries of life contrary to Quran 28:58, and for failing to use mutual consultation (shura), as enjoined by Quran 3:159 and Quran 42:38.