Muhammad Abduh

by Mark Sedgwick

  On January 14, 1905, the khedive asked Lord Cromer to agree to the removal of Muhammad Abduh from his position as Mufti. Cromer refused, although Muhammad Abduh expressed his willingness to resign. On March 19, however, Muhammad Abduh resigned from the Azhar Administrative Council. He also resigned from the Council for Endowments.

  Muhammad Abduh had evidently decided that his days as Mufti were over. His determination to leave government service was known, and a supporter had given him some land on which to start a school. He may even have been thinking of emigrating: in 1905 he visited the Sudan, where he had for some time been advising the legal secretary of the British-run Sudan Government on the Sudanese Sharia Court system. While this may have been routine business, Muhammad Abduh may have been looking for a new job.

  DEATH

  Muhammad Abduh, however, fell ill. On his way to Europe for treatment, his condition worsened, and he stopped in Alexandria at the house of Muhammad Bey Rasim, in the Ramleh district. There, at 5 p.m. on July 11, 1905, he died of cancer of the kidney, aged fifty-six.

  He did not, however, die in disgrace. A special train was arranged to take his body to Cairo, stopping on the way several times for crowds to pay their last respects. In Cairo he was given a state funeral, with a cortege from the rail station to the Azhar that included officials, diplomats, army and police officers, Azhar students, and “a vast concourse of people from all classes and religious faiths.” He was buried in the Mujawirin cemetery. At the commemoration which in Egypt traditionally marks forty days after a death, “a great crowd again gathered.”

  One of the many who attended the funeral was Ahmad Shafiq Pasha, a lawyer and prominent courtier. When he returned from the funeral, the khedive addressed him as follows:

  But don’t you realize that this man was the enemy of God, the enemy of the Prophet, the enemy of religion, the enemy of the doctors of the faith [ulema], the enemy of the Muslims, and the enemy of himself?

  THE ENEMY OF GOD?

  Although it had been said, wrote Lord Cromer, that “an upper-class Moslem must be ‘a fanatic or a concealed infidel,’” he thought Muhammad Abduh was neither. “I suspect that my friend Abdu, although he would have resented the appellation being applied to him, was in reality an Agnostic,” wrote Cromer, after Muhammad Abduh’s death.

  Cromer was certainly right in saying that Muhammad Abduh was not a “fanatic,” if by that word he meant a Muslim who was unwilling to contemplate any alternative to generally accepted understandings of Islam. Muhammad Abduh’s message was, in that sense of the word “fanatic,” directed against fanaticism. Cromer was also right in saying that Muhammad Abduh was not a concealed infidel, but probably not right in seeing him as agnostic. We have only caught occasional glimpses of Muhammad Abduh’s private religious views, but these glimpses do not really suggest agnosticism. One of the most intriguing glimpses in later years is of Muhammad Abduh performing the ritual prayer with his shoes on, a practice that he (as we have seen) is said to have issued a fatwa to defend. Nearly all Muslims, of any variety, were and are fully agreed that shoes should be removed before the prayer. Quite why Muhammad Abduh disagreed is not known, but performing the prayer with shoes on is convincing evidence that Muhammad Abduh was neither a “concealed infidel” nor an agnostic. An agnostic or an infidel might perform the ritual prayer for the sake of appearances, but no one who was interested in appearances would pray with his shoes on.

  It is interesting that Muhammad Abduh remained an active Freemason even as Mufti – though he evidently denied this to Rashid Rida, who explained in Al-Manar that while Muhammad Abduh had once been a Freemason, he had since “cleaned himself internally from Masonry.” Muhammad Abduh’s name, however, appears in a return for 1901 held in the archives of the French Grand Orient in Paris, along with that of Butrus Ghali Pasha, the prime minister. It is possible that Cromer belonged to the same lodge. Saad Zaghlul also remained a Freemason, though it is not known whether he was in the same lodge as Muhammad Abduh. Muhammad Abduh’s earlier participation in Freemasonry can be explained in terms of his participation in Afghani’s revolutionary conspiracy, but his political views as Mufti were very different. His continuing participation in Freemasonry might be explained in terms of the useful contacts it provided. It might also be explained, however, in terms of Muhammad Abduh being a sincere believer in the Masonic ideal of working to better the lot of humanity.

  THE AFTERMATH

  Despite Muhammad Abduh’s death, he continued to have an impact on Egyptian life, as did many of the individuals with whom he was associated, and whom he had to some extent inspired. Some of Muhammad Abduh’s projects were completed by these associates, even though some of his other achievements were undone.

  PUBLIC LIFE

  After the death of Muhammad Abduh, Lord Cromer redirected his support to Muhammad Abduh’s closest friend and colleague, Saad Zaghlul. In 1906, at Cromer’s insistence, the khedive appointed Zaghlul minister of public instruction. One of Zaghlul’s first acts was to establish the school for Sharia Court judges that Muhammad Abduh’s commission had proposed in 1904, and in 1908 the Egyptian University for which he and Muhammad Abduh had worked was also opened. It had proved impossible to reform the Azhar to produce properly trained judges for the Sharia Courts, and it had proved equally impossible to reform it to produce “an inquiring man, a thinker, a philosopher.” The school for Sharia Court judges produced the one, however, and the Egyptian University (later renamed Cairo University) produced the other, at least until it was transformed into a different, and far from rigorous, mass university during the Nasser period. In two important respects, then, what Muhammad Abduh had been working for was achieved soon after his early death.

  Zaghlul was not the only associate of Muhammad Abduh to move from administration into politics, with some encouragement from Cromer. In 1906 a group including several members of the Benevolent Society established a company to publish an anti-khedival and liberal newspaper, Al-Jarida, which appeared in 1907 under the editorship of Ahmad Lutfi. Shortly after Al-Jarida started publication, however, Cromer resigned as consul-general and returned to England, mostly for health reasons. He was replaced by Sir Eldon Gorst, who quickly reversed a major aspect of Cromer’s policy by seeking a rapprochement with the khedive. When in late 1907 the group around Al-Jarida founded a political party, the Umma Party, with Ahmad Lutfi as secretary, its opposition to the khedive led to a different relationship with the British. Although not exactly hostile to the British, the Umma party did not enjoy the same cooperative relationship with them that Muhammad Abduh and then Zaghlul had once enjoyed with Cromer.

  Zaghlul, however, became minister of justice in 1910, and then under the very different conditions that existed after the First World War became Egypt’s leading nationalist politician. His arrest by the British in 1919 sparked riots that are sometimes described as a revolution, and that certainly led Britain to give up direct control over Egypt. Following his release, Zaghlul founded what became one of Egypt’s main political parties, the Wafd Party. As leader of this party, he served as prime minister, and won three elections. If, during the interwar period, he never quite achieved Egypt’s full independence, he without doubt did more towards that than any other Egyptian. Ahmad Lutfi initially joined Zaghlul’s Wafd Party, but then retired from politics. He served as rector of the Egyptian University for many years, and was briefly minister of education from 1928 to 1929.

  Among others of Muhammad Abduh’s associates, Omar Lutfi might have continued to similar prominence, but died in 1911. Talaat Harb became the leading proponent of economic nationalism, establishing a private Bank of Egypt that grew into a massive holding company. Subsidiaries of Talaat Harb’s bank established Egypt’s first film studios and, in 1937, the airline that is now called Egyptair.

  Talaat Harb, Saad Zaghlul, and Ahmad Lutfi played major roles in producing what was seen by many intellectuals at the time as an Egyptian renaissance – which was precisely what, in the last resort, Mu
hammad Abduh had always worked for. Although this renaissance had begun to run out of steam by the 1950s, when it was replaced by the problematic “Arab Socialist” regime of President Nasser, for some decades Egyptian public and intellectual life changed significantly, in much the direction that Muhammad Abduh wanted.

  The achievements of Talaat Harb, Saad Zaghlul, and Ahmad Lutfi were of a variety that Muhammad Abduh himself could hardly have envisaged, given that circumstances between the world wars were so different from those he had known. British weakness lay as much beyond his imagination as film studios and airlines. Muhammad Abduh was only one influence on the development of these men, who also drew directly on the progressive European thought that Muhammad Abduh had drawn on. Muhammad Abduh, however, still deserves some credit for what his younger associates achieved later in their lives, and so for the emergence of a newly independent, modern and – for a time – self-confident Egyptian nation state. His reputation as an Egyptian patriot is deserved, then.

  ISLAM

  If Egyptian public and intellectual life changed in the direction that Muhammad Abduh wanted, religious life at first changed less, and then changed in other directions. In the short term, many of Muhammad Abduh’s most notable positions concerning Islam were reversed, and in the long term, new understandings of Islam became widespread that were very much against the spirit of Muhammad Abduh’s own understanding.

  Muhammad Abduh’s successor as Mufti, Muhammad Bakhit, immediately published a condemnation of property insurance as forbidden on the classic grounds that it was in effect a form of gambling. The same conclusion was reached by another Mufti, Abd al-Rahman Kuraha, in 1925. When, in 1926, the Sharia Court of Appeals came to consider a case involving a with-profits endowment life insurance policy of the sort that Muhammad Abduh had approved in 1903, it refused to order a payment to the appellant, on the grounds that the entire contract was illegal and so unenforceable. Consumer finance remains little used in Egypt even today – though there are reasons for this that have nothing to do with Islam, and derive ultimately from the socialist system that was set up by President Nasser. In other parts of the world, an “Islamic finance”industry has developed that in 2007 managed assets worth some $500 billion. Like Muhammad Abduh, this industry aims to make modern financial instruments available to observant Muslims. It does so, however, by modifying the form of the financial instrument and leaving intact the generally accepted interpretations of the Sharia. Muhammad Abduh tried to leave the form of the financial instrument intact, and to modify interpretations of the Sharia. The alternative approach has worked better.

  Fatwas on other topics were not reversed, but were generally ignored. A small minority of Muslims do follow Muhammad Abduh’s fatwa on meat slaughtered by Christians, but the vast majority do not. The “Halal butcher”has become a central feature in the life of the Muslim diaspora in Europe. Although Muslims today sometimes wear hats and only very rarely wear the fez, this is a result of the abolition of the fez by modernizing states that saw it not as a symbol of Islam but as a symbol of the old monarchical regimes.

  Two basic ideas that Muhammad Abduh had promoted did become generally accepted. One was that Islam should not be an obstacle to progress. Progress, of course, can be understood in many different ways. The other was the rejection of taqlid. Most urban Egyptians today do not think of themselves as following a madhhab, for example, but rather as following Islam. This is not equally true everywhere in the Muslim world, especially in countries where there has only ever been one madhhab, but in general taqlid is no longer an issue. Some current legislation in Egypt and other Muslim countries, mostly on questions such as divorce and inheritance, is based on the Sharia. Recent legislation in these areas has generally followed an approach similar to that used by Muhammad Abduh, based on talfiq and maslaha rather than taqlid, and Muhammad Abduh deserves credit for this.

  The more general demise of the madhhabs also owes something to Muhammad Abduh’s influence. Many later writers and thinkers promoted their own visions of a non-madhhab Islam, from Rashid Rida to Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brothers, a very successful mass movement that has had an extraordinary impact on the entire Muslim world. In Rida’s case, the general idea of a non-madhhab Islam can be traced to Muhammad Abduh, though the understanding of Islam was different, as we will see below. Al-Banna likewise owed the general idea of a non-madhhab Islam indirectly to Muhammad Abduh, though again the understanding of Islam was different.

  The demise of the madhhabs results also from the success of a very different religious reform movement, however, started by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian peninsula in the late eighteenth century. This movement was of little importance in Muhammad Abduh’s time, when it appeared to have been defeated by military action in the days of Mehmet Ali, but in the mid-1920s its proponents captured the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a state which has since promoted its understanding of Islam very successfully. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s reform movement thus received a type of backing that Muhammad Abduh’s did not.

  Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, like Muhammad Abduh, denied the validity of the madhhabs. He called for an unmediated reading of the original texts from which they were derived, the Quran and the hadith. His objection to taqlid was not that it prevented the exercise of reason – which was, in the end, Muhammad Abduh’s objection – but rather that taqlid contained too much human reasoning, and so was something other than the original divine revelation. The Egyptian ulema of the time rejected this view partly because the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab seemed to them to be simply replacing one interpretation with another. In contemporary Western terms, they were certainly doing this, since every act of reading is necessarily an act of interpretation. This may not be obviously true when the text being read is a newspaper, but it is clearly true when the text being read is as complex as the Quran and hadith are, especially when taken together. The Egyptian ulema also objected, of course, because the interpretation that the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab were rejecting was that which they themselves guarded and promoted

  Although extreme hostility to the madhhabs later vanished from the teachings of the official ulema of Saudi Arabia, the original condemnation of taqlid remained alive in other circles, and has since spread from Saudi Arabia to many other parts of the Muslim world. In the end, the demise of the madhhabs owes as much or more to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as to Muhammad Abduh.

  What has replaced the madhhabs is not, in general, the rationalist, liberal Islam that Muhammad Abduh promoted. During the twentieth century, it was versions of the interpretation of Islam espoused by activists such as Hasan al-Banna, and then versions of the Saudi interpretation of Islam, that became ever more influential. Hasan al-Banna’s interpretation was far from nineteenth-century liberalism, and the Saudi interpretation was in no way rationalist or liberal.

  Muhammad Abduh’s understanding of Islam, however, was not entirely lost. It remains alive in two, somewhat different, circles. One of these is the descendants of the Egyptian class where Muhammad Abduh was appreciated in his lifetime. This class lost its position as Egypt’s elite during the Nasser period, but has not vanished. There are still Egyptian Muslims in Cairo who, like Muhammad Abduh, have read and appreciated the classics of modern Western thought, who speak French and English as well as Arabic, and who love Egypt and would never want to be anything but Egyptian, even if they are frequently exasperated and even dismayed by the behavior their fellow Egyptians. These Egyptians, like Muhammad Abduh, are more concerned with conclusions than with methodology, and may worry less about the details of Islam than about broad principles – which generally include such virtues as self-help and honesty.

  The other circle in which Muhammad Abduh’s understanding remains alive consists of later “modernist” intellectuals who, like him, want to promote an Islam that is appropriate for the modern world – which they see globally, not locally. These intellectuals generally
pay more attention to methodology than Muhammad Abduh did, but even so are working in his spirit. Rather as Muhammad Abduh tried to show that there was no contradiction between Islam and science, the Sudanese intellectual Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, for example, has tried to show that there is no contradiction between Islam and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Others, such as the Egyptian Nasr Abu Zayd and the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, have attempted to reconcile Islam with contemporary Western humanism. Such intellectuals, however, have limited influence, and reactions against them in the Muslim world have often been extremely hostile. All those mentioned above moved to Europe or to the United States.

  That Muhammad Abduh’s understanding of Islam has become that of a small minority is not just because of the popularity of alternative understandings, notably versions of the Saudi understanding. It is also because the liberal rationalism that inspired Muhammad Abduh has been on the defensive in the Arab world since the late 1930s, rather as it was in Europe during the period of fascism and communism, and in some ways for similar reasons.

  VIEWS ON MUHAMMAD ABDUH

  Little attention was paid to Muhammad Abduh in Egypt for some twenty years after his death, but Rashid Rida carried on publication of Al-Manar until his own death in 1935, himself completing the tafsir that had started with Muhammad Abduh’s Azhar lectures. Requests for fatwas that once might have been sent to Muhammad Abduh were now sent to Rida, for example by some Muslims in Indonesia who in 1907 asked whether a Muslim might drink wine, beer, or any of their ingredients. It might have been interesting to see how Muhammad Abduh would have handled such a question – but Rida was more predictable.