Muhammad Abduh Read online

  As Mufti, Muhammad Abduh also returned to national politics, becoming a member of the Treasury Council, a member of the Council for Endowments, and a member of the Legislative Council. Of these, the council that really mattered was the Council for Endowments, which controlled the assets, mostly real estate, that financed the upkeep of mosques and the activities of the ulema. The property in question was very substantial, and – given its religious nature – beyond direct British control. The Legislative Council, which consisted of fourteen appointed and sixteen elected members, reviewed all proposed legislation, but was purely advisory. Further, it advised the khedive, while real power lay not with the khedive but with the consul-general. It was still of some importance, however, and was the Egyptian equivalent of the Viceregal Legislative Council to which Ahmad Khan had been appointed in India.

  The position of Mufti also involved duties at the Azhar, where Muhammad Abduh was already on the Administrative Council. Originally, there had been not one single Mufti of the Egyptian Realm but four Chief Muftis at the Azhar, one for each of the four madhhabs. The role of the Chief Hanafi Mufti had developed over the century into the post to which Muhammad Abduh had been appointed. As a consequence, Muhammad Abduh was also the Azhar’s Hanafi Mufti, a post that carried both administrative and teaching duties. His approach to administrative questions was similar to that he took on the Administrative Council, the difference being that he could have a more direct impact, for example in improving admissions standards by the use of an entrance examination for those wishing to study the Hanafi madhhab. On some occasions he went further, for example in raising the stipends of students who did well in subjects such as geography and history – though for this he had to use his own private funds.

  Initially, Muhammad Abduh tried to teach a full range of courses at the Azhar, but soon gave up – probably because of lack of time – and instead delivered one regular lecture. Over time, these lectures became very popular, and not just with students. They were also attended by members of the public, predominantly from the elite, and even by Christians. Muhammad Abduh would sit in a chair facing the prayer niche, which was illuminated by gaslight, a striking symbol of progress. Next to him was a smaller chair, holding a lantern with four tapers. Thus established, he would deliver his lecture slowly and clearly, with occasional pauses, in a style very different from that generally used by Azhari shaykhs.

  The Azhar lectures were one of three ways in which Muhammad Abduh went beyond his required duties to engage in national and international debate. The other two ways were by issuing fatwas on general topics of public interest, and by writing in newspapers, one of which – Al-Manar (“The lighthouse”) – became very closely identified with him, and carried his messages beyond Egypt to the whole Muslim world. These messages, which would not have surprised anyone who had read Risalat al-tawhid, had an extraordinary impact, and in the end changed the nature of Islam – though, as we will see, not necessarily in ways that Muhammad Abduh would have wished.

  Risalat al-tawhid was written by an exiled Egyptian schoolteacher in Syria. The Azhar lectures, printed in Al-Manar, carried with them all the prestige and authority of the world’s most famous institution of Islamic learning, and all the prestige of the Mufti of the Egyptian Realm. This might be a position of relatively recent origin, and more of a political than of a religious or a scholarly appointment, but even so it shared in the authority that had attached to the Azhar over the centuries. The basic message did not change much, then, but the medium changed enormously.

  THE AZHAR LECTURES

  Muhammad Abduh’s lectures at the Azhar were in theory on tafsir, exegesis of the Quran, and were presented as tafsir in Al-Manar. Despite this, rather as Risalat al-tawhid is not really about tawhid (theology), the Azhar lectures were not really about tafsir. They almost totally ignored the established methodology of tafsir, since Muhammad Abduh generally took a short Quranic text as his point of departure for a lecture which might be on a general religious topic, or might be on a social topic. For example, Quran 2:170 refers to those who, when asked to follow what God has revealed in Islam, foolishly reply that they prefer to “follow the ways of [their] fathers.” A traditional tafsir might either discuss some of the pre-Islamic customs that the foolish might have followed, such as “slitting the camel’s ear” or explain that the verse was specifically addressed to a group of Jews who had responded to an invitation to become Muslim by saying they preferred to follow the religion of their fathers. In his Azhar lecture on this verse, Muhammad Abduh entirely ignored such concerns, and instead took the verse as an occasion to attack taqlid, arguing that it was now not the Jews but the Muslims who were excessively attached to the customs of their fathers. The active researcher who sometimes gets things wrong may well be closer to truth than the sheeplike follower of taqlid.

  Another example is Muhammad Abduh on the part of Quran 2:165 that runs “Yet there are those who take others besides God andadan (as equals), loving them with the love of God.”A traditional tafsir of this might perhaps comment on the word andadan, translated above “as equals,” and specify that this means “as equal with God.” It might then continue to explain that the verse refers to polytheists in Mecca, who worshiped idols, and who loved them in the sense of “magnifying them and being subservient to them.” It might perhaps end by stressing the evils of idol-worship by referring to a hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad said that the greatest sin was to appoint a rival to God, while He alone created us. Muhammad Abduh instead took this text as the basis for a discussion of Sufism, explaining that while the early Sufis were great Muslims in terms of their morality and ascetic practice, official persecution forced them to hide their true beliefs behind symbols that subsequent generations took literally, leading later Sufis to hold their shaykhs in excessive reverence, and ultimately to the cult of tombs of saints. Instead of tafsir, then, Muhammad Abduh was simply using his text to repeat a view on popular Sufism that he had first expressed in the pages of Al-Waqa’i al-misriyya before the Urabi Revolt, and that derived in part from Guizot.

  Muhammad Abduh used his Azhar lectures to promote other parts of his reformist agenda as well, for example by arguing against polygamy. Rather than revive the argument of Ahmad Khan that he had once used in Al-Waqa’i al-misriyya, he now objected on practical grounds – the inevitable jealousies between different wives, the hostility between children and wives who were not their mothers, and the resulting rows. He also promoted the virtues of hard work, again on practical grounds, avoiding philosophical discussions of the nature of predestination.

  Muhammad Abduh also addressed the difficult issue of contradictions between generally accepted Muslim understandings of the universe and the new understandings revealed by natural science. He promoted a “scientific” worldview, arguing for naturalistic, non-miraculous understandings of events related in the Quran. References to angels, for example, might be to “natural forces.” References to “seven heavens” might be to the seven planets (the accepted number in 1900). The famous story of an Abyssinian army that was besieging Mecca being destroyed by stones from on high might refer to the impact of microbes, perhaps of smallpox. Stories such as this were anyhow used in the Quran to give lessons, not to teach history. He even defended Darwin, arguing that natural selection was a device used by God, citing Quran 2:251, which states that “if God had not repelled some men by means of others, the earth would have been corrupted.”

  NEWSPAPERS

  Muhammad Abduh’s first newspaper contributions as Mufti were in Al-Mu’ayyad (“The divinely supported”), then recently established but already one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, edited by his friend Ali Yusuf, a supporter of the khedive. In 1900, Al-Mu’ayyad published a translation of an article by Gabriel Hanotaux, a prolific French historian who had served in the French embassy to Istanbul from 1885 to 1886 and as foreign minister from 1894 to 1898. In an article on French policy toward its North African colonies, Hanotaux had been severely critical of Islam
, which he explained in terms of Semitic and Aryan characteristics. He considered that it was the Semitic origins of Islam that led to its requirement for a blind submission to predestination, and that made God remote and so made man helpless. It was Islam, he argued, that was ultimately responsible for Arab decadence. This was a similar argument to that made in 1883 by Renan, who also blamed Arab backwardness on Islam and on the Arab race.

  Muhammad Abduh responded to Hanotaux in Al-Mu’ayyad, as Afghani had once responded to Renan in the Journal des débats. Like Afghani, Muhammad Abduh argued against explaining Arab decadence in terms of race and Islam by providing another explanation. Unlike Afghani, he did not write of the hostility of religion in general to reason, but of the negative impact of Sufism. Also unlike Afghani, he addressed the Semitic/Aryan question directly. It was not Islam that had led to decadence, but Sufism, and Sufism was actually of Aryan origin (in this Muhammad Abduh was following theories then generally accepted in Europe, though nowadays mostly rejected). Europe had in fact benefited from contact with Semitic Arab civilization during the middle ages. And predestination was not the problem: the Islamic understanding of predestination was actually more complex than the Christian. Muhammad Abduh’s response seems to have been generally well received in Cairo as a defense of Islam, though presumably it was less well appreciated by any Sufis who read it, and by Muslims whose understanding of predestination was closer to classical Sunni norms than was Muhammad Abduh’s.

  From 1902, however, Muhammad Abduh wrote not in Al-Mu’ayyad but in Al-Manar, a newspaper that was to become closely associated with him and would be very important in spreading his message. Al-Manar had been founded in 1898 by a Syrian immigrant, Rashid Rida, who had studied in Beirut under Husayn al-Jisr, the director of the Sultaniyya, where Muhammad Abduh had himself taught. Rida later explained his move to Egypt in terms of a desire to work with Muhammad Abduh, by whose articles in Al-Urwa al-wuthqa he had been inspired as a young man. While Rida had no doubt been inspired by Al-Urwa al-wuthqa, an additional explanation is that he – like so many other Syrian journalists – found a more congenial atmosphere in Egypt than in Syria, where journalism was stifled under the autocratic rule of Sultan Abd al-Hamid. Rida had at first attempted to start a newspaper in his native Tripoli, but his application had been refused on the grounds that there was already one newspaper in Tripoli, and that if there were two, the burden on the censor would be too great. When he left Syria for Egypt, he traveled with a friend who also had journalistic ambitions, Farah Antun, a Christian. In Egypt, Antun started Al-Jami’a al-uthmaniyya (“The Ottoman Community”), and Rida started Al-Manar.

  The declared purposes of Al-Manar were to promote social, religious, and economic reform, to encourage tolerance, unity, education, and progress in arts and sciences, and also “to prove the suitability of Islam as a religious system under present conditions, and the practicality of the divine Sharia as an instrument of government.” Initially, Al-Manar was a weekly publication of 8 pages with a print run of 1,500 copies, but this was soon reduced to 1,000 copies, published monthly. In 1902, Al-Manar had only about 350 subscribers.

  The occasion for Muhammad Abduh first writing in Al-Manar, and thus for a substantial increase in Al-Manar’s circulation, was an article on Ibn Rushd published by Antun in Al-Jami’a al-uthmaniyya, in which Antun argued in favor of science and philosophy. Muslim suspicion of Ibn Rushd in particular and of science and philosophy in general, he alleged, derived from a refusal to conceive of God as a first cause who, once the task of creation had been accomplished, withdrew and allowed natural law to reign. This was a particularly Muslim problem: the teaching of Ibn Rushd had survived in Europe, not the Islamic world. Rida encouraged Muhammad Abduh to respond to Antun in Al-Manar, which he did, asserting that in fact Islam did not see God as directly responsible for everything that happens, and that Christianity had not been as tolerant as Antun suggested. Further, Islam was actually more rational than Christianity, as well as more tolerant. The exchange between Antun and Muhammad Abduh continued for several issues, doing wonders for the circulation of both newspapers. After its completion, both sides published their versions – Antun as Ibn Rushd wa falsafatuh (“Ibn Rushd and his philosophy”), and Muhammad Abduh as Islam wa al-nasraniyya (“Islam and Christianity”).

  From this point, Al-Manar proceeded to publish Muhammad Abduh’s lectures, a series which finally became famous as the Tafsir al-Manar (“Al-Manar’s Quranic Exegesis”). This is now probably Muhammad Abduh’s best-known work after Risalat al-tawhid. It is not known quite what Muhammad Abduh thought of Al-Manar or even of Rida, but he must have approved in general, despite the fact that he never promoted the “divine Sharia as an instrument of government.”He often allowed Rida to attribute Rida’s own writings to him.

  Al-Manar’s circulation gradually grew until it was being read across the Muslim world, where Arabic was still the common language of communication for intellectuals as well as ulema – intellectuals who were not ulema, in fact, were only then beginning to emerge as a distinct category. In Malaya, for example, the distinction was made between the kaum muda or “new generation” and the established ulema, who came to be known by extension as the kaum tua or “old generation”. For the kaum muda, Al-Manar was of great significance. Sometimes they took ideas from it, as when they proposed the use of talfiq, the application of rules from various madhhabs, especially controversial in Malaya, where only one madhhab was followed. More important, though, was the way in which Al-Manar’s mere existence justified and legitimized their struggle against the local ulema establishment, almost irrespective of Al-Manar’s content. First, Al-Manar showed that the kaum muda were not alone, and allowed them to present themselves as the local representatives of a general movement of reform and renewal. They might be few, but the movement as a whole was large. Second, Al-Manar came from Cairo, the home of the Azhar, and was in Arabic, the language of Islam. Even though Malaya had had its own ulema for centuries, an Arab provenance was still seen as guaranteeing an authenticity, and conferring a prestige, that could not be found locally.

  Small groups such as the Malay kaum muda existed everywhere, the result of socio-economic change and exposure to Western education and values, and they all drew inspiration from Al-Manar. Such groups sometimes addressed distinctively local issues (such as Hindu influences on Malay Islam), but also addressed general issues that were broadly similar, whether in Russian Central Asia or in Cairo, since their origins were ultimately the same: European penetration of the Muslim world, in politics, economics, thought, and natural science.

  Another reason for Al-Manar’s great influence was that it had no rival. There was no other significant “Islamic” publication, as the ulema everywhere generally avoided the new medium of print journalism. This left the field open to their rivals. The ulema’s apparent negligence is explicable. A similar quandary had faced the Catholic Church in Europe after the Reformation: to use the new medium of printing and enter into the public debate was to accept defeat, since one of the issues at stake was precisely whether there should be a public debate, or whether the knowledge and authority of the established guardians of religious truth rendered any such debate inappropriate and unnecessary. The Azhar, for example, did not launch a publication of its own until 1931.

  EDUCATION

  In 1904, Muhammad Abduh lamented to the French travel writer Amédée de Guerville that Egypt trained lawyers, physicians, and engineers, but provided nothing of any value in the humanities, social sciences, or economics. “You will not find an inquiring man, a thinker, a philosopher or scholar in the educated classes,” he told her. “You will not find one man of broad intellect, of aspiring soul, or noble feeling.” This was something of an exaggeration, as even Muhammad Abduh would really have had to admit, if only as concerned some of his own associates, with whom he continued to work, in a private capacity, for the improvement of education in Egypt. Chief among these was his old friend Saad Zaghlul, now a lawyer in the Nat
ional Courts with a degree in law from Paris, and also with good connections among the Egyptian elite, first through his relations with Princess Nazli Fadil, to whom he had been introduced by Muhammad Abduh, and then through his marriage to Safiyya Fahmi, daughter of Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi.

  Zaghlul shared Muhammad Abduh’s conviction that Egypt badly needed a good institution of higher education, not just professional training, and both men finally abandoned earlier hopes that the Azhar might be reformed into a real university. Zaghlul, Muhammad Abduh, and some others therefore decided to work for the foundation of an entirely new institution. Muhammad Abduh’s main part in this was in convincing a rich landowner, Ahmad Pasha al-Minshawi, to donate a plot of land to be used for the purpose. The land in question was not, however, considered to be in a suitable place. Muhammad Abduh also founded, in 1900, a Society for the Revival of Arabic Books, which published a number of new editions of Arabic classics.

  Zaghlul and Muhammad Abduh were also concerned with primary education, and for this purpose founded, in 1892, a Muslim Benevolent Society, which was to some extent modeled on the Syrian charity of the same name. Also on the board of this society, of which Muhammad Abduh became president in 1900, were Hasan Pasha Asim, later Grand Chamberlain to the khedive, two more lawyers (Ahmad Lutfi and his brother Omar), and an employee of the State Domains Administration, Muhammad Talaat Harb. Many of these were later to become famous.

  The main objective of the Benevolent Society was to set up schools where the poorer classes might have a basic education on the modern European model, though without foreign languages, to prepare them for life as craftsmen or in similar humble occupations. That the children in these schools should not come to despise such occupations was one of their objectives. By 1905, the Benevolent Society had established seven such schools, teaching 770 children. Although this is not a large number, it is significant compared to the government’s own school program, which was also tiny – at the time when the Benevolent Society was established, there were only nine government-run primary schools, teaching 2,460 children. More Muslim children were taught by Christian missionaries, who in 1893 already taught 7,130 children in 108 schools. By 1906, the United Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia alone had 171 schools in Egypt, teaching over 15,000 children, including over 3,000 Muslim children. The Benevolent Society, then, should be seen as doing what it could do with the limited resources that were available.