Muhammad Abduh Read online

  Muhammad Abduh’s new enthusiasm at this point in his life was the work on education of Herbert Spencer, which he translated from French into Arabic. While on holiday in Europe in 1903, he went to Brighton to visit Spencer, then eighty-three years old and with only months left to live, taking with him as interpreter (since Spencer evidently did not speak French) none other than Wilfrid Blunt.

  Spencer is less well known today than he was in 1903, but at the time his works sold in astonishing numbers. One aphorism of Spencer may well have appealed to Muhammad Abduh: “To the superstitions that pass under the name of religion, science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these superstitions merely hide.”Spencer’s book on education argues against learning by rote without understanding, and also against the punishment of children, partly on utilitarian grounds, and partly because the faults of children derive, at least in part, from the failings of their parents. It argues for valuing the physical education of girls as much as that of boys, and not forcing children to eat what they do not want to eat. The views that Muhammad Abduh evidently so much appreciated, although written in 1861, would command general agreement in liberal educational circles today. It is not known to what extent Muhammad Abduh was able to see them implemented in the schools run by the Benevolent Society.

  THE FATWAS

  Although the majority of Muhammad Abduh’s official fatwas were neither remarkable nor controversial, the fatwas that he issued on what would today be called consumer finance were both remarkable and controversial. Even more controversial was one particular fatwa issued not in his official capacity as Mufti of the Egyptian Realm, but in the pages of Al-Manar: the so-called “Transvaal Fatwa.”

  FINANCIAL FATWAS

  Many of the reforms carried out in Egypt during Muhammad Abduh’s life aimed at fostering economic development by introducing a modern physical, administrative, legal, and financial infrastructure. They included the introduction of a modern commercial code of law which allowed for the creation of limited-liability companies, sometimes quoted on an Egyptian stock exchange, and for the issue of Egyptian government debt, both in Egypt and on foreign exchanges. None of these devices were known to classic understandings of the Sharia, which would have condemned most if not all of them, but this did not give rise to significant problems, since they were regulated not by the Sharia but by the new law codes administered by the Mixed Courts and the National Courts. Some controversy arose, however, when it was realized that the Council for Endowments was following the normal practice of other government departments and placing funds on deposit at the National Bank. Interest was earned on these deposits, and classic understandings of the Sharia held that taking interest was forbidden, that money that arose as interest was thus impure, and that anything paid for with that money was also impure. To apply impure money to government purposes was one thing; to apply impure money to religious purposes was another.

  What was generally more controversial was consumer finance: interest-bearing deposit accounts, and property and life insurance. These were clearly legal under the new codes of national law, but were generally regarded as forbidden by the Sharia. While this had no effect from a purely legal point of view, it still discouraged the use of these devices. This concerned the Egyptian government most in the case of post office savings accounts, which were not just potentially useful for the general population, but were also a source of government finance, in Egypt as in other countries.

  Muhammad Abduh issued several fatwas on consumer finance, starting in 1901 with a fatwa that legitimized property insurance. This had previously been considered forbidden by the Sharia on the dual grounds that a contract of insurance is a contract based on an uncertain future event, and that insurance is in substance a gambling transaction – that the insured is, in effect, betting that his or her house will burn down. To the modern Western mind, of course, the reverse is true – insurance is designed to reduce risk, and failing to insure one’s house is gambling that it will not burn down. Property insurance thus provides a neat illustration of the conflict between a strict understanding of the Sharia and modern analyses and practices. It was to be expected that Muhammad Abduh would rule in favor of the modern.

  In 1903, Muhammad Abduh issued two more fatwas on consumer finance, one dealing with interest, and one dealing with life insurance. In one of his Azhar lectures, he argued that “a part of what the ulema class as riba [interest] brings no injustice;in fact, there is sometimes benefit in it for he who gives and he who receives.” The argument made here is utilitarian rather than based on exegesis, much as his argument against polygamy was. The text of his 1903 fatwa on post office savings accounts no longer exists, but it seems that instead of referring to utility, he argued for the legitimacy of payments to depositors that were calculated as a profit-share under the classic Sharia device of the mudaraba partnership agreement. Alternatively, he may have argued for the legitimacy of a “dividend” of up to two-and-a-half percent, distinguishing this from usurious interest. Whatever, the khedive appointed a commission of ulema to look into the question, later saying that he did so to prevent Muhammad Abduh issuing a fatwa that would have allowed all forms of interest.

  The fatwa on life insurance, also issued in 1903, took a similar approach, interpreting life insurance in terms of mudaraba and so allowing it. In the conception of the fatwa, the insured gives money to the insurance company, which then after a specified period returns not only the money but a share of the profits it has made with that money. However, if the insured dies, the money is collected instead by his heirs. This is a description of what is technically known as a “with-profits endowment policy,” and is more or less accurate, so far as it goes. What Muhammad Abduh omitted was the two elements that would raise problems under the Sharia: the pure insurance element in the arrangement, which means that the sum collected by the insured’s heirs after an early and unexpected death is greater than the premiums that have been paid, and the origin of the profits, which commonly includes interest from bonds as well as from other forms of investment. While Muhammad Abduh may have omitted discussion of the interest problem because he had an incomplete knowledge of the investment practices of life insurance companies, he must have known that the sum that would be collected in the event of an early death was greater than the premiums then paid. At least one omission, then, was almost certainly intentional.

  THE TRANSVAAL FATWA

  Perhaps Muhammad Abduh’s most famous fatwa, however, was the “Transvaal fatwa,” also issued in 1903, and so called because it was given in answer to questions raised by Muslims in the Transvaal, the former Boer republic in South Africa that had just been conquered by Britain. That Muslims in the Transvaal should address a Mufti in faraway Egypt was an indication of how far Muhammad Abduh’s fame had already spread, for though the Muslim community in the Transvaal was small, the Muslim community in Cape Town and Durban was substantial and long established, and a lot closer than Cairo.

  Three questions were asked in the Transvaal fatwa. Two related to disputes in the South African Muslim community, which was split between the followers of the Shafi’i and Hanafi madhhabs, the former of whom were the oldest established group, and the latter of whom consisted mostly of more recent arrivals from India. The Hanafi madhhab had been promoted in South Africa by a Kurdish member of the ulema despatched by the Ottoman government. He had also encouraged Muslim men to wear the fez, which the Ottoman government had recently approved as an alternative to the hat, which the Ottoman ulema deemed unsuitable for Muslims since the brim of the hat prevented the forehead from touching the ground during the prostration that was part of the ritual prayer. One of the questions, then, was whether a Muslim might wear a hat. Despite the fact that Egyptian Muslims did not wear hats either, and that the fez was worn in Egypt as it was in the Ottoman Empire, Muhammad Abduh replied in the affirmative, so long as the wearing of a hat did not “indicate an intention of copying the Europeans in their religion, but has a practical pur
pose.” This, of course, was not what was generally thought to be the issue.

  Another question was whether a Shafi’i Muslim might follow a Hanafi imam in prayer. The reason for this question was that the split between the Shafi’i and Hanafi communities in South Africa had given rise to separate mosques for Shafi’is and Hanafis, a practice that some Muslims in the Transvaal evidently wished to challenge. Again, Muhammad Abduh replied in the affirmative, on this occasion following the general view of the Egyptian and Ottoman ulema.

  The third question related not to a dispute but to what must have been a practical problem for the small number of Muslims in the Transvaal: whether a Muslim might eat meat from animals slaughtered by Christians. The generally accepted answer to this question was that Muslims might only eat meat killed properly according to the Sharia, notably when the name of God had been said at the slaughtering of the animal concerned. Presumably, however, there were then no Muslim butchers in many parts of the Transvaal (though there were certainly Muslim butchers elsewhere in South Africa).

  Muhammad Abduh had already encountered this problem since he had lived in Paris, where there were probably then no Muslim butchers either, but it is not known what he had done under these circumstances. He had written in Risalat al-tawhid that Islam, as the third and complete revelation, encouraged amity between peoples by allowing Muslims to share the food of followers of the earlier revelations. This was not as radical as it might seem, however. The ulema would have agreed, since the Quran specifically states that the “food” of the Jews and Christians is allowed to Muslims – but most of the ulema would then have added that “food” did not include meat. The meat eaten by Christians included pork, for example, which everyone agreed was not allowed to Muslims. There was not, however, total unanimity on other meats, and in his fatwa Muhammad Abduh held that “food” did include meat, referring to the opinion of a respected but minor Andalusian scholar of the eleventh century, Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn al-Arabi al-Maliki.

  MUHAMMAD ABDUH’S METHODOLOGY

  In recent years, there has been much discussion among scholars, both Western and Muslim, about what Muhammad Abduh’s methodology was. Methodology is more important in Islam than in religions such as Christianity, because the ulema have, since antiquity, attempted to the best of their ability to extract the rules of the Sharia from the texts left by the original revelation of Islam. The relationship between the Quran and the hadith, for example, has been an important issue. Greater emphasis on one or the other leads to different conclusions on many questions. Another issue has been which hadith to accept and which to reject – there is a great mass of hadith material, and it has always been accepted that some of it is apocryphal, and should be discarded as unreliable. The question has been over where and how to draw the line. Once again, different conclusions result from different methodological approaches. Muhammad Abduh is not recorded as having said much on questions of methodology, which is one reason why there has since been so much discussion over what his methodology was.

  Muhammad Abduh could well have written at length on technical methodology if he had wanted to. He was familiar with the issues from his Azhar training, and sometimes used classic and later-medieval Islamic scholarship to support his arguments, as when he referred to Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn al-Arabi al-Maliki. However, as has been said, he did not write at any length on methodology, and in general – as in his Azhar lectures – spent little or no time examining the basis on which a conclusion was based. It seems, then, that he was more concerned with the conclusion than with the methodology used to reach it. In the classic Sunni conception, a conclusion should be reached by the application of the proper methodology to the sources through which the original revelation is known. If – for example – the conclusion is that insurance is forbidden, then insurance is forbidden, and that is that. Muhammad Abduh seems to have taken the opposite approach – that if insurance is a good thing, then it is a good thing, and questions of methodology do not really matter. In Risalat al-tawhid, he wrote critically of the effects of theological disputation, which he evidently regarded as unnecessary. The source of his objections to polygamy, to Sufism, and to lack of hard work is not a particular exegetic methodology, then. It is his reading on topical issues, his reflections on these, and his experience over the years.

  Despite this, Muhammad Abduh did implicitly promote a new variety of exegesis: that of defying taqlid, both in the technical legal sense of refusing to follow a single madhhab and in the more general sense of refusing to be bound by tradition, by precedent and custom, of reading the Quran anew, ignoring prior interpretations.

  MUHAMMAD ABDUH’S INTENTIONS

  Muhammad Abduh’s attempt to legitimize practices from wearing hats to using life insurance were part of a general attempt to remove Islamic prohibitions against modern European usages. He is said, for example, to have argued against the classic prohibition on the making of images on the grounds that the danger of images being worshiped as idols was now long past. He is even said to have issued a fatwa allowing Muslims to pray with their shoes on, a practice that he adopted – at least on occasion – himself.

  By the 1890s, Muhammad Abduh was clearly an enthusiast of Europe. On his unusual habit of taking European holidays, he wrote:

  I go to Europe so often only to renew my hope of changing the conditions of the Muslims for the better by reforming the religion that they have corrupted, and to spur them to a knowledge of their own affairs and a control over these without going to extremes. And these hopes would grow feeble in my soul when I came back to my own country because of all the wrongdoing I came in contact with, the grave difficulties I encountered, the evils I saw because of the Muslims’ disregard for their own advantage, their hostility towards themselves, their great eagerness to strengthen the grip of their oppressors on them, and their fondness for unthinking servitude to them. But when I returned to Europe, and stayed there a month or two, my hope would come back to me, and it would seem easy to attain what I had thought impossible.

  This, rather like Muhammad Abduh’s comment to Amédée de Guerville on the absence of original thinkers in Egypt, suggests a measure of depression. The cause of this – the “great difficulties” that Muhammad Abduh encountered – will be discussed in the following chapter. The enthusiasm for Europe, however, is also clear – but it was an enthusiasm within limits.

  In 1903, Muhammad Abduh traveled to Algiers. He had initially wanted to go with his friend Ali Yusuf, editor of Al-Mu’ayyad, with whom he had visited the Ottoman capital in 1901, but he went alone, as his friend did not receive the necessary permission from the French authorities. Algiers had been under French control since 1830, and was in 1903 perhaps the most European of all Arab cities, known for its “évolués” – “developed” Algerians who were effectively French in language, culture, and even legal status. Muhammad Abduh stayed with one such évolué, a rich and cosmopolitan Algerian whose house was known for its parties and concerts. On this occasion, predictably, he argued in private conversation for reform of Islamic education, and of Islam itself, to adapt to modern conditions. Less predictably, he argued against the abandonment of Algerian identity, since he thought it unlikely that Algerians would ever be accepted as fully French, whatever they did. This argument is consistent with a view reported by Lord Cromer, that Muhammad Abduh considered “the Europeanized Egyptian” “a bad copy of the original” – a view that Cromer himself seems to have shared. For all his appreciation of Europe, then, Muhammad Abduh remained convinced that Europe was a model, not a destination. He may have wanted to legitimize a range of modern European practices, but he did not wish Egypt, or Algeria, to become Europe.

  Muhammad Abduh’s views on identity are less clear than his views on some other issues, but may have been important for his work, and may also explain part of his own relationship with Islam. The connection between religion and identity in the Arab world, and hence between religion and nationalism, is complicated. The broadest definitions of the
Egyptian nation, such as those promoted in Al-Tijara before the Urabi Revolt, relegate religion to a secondary position in order to include Egyptian Christians (and, once, Jews). Older, religiously based conceptions of the community persist, however, and in practice Islam remains central to the national identity of Muslim Egyptians, whatever the theory. In a certain sense, a patriotic Egyptian has to be Muslim. Muhammad Abduh’s promotion of an Islam that was adapted to modern conditions and was acceptable to modern patriotic Egyptians, then, was not just protecting Islam, but also protecting the Egyptian identity.

  ADVERSITY

  “If I have a portion of true knowledge,” said Muhammad Abduh, “I got it through ten years of sweeping the dirt of the Azhar from my brain, and to this day it is not as clean as I would like.”The response of the Azhari Shaykh Bukhayri, to whom Muhammad Abduh addressed this comment, is not recorded. The response to Muhammad Abduh and his message of the Azhar in general, though, is known. It was generally hostile, and grew more hostile as time passed.