Muhammad Abduh Read online

soaring in spirit in a different world from that which I had known. The way which seemed to me straitened, had widened out before me. The life of this world which had appeared great to me, had become small, and the acquisition of wisdom and the yearning of the soul towards God which had been small in my eyes had become great.

  This is a description of exactly what following a Sufi practice such as that of the Madaniyya is meant to achieve – direct access to God, the feeling which Freud described as “the oceanic,” though Freud did not explain it in terms of the divine. What is somewhat surprising is that it happened to Muhammad Abduh so quickly, but it evidently did happen, and the Muhammad Abduh who returned to the Tanta school was a changed man – not just married, but a Sufi.

  Muhammad Abduh’s experience and subsequent mystical orientation were not unusual. Many of his fellow students in Tanta were also Sufis, since at that time the ulema often combined the pursuit of external knowledge with the pursuit of illumination, the one found in schools such as Tanta and the other found at the hands of great shaykhs such as al-Madani. What is a little surprising is that Muhammad Abduh seems to have had no further contact with the Madaniyya. It is not known whether there were other Madanis in Tanta, but there were Madanis in Alexandria, and the journey to Alexandria would have been easy. Perhaps there was further contact, but Muhammad Abduh simply said nothing about it. Perhaps he was already inclined toward the independence that he would repeatedly demonstrate during the rest of his life.

  CAIRO

  In 1866, at the age of about seventeen, Muhammad Abduh transferred from the Tanta school to the great school at the Azhar mosque in Cairo. This was a time-honored step, one necessary for those who wished to proceed to higher studies and so perhaps to a career in the ulema as a religious scholar, a preacher, or a judge. The Azhar was, like Tanta, free, and for centuries had been one of the four or five leading centers of scholarship in the Muslim world, and a well-trodden route by which men from villages like Muhammad Abduh’s could rise to national prominence and honor.

  It 1866, however, the Azhar was an institution in crisis. First, it was overcrowded – Azhar students were exempt from conscription, and so when conscription was introduced numbers of students had risen from the normal 2,000–3,000 to over 7,000. Numbers dropped after the end of Mehmet Ali’s wars, but jumped again in 1866, and in 1867 there were almost 5,000 students. Second, the Azhar was in financial difficulties. Its senior scholars had assisted Mehmet Ali’s rise to power in the first years of the century, but Mehmet Ali recognized that those who had helped him might one day help a rival, and so once he was firmly enough established he set about reducing the power of the ulema, and of the Azhar. He did this partly by encouraging splits and disputes in the Azhar’s leadership, but most importantly by reducing the economic bases of the ulema’s power – the “tax farms” or concessions that were the principal form of investment used by senior scholars, and the assets of the endowments that financed both them and the institutions they controlled. At precisely the point that the Azhar needed more money to pay stipends to more students and teachers, then, it found that it had less money. Despite this, the number of teachers increased, from around 30 at the beginning of the nineteenth century to 221 in 1867. This produced a respectable ratio of only twenty-one students per teacher, but it is likely that the quality of many of the new teachers was lower than that of the older teachers.

  In addition to these problems, the behavior of students was often poor. Students are not the best behaved of adolescents, and overcrowding at the Azhar made things worse. In 1860, for example, only six years before Muhammad Abduh arrived, a dispute between students from Upper Egypt and students from Syria over sitting spaces for classes had developed into a brawl, and the Upper Egyptian students had blockaded the Syrian students in their dormitory. When soldiers were called to release the Syrian students, the Upper Egyptian students attacked the soldiers, and were only subdued by reinforcements. This riot was, perhaps unfairly, blamed on the rector of the Azhar, Ibrahim al-Bajuri, who was fired by the government and replaced by a four-man council. The Upper Egyptian students were much criticized – Ali Mubarak, a senior official in the Department of Education, alleged that they were in the habit of bringing their goats to class with them.

  An attempt had been made to reform the Azhar the year before Muhammad Abduh arrived there, by Mustafa al-Arusi, a member of the Azhar Council who had been appointed rector of the Azhar by Egypt’s new and ambitious ruler, Ismail. Al-Arusi introduced regulations which would have established central control of which teachers taught which texts in which locations, as well as obliging students to take exams. They would also have improved hygienic conditions in the dormitories. The resistance to these regulations from the Azhar’s teachers was so great that when they petitioned Ismail for al-Arusi’s dismissal, Ismail gave in. Muhammad Abduh, then, arrived at a famous but overcrowded institution where both teaching and hygienic conditions required improvement. The other students were often more interested in escaping conscription than in learning, were not subject to examination, and perhaps sometimes brought their goats to class. It was not until 1872 that a less ambitious reform succeeded in introducing a system of final examinations for a certificate known as the alimiyya, without which it was not allowed to teach.

  According to his autobiography, Muhammad Abduh continued on the Sufi path as a student at the Azhar, though he makes no mention of any other Sufis, save for his uncle. Unlike most other Sufis, Muhammad Abduh was evidently following an individual path, an approach discouraged among Sufis by the well-known saying: “He who has no shaykh has Satan for his shaykh.” As well as continuing with the litany he had learned from his uncle, Muhammad Abduh followed a variety of ascetic practices – wearing a rough garment next to his skin, fasting frequently, staying up all night repeating various litanies. None of these practices were unusual among pious Muslims of a Sufi disposition, though Muhammad Abduh’s practice of avoiding speaking to other people unless he had good reason to speak was slightly less common. After five years, in 1871, his uncle warned him that he was becoming too withdrawn, and advised him to increase his contact with others. This he did.

  AFGHANI

  Up to this point, the story of Muhammad Abduh’s life might be that of any of many thousands of other Egyptian Azhar students at any time during the previous several centuries. In 1872, however, when Muhammad Abduh was twenty-three, something very unusual happened. Muhammad Abduh joined a small group of students studying privately with a remarkable thirty-three-year-old Persian, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. This was the first great turning point in his life.

  There were then probably no other Persians at the Azhar, for the simple reason that Persia – the country now known as Iran – was Shi’i, following the smaller of the two rather different branches of Islam that had resulted from a split more than a thousand years before. Egypt, like most of the rest of the Arab world, followed the larger, Sunni, branch, and so the Azhar was also Sunni. Afghani, however, disguised his Shi’i origins by presenting himself as an Afghan, and so by implication a Sunni, since Afghanistan is mostly Sunni. Although a Persian would have had difficulty in passing as an Arab, it would have been easy for a Persian to pass as an Afghan, at least in the Arab world. In order to do so, however, a Persian would have had to adjust the details of his religious practice from the Shi’i to the Sunni norm, notably when praying. Observant Muslims – which would by definition include students at the Azhar – invariably pray the five daily ritual prayers, and when the time for a prayer comes, they often pray together. Sunni Muslims pray on prayer mats or carpets, which Shi’i Muslims only do with the aid of a turba, a small tablet of baked clay which they first place on the mat or carpet in front of them. Had Afghani used a turba, or had he prayed only on bare stone floors, his Shi’i identity would have become known immediately, since the turba is not used by Sunnis, and no Sunni would pray on a stone floor without a prayer mat. Since this did not happen, Afghani must have prayed without a turba – mea
ning that, in Shi’i terms, his prayers were neither valid nor acceptable. Afghani, then, had either converted from Shi’ism to Sunnism, or did not care about such details. According to his enemies, he was not a religious man – one account even has him drinking brandy and flirting with a European barmaid. This account is unconfirmed, and may have simply been an attempt to slander him.

  Muhammad Abduh first met Afghani in 1869, during a stop Afghani made on his way from India to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. In Istanbul, Afghani had established good relations with the director of the Institute of Arts (the Darülfünun), Taksin Pasha. The Ottoman title of pasha, rather like the English title of lord, indicated considerable wealth, a senior government position, or both. Taksin’s Institute of Arts had just been established as part of the Ottoman Empire’s great effort to modernize in order better to compete with the European empires that threatened it, an effort similar to the program that Mehmet Ali and Ismail were responsible for in Egypt. Afghani was also appointed to the Ottoman Council of Education. In 1871, however, outrage following Afghani’s contribution to an evening lecture series at the Institute of Arts was the occasion for the closure of that institution, and led to Afghani’s own expulsion from Istanbul – the immediate cause of his presence in Cairo. The lecture series was on the thoroughly nineteenth-century topic of “Progress in the Sciences and Industries,” and in this context Afghani had apparently defined prophecy as a form of craft, and perhaps even suggested that philosophers were in some way superior to prophets. If true, this would inevitably have caused outrage. The text of Afghani’s lecture does not survive, so it is not clear whether the objection was to what he actually said, to what he was thought to have said, or merely to the fact that the nature of prophecy was being discussed in a forum outside the control of the ulema. Whichever was the case, he left for Cairo.

  In Cairo, Afghani attracted the patronage of Mustafa Riyad Pasha, who was in some ways the Egyptian equivalent of his former sponsor in Istanbul, Taksin Pasha. Riyad would play an important part in the lives of Afghani and Muhammad Abduh over the next few years, as well as in the history of Egypt. He was the Turkish-speaking son of an Ottoman official who had been director of the mint under Mehmet Ali, and was perhaps of Jewish origin. After a period in the army, he had held three provincial governorships before serving as treasurer under the Khedive Ismail – the title khedive had been chosen as a compromise between king and prince, and was held only by the hereditary ruler of Egypt in succession to Mehmet Ali. Riyad’s career was interrupted by a clash with the khedive that led to his dismissal in 1868, but soon recovered. He was appointed director of education in 1873, and later became prime minister. Riyad evidently appreciated Afghani, since he awarded him a small stipend. Afghani took lodgings near the Azhar, and taught privately there and in a neighboring café, initially hoping to return to Istanbul.

  As well as Muhammad Abduh, Afghani’s regular students at this time included Saad Zaghlul, a younger Azhar student, Abdullah al-Nadim, who was about Muhammad Abduh’s age, and another younger man, Adib Ishaq. All became friends, and all later went on to important positions – Nadim and Ishaq as prominent journalists, and Zaghlul as a great prime minister of Egypt after the First World War. Over the years, Muhammad Abduh would gradually part company with most of his associates from this period, but Zaghlul remained close to him for the rest of his life.

  Afghani, whose earlier education in Persia had given him an excellent knowledge of Arabic, read with Muhammad Abduh and the others classic texts that were fairly standard in Persia, but far from standard in Cairo, notably works on philosophy in which there was then little interest in the Sunni world. These included, for example, the Kitab al-isharat wa ‘l-tanbihat (“Book of directives and remarks”) of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who was best known in medieval Europe for his medical works, but who was also a philosopher in the tradition of Aristotle, Plotinus, and al-Farabi (Alfarabius). They also read together works that were not standard in Persia or in Cairo – Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima (“Introduction”), which sets out a complex philosophy of history, and translations of European works.

  Muhammad Abduh was as struck by Afghani’s method of teaching as by his texts, for rather than teaching by rote as was done in Tanta and at the Azhar, Afghani actually discussed the texts he was teaching, encouraging questions, and asking his own when none were forthcoming. Even more, in Muhammad Abduh’s own words, “he was not satisfied with an understanding of the book and assent to the opinions of the writer.” Like some of the texts Afghani taught, such a method was standard in the schools of Persia. It was the beginning of the development of a critical and inquiring approach to knowledge for Muhammad Abduh, Zaghlul, and the others.

  Two years after meeting Afghani, in 1874, Muhammad Abduh wrote his first book,Risalat al-waridat fi sirr al-tajalliyyat (“An essay on mystical inspirations from the secrets of revelation”). This is traditional in form but unusual in content, reflecting what he had learned from Afghani. It was not published in Muhammad Abduh’s lifetime, but gives an excellent idea of what he had been studying. It starts with a discussion of philosophical proofs for the existence of God, based on Ibn Sina, and differing in some respects from the conception of the relations between God and creation then accepted at the Azhar. From this it moves on to a cosmology that shows the influence of the Shi’i philosopher Mulla Sadra and the School of Isfahan, and then to a discussion of prophecy that again follows Ibn Sina more than the Azhar. It is, in short, a work that owes as much or more to the Shi’i mystical philosophy that Afghani had learned, and was now evidently teaching, than to anything then visible in Cairo. It is also a continuation of the mystical approach to Islam that Muhammad Abduh had learned from his Sufi uncle, so the debt may not be to Afghani and Shi’ism alone: such works as Muhammad Abduh had read with Afghani had once been studied and appreciated in Cairo too, and although there is no evidence of much interest in them during the nineteenth century, there is equally no evidence that an interest in some of them had not survived, at least in restricted circles.

  The Risalat al-waridat was followed in 1876 by a similar work, again unpublished in Muhammad Abduh’s lifetime, Al-taliqat ala sharh al-Dawani li’l-aqaid al-Adudiyya (“A gloss to the commentary of al-Jalal al-Dawani on the Dogmatics of Adud al-Din al-Iji”). It has been argued, however, that the gloss is actually Afghani’s, not Muhammad Abduh’s.

  Muhammad Abduh was twenty-three when he met Afghani, and through him encountered both the highly sophisticated Persian tradition of philosophy and works of modern European thought. As a result, his intellectual world became very different from that of his contemporaries at the Azhar. His earlier studies had prepared him for the encounter with Afghani, but provided little to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. Afghani’s teaching, then, began to fill an almost blank page. At first, it was the Persian philosophy that had the greatest impact; later, it would be the European works. In later life, Muhammad Abduh did not adhere closely to the philosophical views he learned from Afghani, but he did continue to demonstrate the same intellectual independence as he showed in the Risalat al-waridat.

  GRADUATION

  Predictably, Muhammad Abduh’s new interests and views got him into difficulties at the Azhar, where rumors began to circulate to the effect that he was a Mutazilite – a member of a theological school that had ceased to exist some seven centuries before, although its doctrines were still known. These doctrines were objectionable to the Sunnis, but less so to the Shi’a, so Muhammad Abduh may well have expressed approval of one or more positions that were correctly identified as being of Mutazilite origin. Characteristically Mutazilite positions include views on the nature of God and on divine justice and free will that Sunni scholars rejected. Most important were the Mutazilite views on the relative authority of reason and revelation. For the Sunni scholars of the Azhar, the sole valid criterion of good and evil was that which God had revealed through the Prophet. For the Mutazilites, however, reason was also capable of deciding what was good a
nd what was evil, though not in contradiction to revelation – a position which the Shi’a also hold. Given Muhammad Abduh’s later enthusiasm for reason, this may have been the position which got him into trouble.

  In general, however, Muhammad Abduh seems to have been somewhat circumspect. As a senior student, he taught some texts to other students, notably a fairly standard Sunni commentary by Saad al-Din al-Taftazani on the Aqaid (“Dogmatics”) of Umar al-Nasafi. The text was not in itself problematic from the perspective of the Azhar, but it was not normally taught at the level that Muhammad Abduh taught it – and also presumably not normally taught by a student. Had Muhammad Abduh taught the views he had expressed in the Risalat al-waridat, he would have got into much more serious difficulties.

  By his own later account, Muhammad Abduh denied following the Mutazila on the basis that if he had rejected strict adherence (taqlid) to one group, he would not take up strict adherence to another. On this basis, following the intervention of the rector of the Azhar on his behalf, he passed the final oral examination and, in 1877, received the degree of alimiyya which allowed him to teach. This story is slightly unlikely, however, for the simple reason that the necessity for taqlid was then generally accepted by all at the Azhar, and so a student who attempted to defend himself from one charge of heresy by proposing what was in effect an alternative heresy would hardly have improved his position. As will be seen, Muhammad Abduh later became a firm and public opponent of taqlid, and may even have first learned this from his Sufi uncle, but his later recollection of his response to charges of heresy may have exaggerated the extent of his defiance in 1877. He was probably less outspoken and more apologetic.

  In 1877, then, Muhammad Abduh had entered the world of the Egyptian ulema as a qualified scholar at an institution that was still without rival in the Muslim world, despite its various problems. His horizons were far broader than those of the vast majority of his colleagues, and some of his more private views were closer to Shi’i than to Sunni Islam. He was also a member of a group of followers of an unusual émigré Persian, with connections to a rising politician, Riyad Pasha.