Muhammad Abduh

by Mark Sedgwick

  Over the years, Rida became increasingly identified with Muhammad Abduh. Rida promoted the memory of Muhammad Abduh, and the memory of Muhammad Abduh promoted Rida. Without formal religious or scholarly credentials, and as something of an outsider in Egypt, Rida was in need of legitimization, and this was provided by his link with Muhammad Abduh, which he emphasized, presenting himself as Muhammad Abduh’s closest disciple – despite the fact that he had known him only the last eight years of his life, and that if any one person was obviously close to Muhammad Abduh throughout his whole life, it was not Rida but Saad Zaghlul. One reason that Rida was able to do this was that no one else was much interested in claiming the position of Muhammad Abduh’s successor. Muhammad Abduh’s former associates moved on into new roles which did not need religious legitimization. Zaghlul’s activities, for example, were legitimization enough in themselves. Also, by the time that Rida published his Tarikh al-ustadh al-imam al-shaykh Muhammad Abduh (“History of Professor the Imam Shaykh Muhammad Abduh”) in 1931, most of Muhammad Abduh’s closest associates were dead, and so could not comment either on Rida’s portrayal of Muhammad Abduh or on Rida’s portrayal of himself.

  Rida differed from Muhammad Abduh and his former associates both politically and intellectually. Politically, he was committed to the anti-imperialist nationalism that became more and more popular after the First World War, in Syria as well as Egypt – a position very different from Muhammad Abduh’s cooperative relationship with Lord Cromer, or even the purely Egyptian nationalism of Saad Zaghlul in the interwar period, but close to the radical pan-Islamist position that Muhammad Abduh had once promoted from Paris in Al-Urwa al-wuthqa. Intellectually, Rida never shared Muhammad Abduh’s enthusiasm for European civilization, or for European ideas. He was inspired not by Guizot or Spencer, or even by Persian philosophers, but by classic Islamic scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya, the often hard line Hanbalite whose work was used extensively by the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahab in Arabia.

  Rida shared Muhammad Abduh’s objections to taqlid and the madhhabs, but not his emphasis on the conclusions. His continuation of Muhammad Abduh’s tafsir in Al-Manar is much closer to classical tafsir, both in its conclusions and in its methods. Rida, for example, quotes from the hadith in the normal way, which Muhammad Abduh rarely did. Rida objected to Sufism not so much because of the role it seemed to have played in a historical scheme, but because the activities of the Sufis were bida, without sanction in the earliest texts.

  The views of Muhammad Abduh that Rida promoted were, naturally, those closest to his own. The same was true of the picture of Muhammad Abduh that emerged from Rida’s Tarikh. Muhammad Abduh’s conviction that the abandonment of true Islam was the cause of Muslim decline remained, but the nature of that true Islam changed. Rather than a proponent of reason, Muhammad Abduh became a restorer of Islamic orthodoxy, an opponent of bida – and an enthusiast of Ibn Taymiyya. His more unusual views were either ignored or actively deleted from the editions of his works that Rida prepared after the original trustees of these texts – people like Saad Zaghlul – had become too occupied by other matters to complete their task. Rida’s edition of Risalat al-tawhid differs in significant ways from Muhammad Abduh’s original. Certain important details of Muhammad Abduh’s life also vanished – the admiration for Guizot, the Freemasonry, and the excellent relations with Cromer.

  When interest in Muhammad Abduh revived some twenty-five years after his death, partly because reform of the Azhar was again on the agenda, two pictures of him were available. One was that provided by Rida. The other was that promoted in books such as a short biography by Mustafa Abd al-Raziq, published in 1925. Mustafa Abd al-Raziq had been one of the few Azhar students to appreciate Muhammad Abduh’s lectures there, and he had later followed a career similar to those of Muhammad Abduh’s younger associates, who were of course themselves older than he was. He taught at the school for Sharia Court judges and at the Egyptian University before going to France in 1909, where he obtained a PhD. In 1925, he was professor of philosophy at the Egyptian University. As might be expected, his biography of Muhammad Abduh stressed rationalism. As a slightly later biographer in the same spirit, Uthman Amin, wrote, what mattered was Muhammad Abduh’s “attempt to reform religion, his summons to free thought from the bonds of tradition.” This interpretation was presumably also in the mind of the distinguished Egyptian painter Muhammad Naji when, in the 1930s, he included Muhammad Abduh in a painting entitled “The School of Alexandria” along with Alexander the Great, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (also known as Saint Catherine of the Wheel), Archimedes, the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (who lived and died in Alexandria), and the modern Arabic novelist Taha Husayn, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Egyptian renaissance – and also an admirer of Muhammad Abduh.

  Both Rida’s picture and the alternative picture agreed that Muhammad Abduh was an Egyptian patriot and a reformer, which was certainly true. The pictures disagreed, however, about the thrust of the reforms – toward reason or toward orthodoxy – and about the nature of the man himself – modern intellectual or religious scholar.

  As time passed, the Rida view of Muhammad Abduh became the dominant one, enshrined in Egyptian school history lessons and in popular memory. Muhammad Abduh’s learning was stressed, and became more and more Islamic in its nature. His piety was respected, and his patriotism admired. As classic texts similar to those that Muhammad Abduh had once studied with Afghani became better known in the Sunni world, it became ever easier to find classic Islamic precedents for many of his views – precedents which may indeed have affected his reading of his nineteenth-century European thought, even if the historical analysis used in this book does not see them as his most important sources. As more and more emphasis came to be placed on these classic Islamic precedents, Muhammad Abduh’s other sources were increasingly ignored.

  As the details were almost entirely forgotten, Muhammad Abduh receded into the past. While the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death had been celebrated by a series of articles in Al-Ahram, then Egypt’s leading newspaper, and the fortieth anniversary was marked by a speech by King Faruq (the title of khedive was replaced by the title of king in 1922), the hundredth anniversary in 2005 was marked only by a small conference jointly arranged between the Egyptian National Library and a French academic institute, the CEDEJ. The speakers included the Mufti and the rector of the Azhar, but even so, the anniversary passed almost unnoticed.

  In addition to the pictures presented by Rida and by men such as Mustafa Abd al-Raziq and Uthman Amin, a third picture emerged in the West, assisted by the enthusiasm of certain Western scholars, notably Charles Adams, the American Christian author of the only full biography of Muhammad Abduh to appear in a European language during the twentieth century (in 1933). For Adams, Muhammad Abduh’s achievement was to bridge the gap between conservative Muslims and progressive intellectuals who had received European educations, a view that both underestimated the conservative resistance and overestimated Muhammad Abduh’s success. Muhammad Abduh’s impact was also overestimated by Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican bishop and expert on Islam who co-translated Rida’s version of Risalat al-tawhid into English, and who thought that Muhammad Abduh’s “teachings, personality, and influence constituted the most decisive single factor in the twentieth-century development of Arab Muslim thought and renewal.”

  Although Malcolm Kerr argued in 1966 that “Abduh’s historical role was simply to fling open the doors and expose a musty tradition to fresh currents. His intention may have been more specific, but the effect was not,” Muhammad Abduh remained a crucial figure in the Western conception of the development of Islam, understood increasingly in the terms that mixed Cragg’s judgment with that which had become current in the Arab world, derived from Rida. It thus came as something of a shock when, in 1966, Elie Kedourie published Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam. In this book, Kedourie used newly discovered documents that Af
ghani had left behind when he was expelled from Persia to challenge very effectively the general view of Afghani, and used the connection with Afghani to question the general view of Muhammad Abduh. Like many revisionist accounts, this went somewhat too far. Kedourie’s conclusion “that by the end of the 1870s the erstwhile mystic, outwardly a divine, was secretly a free thinker” cannot really be sustained. A more balanced account was later produced by a Tunisian scholar working in France, Mohamed Haddad, but this is available only in French, and has so far had little impact.

  The final twist in the understanding of Muhammad Abduh came when the term “Salafi” became increasingly popular to describe a movement that had arisen in Saudi Arabia during the 1960s and that insisted on the original teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab rather than the more moderate version of them which had become official in Saudi Arabia. The identification of Osama bin Laden with the Saudi Salafi movement led to some occasional confusion among Western students and sometimes journalists, who sometimes tried to connect Muhammad Abduh with al-Qaeda. It also led to complaints by neo-Wahhabi Salafis that Muhammad Abduh had not been a “real” Salafi, “real” Salafism being defined as their own.

  CONCLUSION

  To someone who had met Muhammad Abduh in Paris with Afghani, the idea that this young Egyptian revolutionary might one day be remembered as Mufti of the Egyptian Realm would have seemed most unlikely. A future such as that which awaited Muhammad Abduh’s friend Saad Zaghlul, as first political prisoner of the British and then nationalist leader, would have seemed altogether more probable. There was, however, an underlying logic that united all phases of Muhammad Abduh’s career. As a young man, he worked through journalism and politics for the improvement of the conditions under which his fellow Egyptians lived. As Mufti, he worked – still partly through journalism – for the same end.

  The attempts at transforming the Egyptian system of government in which Muhammad Abduh participated in his youth failed, ultimately because of reasons beyond the control of anyone in Egypt:the seemingly inexorable expansion of European power produced British control of Egypt and so for a time put an end to autonomous political development there. Immediately after the British occupation of Egypt, Muhammad Abduh turned his energies to the promotion of something not so very different from the global revolution that al-Qaeda was to attempt at the start of the twenty-first century. Muhammad Abduh, however, relatively quickly replaced a policy of confrontation with one of cooperation and moderate change. As a moderate committed to cooperation, he became Mufti of the Egyptian Realm.

  Muhammad Abduh was a most unlikely Mufti. He was an intellectual in the modern Western sense, though equipped to deal with religious questions by his early training at the Azhar. His intellectual world was very different from that of the ulema, as a result of his earlier life, his travels abroad, and above all as a result of his reading of the period’s leading social and political theorists. His approach to many of the problems that came before him as Mufti drew on this unusual intellectual world rather than on classic theories of methodology, and indeed it was part of his approach to focus more on the conclusion than on the technical methodology used to reach it.

  This approach made Muhammad Abduh both famous and controversial. For those who shared his intellectual world he was a hero, a progressive figure very different from the far-from-progressive majority of the ulema. He succeeded in showing that Islam did not need to be an old thobe in which it was embarrassing to appear, and that it was possible to be modern, Egyptian, patriotic, progressive, and Muslim at the same time. Islam was thus safeguarded, and so was the Egyptian identity. For many of those who did not share his intellectual world, however, he was a collaborator who was barely even Muslim. This was unjust: if he did in some sense follow a policy of collaboration, he was never a collaborator for selfish reasons, but because he saw no better way of achieving what had always been his fundamental objective: the improvement of conditions in Egypt. If his understanding of Islam was unusual, he seems to have remained a believer. He always remained a patriotic Egyptian.

  Muhammad Abduh’s liberal modernism was very much of its period, a period which was in many ways hospitable to it. Muhammad Abduh became the most prominent and influential representative of the liberal modernist trend within Islam because, as Mufti of the Egyptian Realm, he had more authority than any other representative of that trend, because of Al-Manar, and because of what an admirer called his “superabundant and unabated energy,” which allowed him to be prominent in so many areas at the same time – writing, lecturing, delivering fatwas, active on the Legislative Council and the Council for Endowments, active in the Benevolent Association, and still with time to visit his many friends. But as circumstances changed, which they did quickly over the twenty years after his death, the space for rationalist liberal modernism contracted. Relations between the Muslim world and the West changed as European power weakened and Egyptian and Arab nationalism gained strength. Egyptian politics changed as social and economic developments produced first the student demonstration and then the Nasserite state. Guizot was forgotten as communism and fascism rose and finally fell in Europe, and as the Islamic Revolution transformed Iran and paved the way for a new “clash of civilizations.”

  Muhammad Abduh neither revived true Islam nor proposed an alternative to it. He attempted to address the problems of Egypt through Islam, creating in the process a certain synthesis of Islam and of modern thought, thought that was modern in terms of the nineteenth century, not of the twentieth or twenty-first. The emphasis was more on the modern thought than on the Islam, and the synthesis did not prove to be a lasting one, partly for this reason, partly because Muhammad Abduh was more of a pragmatist than a theorist, and ultimately because his work reflected the circumstances of his age, an age that was soon to pass.

  GLOSSARY

  bida innovation in religion, an undesirable practice not sanctioned by the original revelation of Islam.

  Council for Endowments the Egyptian government body responsible for the administration of the land and other assets that had been given over the centuries for the upkeep of mosques and to support the activities of the ulema.

  fatwa a responsum or non-binding ruling on a difficult issue relating to the interpretation of the Sharia.

  hadith reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, regarded by classic Islamic jurisprudence as equal in importance with the Quran as a source of the Sharia.

  hajj the “pilgrimage” ceremonies performed once a year in Mecca around the ancient temple believed by Muslims to have been built by Abraham.

  imam generally, the leader of ritual prayer in a mosque. Sometimes used as a title for a great religious scholar or leader.

  jihad warfare against non-Muslims.

  khedive title given to the hereditary ruler of Egypt from Ismail to the First World War, being a compromise between “king” and “prince.”

  madhhab an established body of exegetical methodology and of generally accepted conclusions; one of four or five internally consistent interpretations of the Sharia; a denomination.

  maslaha expediency, that which is in the general interest. In a legal context, equity.

  Mufti religious scholar or official charged with the giving of fatwas.

  pasha Ottoman title equivalent to the British “lord” held by senior officials and ministers, generals, or grandees.

  piaster unit of currency in the Ottoman Empire and khedival Egypt. In Egypt, after 1885, 1 piaster was worth about 0.075 grams of gold.

  Quran the text of the revelation believed by Muslims to have been given by God to the Prophet Muhammad.

  salaf the first generations of Muslims immediately following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whose understanding and practice of Islam were exemplary; a group used as a point of reference by several entirely separate movements of religious reform or renewal.

  Salafi member of any one of a number of distinct movements, all of which claimed or claim to be returning to the pur
e Islam of the salaf, but which have little else in common.

  Sharia the right way of living for a Muslim, as derived from the Quran and hadith; hence the detailed rules indicating proper Islamic practice, in life and worship; hence law derived from Islam.

  shaykh title of respect, given especially to Azhar graduates or the leaders of Sufi orders.

  Shi’a the smaller of the two mains sections into which the Muslim community split in its early centuries, following its own distinct understanding of the Sharia. Now found mostly in Iran (formerly Persia), Iraq, and Lebanon.

  Sunni the larger of the two mains sections into which the Muslim community split in its early centuries, following its own distinct understanding of the Sharia. Now found in most parts of the Muslim world that are not Shi’i.

  Sufi a member of a tariqa or order, within Sunni or Shi’i Islam, promoting optional devotional religious practice, often of a mystic variety; associated in some areas with popular religion.

  tafsir exegesis of the Quran; commentary exploring the full sense and meaning of the original text.

  talfiq “piecing together” a conclusion from more than one madhhab.

  thobe gown originally worn by men in the Arab world, used in the late nineteenth century mostly by the poor.

  turba small tablet of baked clay used by the Shi’a when praying, especially when praying on a carpet or mat.

  ulema scholars, especially those devoted to the study, explication, and application of Islam.

  FURTHER READING

  CHAPTER 1

  The two most useful sources for Muhammad Abduh’s life are Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad ‘Abduh (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), and Uthman Amin, Muhammad Abduh (Cairo: Dar ihya al-kutub al-arabiyya, 1944), trans. Charles Wendell (Washington, DC:American Council of Learned Societies, 1953).