Afghani had one creed: Muslim societies had fallen behind the West because they had strayed from the core strength of Islam. Unlike all other world religions, Afghani claimed, Islam celebrated science and reason. That was what had allowed the Abbasids and other dynasties to flourish, and it was why Muslim societies had been successful in the past. Over the centuries, Muslims had lost sight of that. They had closed the door to innovation and become antagonistic to change, with the result that the West had raced ahead. The so-called traditionalists who opposed Western science were, Afghani believed, forsaking the Islamic tradition. True Muslims should embrace the science, technology, and social advancements of the Western states and build on them. Then the community would be whole and strong once again, and a new golden age would begin.
These ideas were not only radical in the Muslim world; they were a direct challenge to the prevailing winds in Europe. In France especially, increasing numbers of the bourgeoisie were indifferent and often hostile to religion, and to organized religions such as Catholicism most of all. The intellectuals of the day, epitomized by the brilliant, arrogant scholar Ernest Renan, believed that all religions were antithetical to innovation, and that religion stood in the way of human progress.
In 1883, a series of electric debates took place between Renan and Afghani. The two men engaged in a multiround duel over the question
of whether Islam was compatible with science. In many ways, their dialogue was a latter-day re-creation of the tense rhetorical battles that Christians, Jews, and Muslims had fought in front of courtiers in Córdoba and Baghdad centuries earlier. But there was one crucial difference: Renan did not defend Christianity; he denounced it, and he denounced Islam. Renan was an avatar for the modern age, an ardent acolyte of reason, a devotee of logic, and an enemy of what he thought was cant and superstition in the guise of religion and faith. A onetime seminary student, he was fluent in Hebrew, versed in the Quran and had devoted years to the study of the Orient. He admired the Persians, but had little respect for what Arabs had wrought over the centuries, and that added to his antipathy for the deleterious effects of organized religion. In his view, the philosophical achievements of the Muslim world during the Middle Ages were in spite of, not because of, Islam. The Persians had done better than the Arabs, he believed, because they were less in thrall to orthodox Islam. Renan held that no religion nurtured the scientific spirit. No religion could afford to, because science was based on the limitless capacity of human reason and intellect while religion rested on the infinite power of God the creator.
Afghani had a different perspective. While he acknowledged that in all religions there was tension between science and faith, he saw Islam as unique in its embrace of reason and its warmth toward science. Drawing on a corpus of works from eighth-century Baghdad through the flowering of medieval Andalusia, Afghani’s argument was buttressed by evidence. He stressed that the great philosophers of Islam—Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Arabi—were often mystics as well. They used reason, and they were also men of faith, who submitted to the mystery and power of God even as they employed logic to probe the meaning of his creation. If Muslims were to meet the challenge of the West, Afghani declared, they would have to reclaim their lost inheritance.
Afghani had many disciples, but none more skilled than Muhammad Abduh. While Afghani roamed restlessly throughout the Muslim world, Abduh dedicated himself to the cause of Egypt. Afghani, wise in so many ways, allowed himself to be used as an ornament by rulers such as the Ottoman sultan, who pointed to his presence at their courts as proof of how forward-looking they were yet had little intention of putting his more radically democratic ideas into practice. Afghani believed that the most important ingredient for change was education, and that only by
taking the curriculum out of the hands of the hidebound
ulama
and putting progressives like him in charge could a new generation be trained to grapple with the West and implement real reform. Abduh took up that mantle in Egypt. By the end of his life he had some success in turning those ideas into a reality, but not without considerable anguish at the failure of the nationalist movement in the early 1880s, and not before being exiled by the British for five years.
When Abduh returned to Egypt, he reestablished himself at Al-Azhar, and then emerged as one of the most serious, and influential, reformers during the long years of British rule. Like Afghani, Abduh took as his starting point Quran 13:11, which states, “Verily God does not change what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves.” Generations of exegesis had taken the verse to mean that mankind has free will. With free will comes reason, and reason is integral to progress. Abduh, who had witnessed the absence of progress firsthand when he was taught a curriculum at Al-Azhar that had been frozen for centuries, believed that ignorance was a greater threat to Egypt and the Arab and Muslim world than the West was. “If we continue to follow the method of blind acceptance,” he wrote, “no one will be left who holds this religion. But if we return to that reason to which God directs us in this verse and other verses like it, there is hope that we can revive our religion.” And that religion, Abduh continued in other writings, “may be counted a true friend of science, a stimulus into the secrets of the universe, and an appeal to respected established truths, and we may rely upon it in cultivating our spirits and reforming our actions.”
Like his teacher Afghani, Abduh did not limit his aspirations to one country. Afghani has been called, rightly or not, one of the creators of pan-Islam, a movement that has been tainted as an early-twentieth-century version of Islamic fundamentalism. But where Afghani tried to spark a reformation everywhere, Abduh diligently pursued reform in Egypt as an incubator for the rest of the Muslim world. His faith in reason, as it were, led him to excoriate the structure of the Egyptian state that had evolved under both the Ottomans and Muhammad Ali and his heirs. Law had been based on the whim of the ruler, supported by a placid religious and judicial establishment. If Egypt was to change, Abduh believed, it would need not only a better education system, but a legal system that was more powerful than any one man.
Abduh’s dedication and erudition impressed the British administration,
and late in his life, in 1899, he was made grand mufti of Egypt, in charge of all religious law and jurisprudence. In that position, he revised the curriculum for training civil servants and imams alike. He attempted to reorient Egypt away from blind adherence to tradition and toward a reborn society that fused reason, science, and the Quran. Though he did not fulfill his own high ambitions, he did create a new way, one that demanded internal reform based on laws that honored the Islamic tradition but were in harmony with the modern world. That in turn was to be the foundation of a modern Egypt led by men trained to think, to question, and to learn, who not only accepted but fostered innovation, and who nurtured the spirit of scientific inquiry that had always been part of the glory and strength of Islam.
Though Abduh saw Egypt as an important test case, his ultimate goal was the renaissance of all Muslim societies. Unlike Afghani, he was less focused on active resistance to the West than he was on awakening the dormant spirit of Islam. In his reading of history, the past success of Islam was the product not just of fearless inquiry but of toleration for religious minorities. Abduh’s vision embraced Christians and Jews as equal partners who had been vital to Muslim success in the past, and would be essential to success in the future. In short, his Islam not only was compatible with the modern ethos articulated by the West; it also predated it.
Science, military prowess, respect for law, and liberalism were among the cornerstones of Western culture in the nineteenth century, which along with more than a dollop of greed and rapaciousness led to the dominance of Europe relative to the rest of the world. But Europe’s great weakness, Abduh believed, was that it had created a false tension between religion and modernity. According to Abduh’s reading of the past, Muslim societies had once surpassed the West because that tension did not exist in the centuries after Muhammad. Unlike post-Enlightenment Europeans, the
Salaf
(the elders of the early community of Muslim believers) had prospered because they combined reason with faith. That meant that modern Egyptians, as the vanguard of Muslim states, had the potential not only to hold its own, but to set an example by adding religion to the mix instead of banishing it from the public sphere.
That, at least, was Abduh’s dream. But he knew that until Egypt and other Muslim states did the hard work of wrenching themselves out of their stupor, they would follow the West and not lead the world. And as
long as Muslim societies remained mired in ossified traditions, they would invite scorn and condescension. Abduh felt the sting of British disdain, but he understood that it was a natural and appropriate reaction to Egyptian backwardness. He reserved his most stringent criticisms not for the conquerors but for the failings in his own society that made it unable to resist Western encroachment.
Centuries earlier, with the passing of al-Ghazali and others, the Muslims of the Near East and North Africa had gradually retreated from interpreting the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. Abduh represented a break from that unfortunate legacy. He claimed the right to interpret Islam and adapt it to the circumstances of his time, and he did so believing that this was the birthright of every Muslim and every human being. The fact that interpretation had been discouraged was the failing of Muslims and Muslim societies, but not indicative of the true Islam of Muhammad, his companions, and those who immediately followed them. Understanding that human beings were weak and prone to error, Abduh treated his countrymen with compassion rather than contempt, and regarded the Christians and Jews in his midst as people worthy of the respect that he believed the Quran demanded. In spite of the ossified culture of Egypt and of much of the Arab world, he rarely doubted that progress was possible, and that a new era of peace and prosperity was within reach so long as the Arab world in general and Egypt in particular recognized that they had lost their way and began the process of rebirth.
Abduh set the tone for a generation of activists and intellectuals who helped define Arab nationalism in the first part of the twentieth century. Slowly, however, his legacy was distorted by followers who were less convinced that the modern trappings of science and European liberalism were compatible with Islam and Arab independence. Other Muslim countries, Turkey and Iran among them, grappled with similar issues and experienced similar fissures between those who envisioned a future of peaceful rivalry with the West and those who resisted the changes that the rise of Europe had forced on the world. Some became bitter and angry that reforms did not yield immediate benefits, and as the West continued to dominate the economic, political, and military destiny of much of the Muslim world in the first decades of the twentieth century, that bitterness generated darker versions of Abduh’s teachings. Abduh believed that the
Salaf
had been ecumenical and tolerant, but others saw
them instead as a tight-knit community of believers whose strength lay in the rejection of the message given to the People of the Book and in their willingness to silence any who challenged the words of the Quran and the hadith. In fact, within Muslim communities, people known in the West as “fundamentalist” are often referred to as
salafiyya
, because they look to the founders of Islam for answers about how to confront the challenges of the present.
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Abduh would have been dismayed by the twentieth-century evolution of the
salafiyya.
He vigorously opposed what the British government had done in Egypt and elsewhere, but he warmly embraced the English and French friends he made in Cairo and in the capitals of Europe. One of his closest companions was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, an Englishman who devoted his life to fighting against imperialism and to defending Islam to a skeptical English public. Blunt was a full-fledged member of the British ruling class, yet he was outside the mainstream. Having married the granddaughter of Lord Byron, he was drawn to the mysteries of the desert and the esoteric, and he shared with his wife an insatiable yearning for something other than what England had to offer. Seeking adventure, they shunned London society and spent nearly a decade riding their horses through the most desolate tracts of the African Sahara and the Arabian Najd, where they were guests of Ibn Rashid, whose family was then locked in a struggle with the Saudis and their Wahhabi followers. The Blunts also lived with the bedouin of the Euphrates in central Iraq, and they wrote a book about their experiences that was avidly read by the English public.
Among the bedouin, Wilfrid Blunt found what he had been looking for. Disillusioned by imperial Britain, he romanticized the moral code of the bedouin, their purity of faith, and their lack of hypocrisy. The bedouin were a society of merit, who through Blunt’s rose-tinted vision offered “the purest example of democracy to be found in the world— perhaps the only one in which the watchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are more than a name.” Their Islam had not been sullied by the ostentatious displays that marked the High Anglicanism of Blunt’s England. While most of his contemporaries compared the Arabs to Europe and found them culturally deficient, Blunt concluded that it was the Europeans who were deficient. The Arabs may have temporarily fallen behind the West, but for that Blunt blamed the Ottomans. He believed that once the empire finally collapsed, the Arabs could restore
their caliphate and rise again as a beacon of freedom and creativity that would put the West to shame.
In 1880, Blunt visited Egypt and met Abduh. Through Abduh, he was drawn into the nationalist movement that ultimately culminated in the British occupation, an event that Blunt did everything he could to prevent and that devastated him when it finally took place. The scorn that most of his countrymen felt toward Arabs and Islam was a disgrace, Blunt wrote on the eve of the invasion. Islam, he said, “must be treated as no vain superstition but a true religion, true inasmuch as it is a form of the worship of the one true God in whom Europe, in spite of her modern reason, still believes. As such it is entitled to whatever credit we may give true religions of prolonged vitality and while admitting the eternal truth of Christianity for ourselves, we may believe that in the Arabian mind… Islam too will prove eternal.” He tried to persuade the British prime minister William Gladstone that Egypt should be allowed to manage its own destiny and that it was contrary to Gladstone’s liberal creed and against the true tenets of the Christian faith to sanction an occupation of a country undertaken solely to appease European creditors. But Gladstone, anxious about any potential threat to the sea lanes from Suez to India, did not agree.
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