Muhammad Abduh Read online

  Muhammad Abduh

  SELECTION OF TITLES IN THE MAKERS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD SERIES

  Series editor: Patricia Crone,

  Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

  Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, Samer Akkach

  ‘Abd al-Malik, Chase F. Robinson

  Abd al-Rahman III, Maribel Fierro

  Abu Nuwas, Philip Kennedy

  Ahmad al-Mansur, Mercedes García-Arenal

  Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Christopher Melchert

  Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi, Usha Sanyal

  Akbar, André Wink

  Al-Ma’mun, Michael Cooperson

  Al-Mutanabbi, Margaret Larkin

  Amir Khusraw, Sunil Sharma

  Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, Muhammad Qasim Zaman

  Chinggis Khan, Michal Biran

  El Hajj Beshir Agha, Jane Hathaway

  Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, Shazad Bashir

  Ghazali, Eric Ormsby

  Husain Ahmad Madani, Barbara Metcalf

  Ibn ‘Arabi, William C. Chittick

  Ibn Fudi, Ahmad Dallal

  Ikhwan al-Safa, Godefroid de Callatay

  Karim Khan Z and, John R. Perry

  Mehmed Ali, Khaled Fahmy

  Mu ‘awiya ibn abi Sufyan, R. Stephen Humphreys

  Nasser, Joel Gordon

  Sa‘di, Homa Katouzian

  Shaykh Mufid, Tamima Bayhom-Daou

  Usama ibn Munqidh, Paul M. Cobb

  For current information and details of other books in the

  series, please visit www.oneworld-publications.com

  Muhammad Abduh

  MARK SEDGWICK

  MUHAMMAD ABDUH

  Published by Oneworld Publications 2010

  This ebook edition published in 2013

  Copyright © Mark Sedgwick 2010

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–85168–432–8

  eISBN 978–1–78074–213–7

  Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India

  Oneworld Publications

  10 Bloomsbury Road

  London WC1B 3SR

  England

  USA: 38 Greene Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10013, USA

  www.oneworld-publications.com

  Stay up to date with the latest books,

  special offers, and exclusive content from

  Oneworld with our monthly newsletter

  Sign up on our website

  www.oneworld-publications.com

  For Zahra

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 THE STUDENT

  Tanta

  Cairo

  Afghani

  Graduation

  2 INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS

  Muhammad Abduh’s Teaching

  Politics

  Freemasonry

  The Opposition Press

  Intervention

  Defeat

  3 URABI AND EXILE

  Muhammad Abduh the Editor

  Muhammad Abduh and Urabi

  Triumph and Renewed Defeat

  Exile

  Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Islam

  To Paris

  4 PARIS

  Muhammad Abduh and Wilfrid Blunt

  Al-Urwa al-wuthqa

  5 BEIRUT

  The Break with Afghani

  In Search of an Occupation

  Risalat al-Tawhid

  6 THE RETURN TO EGYPT

  The National Courts

  The Azhar Council

  Appointment as Mufti

  Law Reform

  7 THE MUFTI

  The Azhar Lectures

  Newspapers

  Education

  8 THE FATWAS

  Financial Fatwas

  The Transvaal Fatwa

  Muhammad Abduh’s Methodology

  Muhammad Abduh’s Intentions

  9 ADVERSITY

  Opposition in the Press

  Deteriorating Relations with the Khedive

  Reactions to the Transvaal Fatwa

  Resignation

  Death

  The Enemy of God?

  10 THE AFTERMATH

  Public Life

  Islam

  Views on Muhammad Abduh

  Conclusion

  Glossary

  Further Reading

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), Mufti of the Egyptian Realm, is one of the most famous figures in recent Islam. In Egypt, he is now generally remembered as a great scholar and a patriot, a great renewer of Islam, one of those who awakened the nation – though the details of this greatness have grown somewhat fuzzy with time. Among scholars, in the Muslim world and the West, he is known as Islam’s leading modernist. For some, his modernism consisted in creating a synthesis of Islam and modern thought; for others, it consisted in the bridge he built between the old world and the new. Some see him as having revived true Islam, and some see him as having proposed an alternative to true Islam. One question that this book attempts to answer, then, is quite what his modernism consisted in. Another question is where his modernism came from, and a final question is what happened to it after his death.

  Muhammad Abduh was born into an Egypt that was an autonomous province of the ancient Ottoman Empire. He participated in a failed attempt at revolution, and died in an Egypt under British occupation. Politically, he lived through extraordinarily eventful times, and politics occupied him throughout his life, often more than Islam. Muhammad Abduh was, as a result of his initial education, a religious figure – a member of the ulema. He acquired this status almost by default, since at the time of his birth formal education in Egypt was almost exclusively religious. His appointment as Mufti made him one of the most senior three or four religious figures in the Muslim world, but his earlier career might equally have led to him becoming a government minister, a newspaper editor, or a university president – or a political prisoner, given that he was never afraid of risk and confrontation, and lived in a world where both were often dangerous. He did, in fact, spend some time editing a newspaper, and some time in prison.

  Muhammad Abduh was one of the first Arabic-speaking Muslims to experience the West at first hand. Although he grew up in a purely Egyptian environment, he spent time in France and other European countries, learned French, and read deeply in nineteenth-century European social and political thought. Although he always remained Egyptian rather than European, he knew European ways well enough for his relationship with the very imperial British representative in Egypt, Lord Cromer, to become a real friendship. Although he remained a believing Muslim, he also took his Freemasonry very seriously. He certainly bridged two very different worlds, and tried to show others how this might be done. One part of his modernism, then, was to prefer a marriage of civilizations to a clash of civilizations.

  Given this, it is strange that Muhammad Abduh’s successor is commonly seen as Rashid Rida, that Rashid Rida’s successor is commonly seen as Hasan al-Banna, the creator of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the Muslim Brotherhood is seen as the distant origin of al-Qaeda. This is one of the paradoxes that this book explores.

  This book builds on the research that has been done on Muhammad Abduh by many other scholars over the years. Its main contribution, I hope, will be in presenting a coherent picture of Muhammad Abduh. Many of those who have worked on Muhammad Abduh in recent years have done so from the perspective of some other issue that concerned them, and no full biography has been published by a Western scholar since 1933. As a result, it has sometimes been hard to judge various hypotheses against the big picture, which is what I have attempted to do whi
le writing this book. When I have discarded a hypothesis as being too inconsistent with the big picture, I have generally not referred to it, given both limitations of space and the policy of this series, which calls for clarity. The specialist will, I hope, recognize which hypotheses I have discarded, and be able to read between the lines to see why.

  In common with other volumes in this series, this book has no source notes. Suggestions for further reading, however, will be found at the end of the book, as will a bibliography giving my main sources. For those who are interested, further information on sources is available online at www.abduh.info. This website will also carry corrections of errors in the pages that follow (there will inevitably be some errors, for which I apologize in advance), such additional material as becomes available, a few images, and additional suggestions for further reading. Use of technical Arabic terms has been kept to an absolute minimum, but even so some have had to be used, and these are listed in a glossary.

  I would like to thank the many students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) who took with me classes and seminars in which Muhammad Abduh was discussed, for the questions, objections, and suggestions that helped me refine my own understanding of Muhammad Abduh, and Dina Hamdy, who helped me research later views of Muhammad Abduh in Egypt. The 1933 biography of Muhammad Abduh was written by a scholar working at AUC, so it is appropriate that most of this book was written while I was also working at AUC. I would also like to thank two scholars who I have never met, but whose work was of great use: Mohamed Haddad and Indira Falk Gesink, who generously allowed me to make use of her unpublished PhD thesis. My thanks are likewise due to Patricia Crone, for her comments some years ago on the paper in which I first approached some of the issues that underlie this book, as well as for suggesting that I write it. Finally, I would like to thank two scholars who I know well, Elisabeth Sartain and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, for many fruitful discussions, and also for their comments on the manuscript of this book. In some cases, of course, disagreements remain.

  Mark Sedgwick

  Aarhus University, Denmark

  February 9, 2009

  THE STUDENT

  Muhammad Abduh was born to a small farmer in an Egyptian village in about 1849, the year of the death of Mehmet Ali, the Albanian soldier who had appointed himself governor of the Ottoman province of Egypt, rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, and successfully established himself as a powerful and independent ruler – at great cost to the small farmers of Egypt, upon whose forced labor he had built his power.

  Mehmet Ali’s strong rule did bring some benefits to small farmers such as Abduh ibn Hasan Khayrallah, Muhammad Abduh’s father, since it ended the general disorder and periodic violence that had previously been the norm in the Egyptian countryside. Mehmet Ali’s government also made improvements to rural irrigation systems, and promoted the growing of cotton, a crop for which Egypt became famous. The structure of the cotton trade, however, was such that most of the riches it produced went either to the Egyptian state or to merchants, and only rarely to the farmers who grew it. These farmers also had to provide forced labor for Mehmet Ali’s various improvement projects, and conscripts for his armies. By 1840, according to some estimates, twelve percent of the working population of Egypt had been conscripted. Conscription was so unpopular that it was common for peasants to flee their villages or to maim themselves in order to avoid it. Muhammad Abduh’s father was one of those who had fled his village, and the exact place of Muhammad Abduh’s birth is thus unknown.

  The Egyptian countryside became quieter after the death of Mehmet Ali, and Muhammad Abduh grew up in the village of Mahallat Nasr, one of many small villages scattered around the green and fertile Delta area that stretches south from the Mediterranean coast to Cairo, watered by several branches of the Nile, one of which – the Rosetta branch – lay some eight miles to the east of Mahallat Nasr. In the other direction, also about eight miles away, lay the provincial capital, the town of Damanhur.

  Though not rich, Muhammad Abduh’s father was a substantial man in Mahallat Nasr, able to afford to marry a second wife. He was also wealthy enough to hire a private Quran teacher for his son. The only education then known in the Egyptian countryside started with the memorization of the Quran, a task that Muhammad Abduh had completed by the age of twelve. This was a later age than many, but equipped Muhammad Abduh to move on to the next stage, at the great mosque school in the town of Tanta, thirty miles from Mahallat Nasr. Muhammad Abduh’s mother came originally from Tanta, and a relative taught at the school there, so there may have been some tradition of learning in his mother’s family.

  TANTA

  Muhammad Abduh arrived at Tanta in 1862, at the age of thirteen, shortly after Tanta had been connected to Cairo and Alexandria by a newly built railway. Tanta had been famous since the thirteenth century for its mosque, built around the tomb of Egypt’s most revered Sufi saint, Ahmad al-Badawi, and during the mid-nineteenth century Tanta grew fast, becoming an important center for the cotton trade. As a result, a few European-style schools were just beginning to be established there by some of the newcomers whom the cotton boom was attracting – but these newcomers were Greek Christians, whose schools were not attended by Muslims. Muslims still had only one choice: the ancient school in the mosque of Ahmad al-Badawi.

  Muhammad Abduh joined about one thousand other students there. Under the terms of the charitable endowment that had financed the Tanta school since the eighteenth century, education was free, and students also received basic food rations. Following immemorial practice, students gathered in circles around teachers, each of whom taught a particular text. Each text had to be learned by heart, and the teacher checked this. Students did not generally ask questions of the teacher, either during or after the session. One central discipline was the study of the meaning of the Quran, section by section, using such tools as grammatical and etymological analysis, reference to collections of hadith reports of the words and actions of the Prophet, and a complex methodology of usul or jurisprudence.

  This was a system of education that Muhammad Abduh was later to criticize in the harshest terms, a system that has now generally been abolished, though it still survives in some places. It was not quite as bad a system as Muhammad Abduh later made out, however. It survived long enough in Morocco for a contemporary European researcher to be able to interview old men who had started their education in this way. The researcher concluded that the way the system actually worked was that the discussion that was essential for actually understanding the texts being studied took place informally. Students discussed texts with each other privately, and sometimes also discussed them with relations who were established members of the ulema, if they were fortunate enough to have such relations. Students who came from families in which scholarship was a tradition, then, had a definite advantage over outsiders. We know that Muhammad Abduh had a relation among the ulema of Tanta, but only a teacher of Quran recitation – the least prestigious branch of Islamic scholarship.

  Whether or not Muhammad Abduh discussed the texts he was learning with a relation, he was not happy, and afterwards wrote that he had learned nothing during this period of his life. “The teachers were accustomed to use technical terms of grammar or jurisprudence which we did not understand,” he later complained, “nor did they take any pauses to explain their meaning.” After a year and a half, Muhammad Abduh ran away from Tanta to stay with some uncles, but was taken back by a stepbrother. He ran away again and returned to Mahallat Nasr, determined to become a small farmer like his father. He got married, being by then sixteen, the normal age of marriage for a man who could afford to set up a household. We know nothing of his wife, who would probably have been younger, possibly as young as twelve. His father presumably approved of the marriage, which otherwise could hardly have taken place, and perhaps hoped that marriage would encourage Muhammad Abduh to settle down. After a forty-day honeymoon, Muhammad Abduh was again returned to the school in Tanta.

  On
his way back to Tanta, Muhammad Abduh stopped to stay with an uncle named Darwish, a Sufi. Sufism was widespread in rural Egypt, where in most cases it was a form of popular religion, associated with seasonal celebrations at the tombs of local saints, and with weekly meetings at which local men sat together and chanted the litany of one or another of the many different Sufi orders. Muhammad Abduh’s uncle, however, was a different sort of Sufi, a follower of Muhammad al-Madani, one of the great shaykhs or spiritual masters in a movement of religious revival and reform that had started in the eighteenth century and lasted through the whole of the nineteenth century. Muhammad al-Madani was born in Medina, studied under the great shaykh Abu Ahmad al-Arabi al-Darqawi in Morocco, returned to Medina, and finally settled in Misrata, in what is today western Libya, where he established his own Sufi order, the Madaniyya. Under al-Madani’s son, his following spread from Libya, Algeria, and Tunis to Egypt. Muhammad Abduh’s uncle was a devoted follower of the Madaniyya, and had at one point made the arduous journey to Misrata to visit his shaykh.

  The revivalist and reformist movement of which the Madaniyya was part was an international movement rather than a local one. It was also a scholarly and intellectual movement, not a form of popular religion, of which it was sometimes very critical. It stressed both spiritual experience and the proper practice of Islam, and was in contact with leading scholars in Medina who argued for closer adherence to the founding teachings of Islam and against taqlid, strict adherence to precedent. This combination of emphases – on the internal and on the external – was probably the main reason for its great success, along with the evident quality and charismatic nature of many of the chief figures associated with it, including al-Madani.

  Muhammad Abduh’s uncle pressed on him a book of the collected letters of al-Madani. After some days, Muhammad Abduh began to practice the litany of the Madaniyya, and after a few days more he found himself