Muhammad Abduh Read online

  In general, Urabists with good connections to the elite escaped punishment. Urabi himself was tried, spared execution, and sent into permanent exile. Muhammad Abduh escaped trial as a result of Broadley’s negotiations, but was sent into exile for three years. A year later he wrote to Afghani in harsh terms of the Urabists:

  These men donned the garb of prophets but followed the methods of tyrants; they spoke the words of learned men and were inwardly ignorant; they adopted our manner of calling for liberty, and were enabled by the power of the sword and the weakness of the government to convince the vulgar man that they stood for right and truth and the protection of the laws.

  In the years since he graduated from the Azhar, Muhammad Abduh had twice been involved in attempts to reform Egyptian politics and society, and had twice been disappointed. On the first occasion, the cause of liberty had been defeated by the khedive, with British support. On the second occasion, the cause of liberty was defeated by the miscalculations of the Urabists, and by the British occupation of Egypt.

  EXILE

  Exiled from Egypt in December 1882, Muhammad Abduh traveled to the Ottoman Empire, first to Damascus and then to Beirut. Little is known of how he spent his time in Damascus, save that he met the son of the Amir Abd al-Qadir, formerly leader of the armed resistance to the French occupation of Algeria, and briefly ruler of a small state recognized by France. After his defeat, Abd al-Qadir had spent some time in France as an honored prisoner, and had joined a Masonic lodge. After his release by Emperor Napoleon III, he moved to Damascus, where – as well as being awarded the Légion d’honneur for saving many Christians during a riot – he devoted the remainder of his life to the study of the works of the greatest of Sufi mystic philosophers, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi.

  Abd al-Qadir became a central point in a group of religious reformers known as the Salafis (a group to which the well-known contemporary movement of the same name has no connection), and it has been suggested that through these contacts Muhammad Abduh met representatives of the Salafis. The name Salafi stressed the group’s adherence to the doctrines and practices of the salaf, the first generations of Muslims after the Prophet, rather than to the later formulations of Islamic law that were then generally accepted. The Salafis rejected taqlid (strict adherence to precedent), as did Muhammad Abduh, but for somewhat different reasons. The Salafis were connected to the same earlier movement as the Madaniyya, the Sufi order to which Muhammad Abduh’s uncle belonged, and wished to follow the earliest models of Islam more closely. This might have made Muhammad Abduh sympathetic toward them, but the later logic behind his rejection of taqlid was more utilitarian, as will be seen. Although he may have been in contact with these Salafis, then, it is unlikely that in the end he took much from them other than, perhaps, their reference to the salaf.

  In 1883, Muhammad Abduh moved from Damascus to Beirut, a city which enjoyed relative autonomy under arrangements forced on the Ottomans by the European powers for the sake of the city’s significant Christian population. In Beirut, he joined a small group of other Egyptian exiles, and was welcomed by local progressive intellectuals. He initially stayed with Muhyi al-Din Bey Humada, the reformist mayor of Beirut, before taking a house in the Zuqaq al-Blat quarter, the modern area of the city.

  Among the exiles in Beirut were Ibrahim al-Laqqani, the former editor of Mirat al-sharq and a former member of the Afghani group in Cairo, and Abu Turab, Afghani’s servant, who performed functions akin to those of Afghani’s assistant. Al-Laqqani had arrived in Beirut with Abu Turab, whom he had met in a jail in Alexandria where the two were awaiting deportation. Abu Turab had accompanied Afghani to India, but had then returned to Cairo on a mission to recover Afghani’s personal effects and money owed him by Riyad Pasha and Sharif Pasha. He had then been arrested. Al-Laqqani had presumably been arrested for participation in the Urabi Revolt.

  AFGHANI, MUHAMMAD ABDUH AND ISLAM

  Contact with Afghani thus re-established, Muhammad Abduh wrote to his former teacher and leader, who had by then moved to Paris, requesting copies of his recent articles. Until this point there is evidence of the young Muhammad Abduh’s views on political and social questions, but not on religious questions. As a result of Muhammad Abduh’s renewed contact with Afghani, his views on religion become somewhat clearer, though not entirely clear.

  Among the articles Muhammad Abduh received was one by Afghani that had been published in French in the Journal des débats on May 18, 1883 in response to a lecture by Ernest Renan, a renowned Orientalist. Renan’s lecture, given at the Sorbonne, had been printed in full in the Journal des débats six weeks before, and had attracted much attention. Renan had argued, with some passion, that both Islam and the Arab spirit were hostile to science and philosophy, and that the famous Arab and Islamic scientists and philosophers of the past were in fact neither Arab nor Muslim. They were perhaps Arab by language, but were generally Persian in cultural and racial terms. Some were not Muslim, and those who were Muslim were “in internal revolt against their own religion.”

  Afghani replied that it was wrong to distinguish language from race in this way. “Human races can be distinguished only by language,” he wrote, and no one seriously suggested that Mazarin and Bonaparte were Italian rather than French, despite their origins. Anyhow, the Arab spirit could hardly be thought hostile to science and philosophy given the speed with which it had advanced along “the path of scientific and intellectual progress,” assimilating Greek and Persian science in less than a century. Afghani, however, accepted Renan’s basic proposition concerning Islam – that it was hostile to science and philosophy. “It is evident that, wherever it became established, this religion sought to stifle science,” he wrote. However, this was not the fault of Islam itself. “All religions are intolerant, each in its own way.” Nor did this mean that Muslims could never develop science and philosophy. There was a general pattern whereby all peoples, at their origin, were necessarily governed by strict rules “imposed in the name of the Supreme Being, to whom their teachers attributed all events, without permitting them to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of this.” This is how all peoples, Muslim, Christian or pagan, first emerged from barbarism. Christian societies had then moved forward from this first period “to advance rapidly on the path of progress and science.” So might Muslim societies.

  I cannot but hope that Mohammedan society will one day break its bonds and walk resolutely on the path of civilization after the example of Western society for which the Christian faith, despite its rigors and its intolerance, has in no way been an insuperable obstacle.

  In a letter in the next day’s Journal des débats, Renan welcomed Afghani’s article, and accepted that Muslim societies might indeed “arrive at that state of benevolent indifference [towards religion] in which religious beliefs become inoffensive,” as had happened in many – but not all – Christian countries. “Reduced to the condition of individual and voluntary things, like literature or taste, religions change entirely,” asserted Renan, an end that in the case of Islam could be best achieved by the spread of education.

  When Afghani’s article arrived and its full contents were explained to Muhammad Abduh by a translator, Muhammad Abduh decided that the article could not possibly be published in Arabic, which had been the original intention. Anything that seemed to hope for the decline of Islam would have been received very badly. Muhammad Abduh put the translator off with an excuse, and explained this to Afghani in a letter. He added:

  We regulate our conduct according to your sound rule: we cut off the head of religion only with the sword of religion. Therefore if you were to see us now, you would see ascetics and worshipers kneeling and genuflecting, never disobeying what God commands and doing all that they are ordered to do.

  The exact meaning of this curious passage, contained in a letter that was not published until 1963, has been much debated, with much attention focusing on the possible meaning of the word “head” (ras). In his letter to the editor of the J
ournal des débats, Renan had described Afghani as “entirely free from the prejudices of Islam,” adding that “his freedom of thought, his noble and loyal character, made me think whilst talking to him that I had before me, reincarnated, one of my old friends, Avicenna, Averroes, or another of those great infidels who for five centuries represented the tradition of the human spirit.” Some have argued that Muhammad Abduh, like Afghani, was an infidel, “entirely free from the prejudices of Islam” in the sense of having left Islam. An alternative interpretation is that Muhammad Abduh and Afghani were simply free of the prejudices of Islam, an interpretation that seems more likely. In his article, Afghani was arguing that Muslim society would “walk resolutely on the path of civilization” when the habit of looking only to Islam and never to science or philosophy had been eliminated, not when Islam itself had been eliminated. That Renan hoped for a “state of benevolent indifference” did not mean that Afghani, or Muhammad Abduh, did. Whatever Muhammad Abduh meant by ras, he did not mean Islam as a whole.

  Much has been read into a distinction between the masses and “a few select minds” made in the conclusion of Afghani’s article:

  For so long as humanity exists, the struggle will not cease between dogma and free enquiry, between religion and philosophy, a desperate struggle in which, I fear, the victory will not be to free thought. The masses do not like reason, the teachings of which are understood only by a few select minds. Science, however fine it may be, cannot completely satisfy humanity’s thirst for the ideal, or the desire to soar in dark and distant regions that philosophers and scholars can neither see nor explore.

  Afghani, it has been suggested, was not himself religious, but recognized that religion was useful for the masses. This interpretation has been supported by one reading of a work of Afghani’s that Muhammad Abduh did translate while in Beirut, Haqiqat-i mazhab-i naichun (“The truth about the naturist sect”), written in Persian, and published in Hyderabad in 1881. Abu Turab knew Persian, and worked with Muhammad Abduh on this translation, which was published in Arabic as Al-radd ala al-dahriyyin (“Refutation of the materialists”) in Beirut in 1885. While Muhammad Abduh did not necessarily agree with every word written by Afghani in this work, it can safely be assumed that he did not disagree with its basic tenor.

  Afghani’s work was written during a controversy in India unleashed by the public endorsement of the laws of nature by Ahmad Khan, the Indian Muslim reformer whose ingenious argument that polygamy was forbidden in practice had been used by Muhammad Abduh in Al-Waqa’i al-misriyya. Ahmad Khan had addressed the relationship between nature and religion, a difficult issue for all religions during the late nineteenth century. The issue arose partly because of new scientific discoveries such as those of Darwin. Even before Darwin, the discoveries made by early geologists had already undermined the previously accepted narrative of creation, common to Islam and Christianity. Darwin in a sense delivered the coup de grâce by arguing that the origin of species was not divine will but the consequences of random, chance events. A second problem was posed by what we would now call social science – rationalist and scientific analyses of human behavior that advanced explanations and prescriptions often at variance with religion. Ahmad Khan had grasped the bull by the horns, accepting the scientific understanding of nature, and proposing that “The work of God (nature and its fixed laws) is identical with the Word of God (the Quran).”This was not the only way in which he grasped a bull by its horns, however. A second issue that confronted Indian Muslims at the time was their relationship with the British rulers of India. Ahmad Khan advised absolute loyalty to the British crown, coupled with education along British lines. In 1878, he had founded a “Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College” at Aligarh, modeled on the great British universities, and in 1878 he had accepted appointment by the British to India’s Viceregal Legislative Council. In 1888, after these events, he was made a British knight.

  Afghani took issue with Ahmad Khan, arguing against the “naturists” on two bases. First, he deployed philosophical arguments against the Darwinian view that chance could be a prime cause. Second, he argued for the social usefulness of religion, which the gross materialism of the naturists – among whom he included contemporary socialists – tended to destroy. Religion, he argued, is the only true basis for personal morality, social cohesion, and civilization in general.

  One reading of this takes Afghani’s emphasis on the social utility of religion together with his view that the masses want religion, and concludes that Afghani thought that religion was only for the masses, and that social utility was the only or main justification for it. An alternative reading notes that the fact that Afghani thought that religion had social utility did not mean that he thought that it had no other justification.

  At the end of his book on the “naturists,” Afghani argues that Islam is the best of all the religions, since it

  is the only religion that censures belief without proof and the following of conjectures; reproves blind submission; seeks to show proof of things to its followers; everywhere addresses itself to reason; considers all happiness the result of wisdom and clear-sightedness.

  Afghani concludes:

  If someone says: If the Islamic world is as you say, then why are the Muslims in such a sad condition? I will answer:When they were [truly] Muslims, they were what they were and the world bears witness to their excellence. As for the present, I will content myself with this holy text:“Verily, God does not change the state of a people until they change themselves inwardly.”

  Afghani’s characterization of Islam as “the only religion that censures belief without proof” requires comment. At the time, it was generally agreed among the Shi’a that Islam required an understanding of the logical proofs behind belief; this was not, however, the view of the Sunni ulema at that time. Afghani is writing, then, not of Sunni Islam as it then was, but of Islam as he – and presumably Muhammad Abduh – would have liked it to be: rational. If nature and Islam were one and the same for Ahmad Khan, reason and Islam were one and the same for Afghani and, as we will see, for Muhammad Abduh.

  Read in this light, Afghani’s response to Renan does not mean that science and philosophy may flourish in the Muslim world when Islam has passed, but that they may flourish when the opposition to reason that is associated with the current form of Islam has passed. Muhammad Abduh, then, seems to have agreed that the intolerance currently found in the Muslim world was a severe obstacle to progress, not that Islam itself was an obstacle to progress.

  Although the precise religious stance of Afghani and Muhammad Abduh cannot be determined with certainty, then, it seems unlikely that they were the atheists that they have sometimes been made out to be. It is possible that they were liberal, but in some sense believing, Muslims.

  TO PARIS

  Afghani evidently suggested to Muhammad Abduh that he join him in Paris, since Muhammad Abduh wrote to Afghani that he would certainly do this, were it not for his wife and children, who had accompanied him to Beirut. Muhammad Abduh later changed his mind, however, and did go to Paris. A curious exchange of letters between him and Prince Abd al-Halim survives, in which Muhammad Abduh writes that he and an unidentified Shubashi had arrived in Paris as Prince Abd al-Halim wished, and looked forward to receiving £100. Prince Abd al-Halim replied that he had never asked them to go to Paris, had only given Shubashi money in the past because Shubashi insisted, and was not going to work with them or with Afghani. Someone had evidently misled Muhammad Abduh, who had been introduced to one of the characteristics of the life of the political exile: the constant search for money from all available sources.

  PARIS

  Muhammad Abduh arrived in Paris in 1884, joining Afghani and a number of other exiled Egyptians and Ottomans there. Paris was a natural destination for these exiles, as a place of relative safety and freedom, as the period’s chief global center of culture and art, and as a city where French – then the most widely known international language – was spoken. Within thir
ty years, these Middle Eastern exiles would be replaced in Paris by refugees from the Russian revolution. It was only after the Second World War that the pre-eminence of French and Paris was challenged by English and America.

  The Ottomans formed the largest group of exiles in Paris, engaging in often bitter émigré politics, publishing numerous émigré newspapers, and frequently spying on each other. The Ottoman government devoted such resources to paying spies and bribing journalists that one historian has speculated that the major source of finance for all these émigré activities was provided unwittingly by the Ottoman government.

  The Egyptian émigré community was rather smaller. One of its earliest members was Afghani’s friend Yaqub Sannua, who had moved to Paris after his satirical newspaper Abu Nadara had been closed by the khedive Ismail in 1877. Afghani had remained in contact with Sannua during the period he spent in India after his own expulsion from Egypt. Also in Paris were Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, the brother of the Freemason and deputy who had supported the “national plan” under the khedive Ismail, and Ibrahim al-Laqqani, the former editor of Miraat al-sharq who had met Afghani’s servant Abu Turab in an Alexandria jail and had been the means by which Muhammad Abduh re-established contact with Afghani. Adib Ishaq, formerly editor of Misr, was also in Paris, but seems to have held somewhat aloof from the others. His émigré newspaper supported Sharif Pasha, not Riyad Pasha, the former patron of the Afghani group.

  In Paris, Afghani again became a focus for these men, as he had been previously in Cairo. Freemasonry seems not to have played a significant role on this occasion, although Afghani did apply for membership of a lodge in Paris. In Cairo it was necessary to organize clandestinely, but in Paris it was possible to organize openly, so long as the French government was not attacked. Afghani organized a group he called Al-urwa al-wuthqa, “The firmest bond,” a phrase used twice in the Quran to indicate the value of faith in God: “Whoever submits himself wholly to God and is a doer of good, has indeed taken hold of the firmest bond” (Q. 31:22). Afghani, however, used the term metaphorically – his group focused not on submission to God but on politics.