31. Al Azhar

Salafiyya

Lord Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt, who worked closely with Mohammed Abduh, then Grand Mufti of Egypt, to modify Islamic Sharia to suit British colonial interests, admitted, “Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”[1] What is it that Afghani’s disciples learned from him? By all appearances, Afghani was a sincere activist, dedicated to the revival of the Islamic world. Even among most scholars of today, he’s still described as “the most important Muslim figure reacting to the encroachment of Europe on Muslim domains during the last quarter of the century.”[2] However, as Abduh recalled learning from Afghani: “We do not cut off the head of religion except with the sword of religion.”[3] As Eli Kedourie explained, “This letter makes absolutely clear that one of Afghani’s aims—of which his disciple ‘Abduh knew and approved—was the subversion of the Islamic religion, and that the method adopted to this end was the practice of a false but showy devotion.”[4] Therefore, Afghani’s entire agenda, of calling for a revival of Ijtihad to return Islam to the pristine days of the Salaf, was just a pretext for its destruction. Afghani was not only not a Sunni, as he was presumed to be, nor even a Shiah, as he would be suspected to have been, since he originated in Iran, but he was secretly a follower of the Bahai faith, and merely used Islam as a cover to achieve its one-world religion objectives.

It was Blunt and Browne, explains Kedourie, who together were largely responsible for Afghani and Abduh’s “a high reputation as defenders and reformers of modern Islam.”[5] In addition to his plans to create replace the Ottoman Caliphate with one based in Mecca, Blunt also called for a rewriting of the laws of Islam, in a manner all too similar to the prescriptions of the Salafis. Upon his return to England in 1881, Blunt had articulated these ideas in a series of articles for The Fortnightly Review, which were later published together as The Future of Islam in 1882. Blunt was fully aware that the Doors of Ijtihad continued to protect the sanctity of Islam and prevented its corruption. According to Blunt:

 

The great difficulty which, as things now stand, besets reform is this: the Sheriat, or written code of law, still stands in orthodox Islam as an unimpeachable authority. The law itself is an excellent law, and as such commends itself to the loyalty of honest and God-fearing men; but in certain points it is irreconcilable with the modern needs of Islam, and it cannot legally be altered.[6]

 

Like the Revivalists, for Afghani the practice of “Taqlid,” the duty to follow one of the four legal schools, or Madhabs, was characterized as “blind following” which he rejected in favor of reviving Ijtihad as a means of permitting the reform of Islam.[7] The Revivalists basically suggest that each Muslim should do his own due diligence with regards to any ruling he follows instead of relying on the opinion of an Imam. They mention comments like Imam Shafi’s, who said, “when a hadith is authentic it is my Madhhab,” and therefore suggest that when a Hadith is found to be in contradiction with one of their rulings, that the Hadith takes precedence. But Imam Shafi’s comments were not intended for the layman. Such suggestions only succeed on those without a modicum of knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence. Because, as clarified by Imam Nawawi:

 

…what al Shafi said does not mean that every time someone encounters an authentic Hadith he should say that this is the Madhhab of al Shafi, and follow the apparent meaning of it. This is restricted to those who have attained the level of Ijtihad in the Madhhab, and is contingent on the preponderance that al Shafi might not have been aware of that Hadith or its authenticity. This is possible only after reading all of al Shafi’s books and others who had drawn from him. This is a difficult condition, and rare are those who can meet it. This condition has been attached because al Shafi has abandoned citing according to the apparent meaning of many Hadiths that he saw and knew, however there was proof sufficient enough for him to criticize them, declare them abrogated, restricted, interpreted or its likes.[8]

 

The Islamic world has clearly fallen in stature, from its days of glory as leaders in science and civilization, but the cause is how Muslims have failed to live up to the standards of Islam, and not a problem with Islam itself, as Afghani and the other Revivalists dishonestly claimed. As a result of the catastrophe of colonialism in general, education in traditional religious science in the Islamic world had already been severely weakened. And, the apparent ineffectiveness of Muslim institutions initially lent support to the notion that Islam needed to be replaced with Western-based models, which generated new elites of Western-educated secular professionals. Thus, many of the Sharia schools were closed down. The religious endowments that traditionally funded the Sharia schools were nationalized and became state-owned property. Those like Al-Azhar in Egypt, which had been the most prestigious educational institution in Islam, and the oldest university in the world, became state-owned schools with state-appointed faculty. The curricula were redefined and limited in such a way that those trained in these schools no longer achieved the credentials of jurists in the traditional sense. The Ulema, in effect, became state functionaries, relegated to officiating at public rituals.

 

Lord Cromer

In the modern academia, Salafism is commonly used to refer to a cluster of Sunni revivalist and reform movements inspired by the teachings of classical scholars, in particular Ibn Taymiyyah.[9] According to David Commins, “tracing the links among enthusiasts for Ibn Taymiyyah reveals a network of Ulema [Muslims scholars] living in Baghdad, Damascus, Najd, Mecca and India.”[10] As he further explains:

 

The Ottoman Arab reformers’ and the Wahhabis’ common interest in Ibn Taymiyyah does not mean that they concurred on doctrinal matters. Wahhabi positions on idolatry and viewing Muslims as infidels were at odds with the Ottoman Arab Ulema’s more inclusive outlook. But they did agree on the permissibility of Ijtihad. That pitted them against the Ottoman religious law establishment that reject Ijtihad.[11]

 

The Revivalists like Afghani and Abduh suggested that Muslims needed to return to the “original sources,” meaning the Quran and Hadith, bypassing the accumulated scholarship of the Mujtahids through the centuries, in order that Islam could be reinterpreted anew and be “adapted” to modern times. Evidently, the claims of the Salafis were just a devious ruse to open the door for the British plan of rewriting Islam, following upon the revival of the reputation of Ibn Taymiyyah initiated by Abdul Wahhab. Sheikh al Buti describes, in his history of the attack on Ijthad:

 

According to Lord Cromer’s view, the Islamic Shariah was backward, stagnant, and not conclusive to development. He was looking for an easy way to make the Egyptian society break away from this chain. His crafty way was to promote the idea of Ijtihad among those who believed in the advancement of modern European society. Such people were assigned sensitive religious positions. Some were made Muftis, and others were assigned to the administration of Al-Azhar. Those who had faith in European society, and its values, started encouraging the Shaykhs of Al-Azhar and its scholars to exercise Ijtihad outside its allowed domains. This had reached the point to where Shaykh al Maragani removed the stipulation that a Mujtahid need to know Arabic.[12]

 

From Afghani, Abduh inherited the idea of the preference for Ijtihad over Taqlid, which ultimately would come to define his career.[13] As the chief Mason of his country, Abduh did much to spread interest in Freemasonry in the Arab World. In How We Defended Orabi, A.M. Broadbent declared that, “Sheikh Abdu was no dangerous fanatic or religious enthusiast, for he belonged to the broadest school of Moslem thought, held a political creed akin to pure republicanism, and was a zealous Master of a Masonic Lodge.”[14] Rida recalled an explanation that Abduh shared with him of the role of Freemasonry in his relationship with Afghani:

 

I asked him once what masonry really was, and he said that its role—now ended—in the countries in which it is found was to resist the authority of kings and popes who were fighting against knowledge and freedom, and that his was a great achievement and one of the pillars of European progress… He also told me that his membership in the Sayyid’s (Afghani) was for a pollical and social purpose.[15]

 

In a lecture at the Egyptian University in 1922, Shaikh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq described the reasons for Abduh’s dubious reputation at Al-Azhar in the 1870s:

 

…his association with Afghani, his interest in falsafa (philosophy), his advocacy of certain mu‘tazilite principles, his prohibition of traditional interpretation (Taqlid), his call for the study of modern sciences, his preference for the sciences of the Franks [Europeans], and also letting his hair grow long [presumably like a dervish].[16]

 

When Abduh presented himself at the final year examinations in Al-Azhar in 1877, he found many of his examiners opposed to his views on Ijtihad, and he would not have been allowed to graduate if it wasn’t for the intercession of Mohammed al Abbasi.[17] After earning his degree, Abduh became a teacher of modern philosophy in Islamic and secular schools, making a concerted effort to employ Afghani’s teaching techniques.[18] Abduh wanted to shift the traditional focus on exclusively Islamic and proposed a new education system that emphasizing modern science as a main subject, along with mathematics, languages and comparative religion, in line with the educational institutions of Europe and America. He insisted that, without reforming Al-Azhar, progress in other areas would not be possible.[19] In 1878, Abduh was appointed by his Masonic brother, Prime Minister Ryad Pasha, to teach history at the newly-founded Dar ul-Ulum, established in 1873 by Ali Pasha Mubarak (1823 or 1824 – 1893), Minister of Education, to rival Al-Azhar. While maintaining his position at Al-Azhar, Abduh also became a teacher of the Arabic language and literature at the School of Languages, another institution championing reform and modernization.[20]

However, in 1879, the Khedive Ismail was replaced by his son, Tewfik Pasha, who was hostile to reform, and expelled Afghani from Egypt and forced Abduh into retirement. Nevertheless, the following year Ryad Pasha appointed Abduh to the editorial position at the official government newspaper, Al-Waqa’i’ al-Misriyya (“The Egyptian Affairs”), where he able to freely voice his reformist ideas. In 1881, in an article on society reform through education, titled “The Error of the Wise,” Abduh wrote that “whoever seeks the good of the country, let him strive for nothing other than perfection of education, then everything that he was seeking would be accomplished … without exhausting the mind or the body.”[21]

According to Dreyfuss, Afghani’s Bahai associate Mirza Mohammed Baqir, E.G. Browne’s Persian teacher, was recruited into the pan-Islamic movement by Blunt.[22] In 1884, when Abduh and Baqir, while on a visit to London, discussed whether the Quran was originally a book, or only a compilation of oral statements, Abduh, wrote Blunt, “holds the latter opinion.”[23] Abduh repeated the doctrine that the Quran is uncreated in his Risalat al-tauhid, causing him to be accused by his critics of reviving the errors of the Mutazilites. In a manner reminiscent of Afghani, Abduh’s Risala insisted on the social utility of religion, as Kedourie paraphrases: “religion, in fact, is a good substitute for the natural feelings of love and sympathy between individuals which ordinarily do constitute and maintain the bonds of society.”[24]

 

Grand Mufti 

Abduh ultimately broke with Afghani, rejecting his radicalism, and in 1888, he returned to Egypt where he received a pardon from Lord Cromer, Consul-General of British-occupied Egypt, for his subversion for which he had been expelled.[25] Between 1888 until his death in 1905, Abduh would regularly visit the home and office of Cromer.[26] Of Abduh, Cromer related, “I suspect my friend Abduh was in reality an agnostic,” and he said of Abduh’s Salafi reform movement that, “They are the natural allies of the European reformer.” Cromer also concluded, however, referring to both Afghani and Abduh:

 

The political importance of Mohammad ‘Abduh’s life lies in the fact that he may be said to have been the founder of a school of thought in Egypt very similar to that established in India by Sayyed Ahmed, the creator of the Aligarh College. The avowed object of those who belong to this school is to justify the way of Islam to man, that is to say, to Moslem man. They are the Girondins of the Egyptian national movement. They are too much tainted with a suspicion of heterodoxy to carry far along with them the staunch conservative Moslem. On the other hand, they are often not sufficiently Europeanised to attract the sympathy of the Egyptian mimic of European ways. They are inferior to the strictly orthodox Moslem in respect to their Mohammedanism, and inferior to the ultra-Europeanised Egyptian in respect to their Europeanisation. Their task is, therefore, one of great difficulty. They are the natural allies of the European reformer.[27]

 

In 1892, Abduh was named to run the administrative Committee for the Al-Azhar mosque and university. From his post, he reorganized the entire Muslim system in Egypt, and because of Al-Azhar’s reputation, much of the Islamic world as well. In 1899, Lord Cromer made Abduh the Grand Mufti of Egypt, chief legal authority in Islam, as well as the Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt. One of Lord Cromer’s motives was to change the law forbidding interest banking. On his behalf, Abduh offered a contrived interpretation of the Quran to create the requisite loophole, giving British banks free reign in Egypt.[28] Following Abduh’s lead, Rashid Rida similarly maintained that the kind of interest prohibited by the Quran is compound interest, but “it does not cover the simple interest charged on loans by banks or paid by banks to their depositors.”[29]

And although, beginning with the French scholar Louis Massignon, European scholarship considered the revivalist movement of Afghani and his pupil and fellow Mason, Mohammed Abduh, to be part of the wider Salafi movement, and since then the appellation has not been applied to them, those identified as the earliest examples of the movements fell in with Abduh’s network, such as Jamal al-Din Qasimi (1866 – 1914), 'Abd al-Razzaq al Bitar (1837 – 1917), Tahir al-Jazai’iri (1852 – 1920) and Abduh’s pupil Rashid Rida. Rida met Abduh while he was living as an exile in Lebanon in the mid-1880s and quickly came to view him as his mentor. In 1897, Rida decided to study under Afghani, who at that time was in Istanbul. When Afghani died later that year, Rida suspected the Ottoman government of responsibility for his death and left Istanbul to join Abduh, now in Egypt.[30] Rida and Abduh started the monthly periodical al-Manar. Rida also studied Ibn Taymiyyah and his disciples, which eventually led him to embrace ideas including opposition to folk practices of Sufism, criticism of Taqlid, and the desire to revive Hadith studies, topics that became foundational themes of the Salafism.[31]

 

Future of Islam

From British-controlled Egypt, Abduh and Rida’s al-Manar became the instrument through which to push forward Blunt’s plan for a recurring Muslim congress. To bring about these most fundamental changes, Blunt again anticipated the need for convening a series of regular Muslim congresses, to empower a designate “Mujtahid” to radically rewrite the Sharia:

 

Since we are imagining many things we may imagine this one too—that our Caliph of the Koreysh, chosen by the faithful and installed at Mecca, should invite the Ulema of every land to a council at the time of the pilgrimage, and there, appointing a new Mujtaheed, should propound to them certain modifications of the Sheriat, as things necessary to the welfare of Islam, and deducible from tradition. No point of doctrine need in any way be touched, only the law. The Fakh ed din would need hardly a modification. The Fakh esh Sheriat would, in certain chapters, have to be rewritten. Who can doubt that an Omar or an Haroun, were they living at the present day, would authorize such changes, or that the faithful of their day would have accepted them as necessary and legitimate developments of Koranic teaching.[32]

 

Among Muslims, it has been common to attribute the first appearance of the idea of a congress to Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. After Afghani’s death, when the source of the congress idea became something of a political issue, Rashid Rida asserted on no uncertain terms that it was Afghani who was its originator.[33] However, the first to advocate of a Muslim congress in print, and the first to disseminate the idea among influential Muslims, explains Martin Kramer, in Islam Assembled. The Advent of the Muslim Congresses, was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.[34] In The Future of Islam, Blunt proposed:

 

It is surely not beyond the flight of sane imagination to suppose, in the last overwhelming catastrophe of Constantinople, a council of Ulema assembling at Mecca, and according to the legal precedent of ancient days electing a Caliph. The assembly would, without doubt, witness intrigues of princes and quarrels among schoolmen and appeals to fanaticism and accusations of infidelity. Money, too, would certainly play its part there as elsewhere, and perhaps blood might be shed. But any one who remembers the history of the Christian Church in the fifteenth century, and the synods which preceded the Council of Basle, must admit that such accompaniments of intrigue and corruption are no bar to a legal solution of religious difficulties. It was above all else the rivalries of Popes and Anti-popes that precipitated the Catholic Reformation.[35]

 

Al-Manar first raised the congress issue in an article on religious reform, directed to Abdul Hamid II and published in 1898 in the first volume:

 

This reform is consistent with the creation of an Islamic society, under the auspices of the caliph, which will have a branch in every Islamic land. Its greatest branch should be in Mecca, a city to which Muslims come from all over the world and where they fraternize at its holy sites. The most important meeting of this branch should be held during the pilgrimage season, when members (Ada) from the rest of the branches in the rest of the world come on pilgrimage.[36]

 

This global religious society, according to Rida, would pave the way for a spiritual Caliphate. Islamic unity required the abolition of sectarian differences as well as the revival of doctrines practiced by the Salaf.[37] The proposed society would publish a religious journal in Mecca, and work to counter religious innovations and corrupt teachings. A book would also be composed by the society, in which the principles of Islam would be outlined in conformity with the society’s recommendations.[38] These publications would then be translated into all the languages of the Muslims, “and the caliph would announce that this is Islam, and all who believe in it are brethren in faith.” The proposed Caliph would also order the society to produce books of law, drawn from all the Madhabs, but adapted to contemporary circumstances, effecting in all Muslim states.[39]

 


[1] Lord Cromer. Modern Egypt, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1916); cited in C. Bennett. “Amir ‘Ali.” In: Kassam, Z.R., Greenberg, Y.K., Bagli, J. (eds) Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Encyclopedia of Indian Religions (Springer, Dordrecht, 2018), p. 64.

[2] Geoffrey Nash. From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East 1830–1926 (I.B.Tauris, 2016), p. 33.

[3] Kedourie. Afghani and ‘Abduh, p. 45.

[4] Ibid., p. 45.

[5] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini.

[6] Blunt. The Future of Islam, p. 166; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 16.

[7] Majallat al-Manār, 8 (1905), pp.. 399–400; Mohammad Hashim Kamali. An Introduction to Sharī ’ah (Selangor, Malaysia: Ilmiah Publishers, 2006), p. 171; cited in Kinda AlSamara. “Muhammad ‘Abduh: Islam and New Urbanity in the Nineteenth-Cuntury Arab World.” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 3: 1 (2018), p. 65.

[8] al Majmu, Vo. 1, p. 64, quoted from Buti, Al la-Madhhabiya, p. 2006, p. 111.

[9] Clinton Bennett & William Shepard. “6: Salafi Islam: The Study of Contemporary Religious-Political Movements.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies (London: Bloomsbury 2013), pp. 163, 169–70.

[10] Commins. The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, p. 132.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al Buti. Al la-Madhhabiya: Abandoning Madhhabiya the Madhhabs is the Most Dangerous Bid’ah Threatening the Islamic Shari’ah (Damascus: Sunni Publications. 2007), p. 120.

[13] Majallat al-Manār, 8 (1905), pp.. 399–400; Mohammad Hashim Kamali. An Introduction to Sharī ’ah, p. 171; cited in AlSamara. “Muhammad ‘Abduh: Islam and New Urbanity in the Nineteenth-Cuntury Arab World,” p. 65.

[14] Raafat. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?”

[15] Johnson. Initiates of Theosophical Masters, p. 75.

[16] Cited in Kedourie. Afghani and ‘Abduh, p. 12.

[17] Majallat al-Manār, 8 (1905), pp. 399–400; Kamali. An Introduction to Sharī ’ah, p. 171; cited in AlSamara. “Muhammad ‘Abduh: Islam and New Urbanity in the Nineteenth-Century Arab World,” p. 66.

[18] Muhammad ‘Atif ʻIraqi. al-Sheikh Muḥammad ʻAbduh, 1849-1905 (Cairo: al-Majlis al-Aʻlā lil-Thaqā fah 1997), 16; cited ibid.

[19] AlSamara. “Muhammad ‘Abduh: Islam and New Urbanity in the Nineteenth-Cuntury Arab World,” p. 66.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Oliver Scharbrodt. Islam and the Baha'i Faith: A Comparative Study of Muhammad ‘Abduh and ‘Abdul-

Baha ‘Abbas (London: Routledge, 2007), 99; cited in AlSamara. “Muhammad ‘Abduh: Islam and New Urbanity in the Nineteenth-Cuntury Arab World,” p. 67.

[22] Cited in Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 121.

[23] Kedourie. Afghani and ‘Abduh, p. 13.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Kedourie. Afghani and ‘Abduh, 37-38.

[26] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 137.

[27] Evelyn Baring. Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (London 1908), p. 180.

[28] Malcolm H. Kerr. “Abduh Muhammad.” In Hoiberg, Dale H. (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. I: A-ak Bayes, 15th ed. (Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc, 2010), pp. 20–21.

[29] Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee. The Concept of Riba and Islamic Banking, (Islamabad, 1995), p. 10.

[30] Eliezer Tauber. “Rashid Rida as Pan-Arabist before World War I.” The Muslim World, 79: 2 (2007), p. 102–112.

[31] Alexander Thurston. Salafism in Nigeria Islam, Preaching, and Politics (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 56.

[32] Blunt. The Future of Islam, p. 161; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 16.

[33] Blunt. The Future of Islam, p. 131. Cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 19.

[34] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 10.

[35] Blunt. The Future of Islam, p. 131. Cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 15–16.

[36] Al-Manar, 1: 39 (December 17, 1898), p. 765-66; cited in Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 28.

[37] Mahmoud Haddad. “Arab Religious Nationalism in the Colonial Era: Rereading Rashīd Rida’s Ideas on the Caliphate.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 117: 2 (1997), p. 255.

[38] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 28.

[39] Ibid.

Divide & Conquer