Muhammad Abduh
(or 'Abduh) (Arabic:
محمد عبدهý) (1849 - July 11, 1905) was a
Muslim
theologian, a Mufti of Egypt, liberal reformer, the founder of Islamic Modernism
and an important voice in the theology and philosophy that produced modern
Islamism.
Abduh was born in 1849 in the village of Mahallat in the Nile Delta. He was the
son of a Turkomen father and an Egyptian mother. He studied in the village
schools and from 1862, in the Tanta theological school, which he apparently left
in dissatisfaction. He studied at Al Azhar university from 1872 and developed a
conservative outlook based in
Sufism.
This was soon to change however, after he came in contact with
Jamal_al-Din Al-Afghani.
Al-Afghani weaned him of his Sufism and conservative philosophy and
introduced him to politics and science. From Afghani, Abduh developed a distrust
of the west and the British.
In 1877 Abduh graduated from Al Azhar with a certificate as a scholar. He took a
post as a teacher in al Azhar. However, when Afghani was exiled from Egypt for
extreme anti-British sentiments in 1879, Abduh lost his post, probably because
of his contacts with Afghani. In 1880 however, he was appointed chief editor of
the Official Egyptian Gazette, the oldest Arab newspaper. He used the Gazette as
a platform for preaching against British and French involvement in
Egyptian politics. Along with other disciples of Afghani, he became
involved in the Urabi revolt and when that failed in 1882, he was exiled from
Egypt to Lebanon by the British occupation. In 1884, al-Afghani invited him to
join him in Paris, where they edited the short lived reformist and pan-Islamic
anti-British and anticolonialist journal, al-Urwah al-Wuthqa (the firmest
fond or the indissoluble bond). Together with al-Afghani, Abduh believed in
pan-Islamism in the sense that Muslims must all cooperate to reverse internal
decline and counter European imperialism. They both favored a return to the
essential simple teachings of early Islam and a reinterpretation of the
Quran
and the sunna (precedents) of the prophet
Muhammad
to fit modern times. They separated between essential theology, which was
sacred, and political and legal interpretations in
Islam,
which could be adapted to new needs. Like Afghani, Abduh believed that Islam was
better suited to scientific progress than Christianity, and he tried to merge
science and religion. The return to the teachings of early Islam, called
Salafiyah (or Salafi), was not meant to impose a rigid orthodoxy or fanaticism
on Islam, but rather to strip away all the generations of encrusted precedent
that had followed the early period, and allow the reconstruction of a reformed
and modern religion based on first principles.
Upon his return to Egypt in 1888, Abduh was appointed a judge. Abduh
diverged somewhat from al-Afghani's teachings. He became convinced that internal
reform was more urgent than the anti-colonial struggle. Thus, he abandoned
political struggle and cooperated with Lord Cromer, who was the real power in
Egypt, in attempting to introduce reforms. This invited the enmity the Khedive
Abbas Hilmi II and of the politically active nationalists. His cooperation with
the British evidently helped advance Abduh's career. In 1891, he was appointed
judge at the Court of Appeal. In 1894 he was made a member of the supreme
council of al-Azhar. In 1899, with the help of the British, Abduh became
Mufti of Egypt, the supreme Muslim authority.
In 1898, Abduh founded the reformist Muslim political journal al Manar
(the beacon) which became a platform both for his ideas and those of his more
more extremist disciple,
Muhammad Rashid Rida.
Abduh's theology was innovative. He believed that the gates of
Ijtihad
(innovation) were not closed, Abduh rejected the divine origin of much of the
Quran.
He believed part of it reflected the ideas of
Muhammad,
and he advocated reasoned interpretation of the
Quran.
Abduh nonetheless believed that the
Quran was the only true ethical and logical
guide, implying that the
Madh'hab
(schools of Jurisprudence)
might be wrong. Still, he claimed that the principles of the Quran were the only
tool by which the human mind truly could understand the difference between right
and wrong, indirectly casting doubt on the validity of the
Madh'hab
and the
Hadiths.
Like Afghani, he believed in human reasoning, social equity and social welfare.
Abduh was an innovative and controversial jurisprudent. He ruled that meat from
animals slaughtered by Christians or Jews was
Halal,
permitted to
Muslims. He reformed the provisions of the
Waqf
law and allowed interest on loans.
Abduh explained that the purpose of his ideology and theology was:
to liberate thought from the shackles of imitation (Taqlid)
and understand religion as it was understood by the community before
dissension appeared, to return, in the acquisition of religious knowledge,
to its first sources, and to weigh them in the scale of human reason, which
God has created in order to prevent excess or adulteration in religion, so
that God's wisdom may be fulfilled and the order of the human world
preserved, and to prove that, seen in this light, religion must be accounted
a friend in science, pushing man to investigate the secrets of existence,
summoning him to respect established truths and to depend on them in his
moral life and conduct. [[Rida, Rashid, Tarikh al ustadh
al-imam al-shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh Vol 1 (Cairo 1932) p 11.]
Abduh's thinking distinguished between the principles or doctrines and worship
('ibadat) of Islam, and
the teachings concerning social relations, customs and equity laws (mu'amalat). The doctrines
of worship, were, according to him, transmitted by the pious ancestors (al Salaf al Salih). These doctrines were few and simple
and unchanging: Belief in God, monotheism (Tawhid), risala -
revelation through a series of messengers or prophets, moral responsibility and
judgment. The laws and customs and social mores, in his view, were not sacred
and unchanging, but rather represented application of the principles of Islamic
thinking to a given cultural context. They must be subject to reason, which is
the basis of everything including religion. They should change and be revised to apply
to the modern world, within the confines of Muslim ethics. It would follow from this that almost all of the
Fiqh
rulings of the
Madh'hab
schools of jurisprudence regarding social issues might no longer be valid.
The appeal to the "pure" ancestral form of the religion is categorized as
Salafi.
However, Abduh's Salafism was meant to allow liberal reform rather than to
stifle it, and it should not be confused with
Salafi
doctrines of his successors and of certain others, which are used to propagate
either a very conservative or a radical reactionary doctrine of
Islam.
A Salafi group has published a detailed critique of the
Muslim Brotherhood:
Historical Development of the Methodologies of the Ikhwan al Muslimeen and their
effect on contemporary Salaafi Dawah. They maintain that
Muhammad
Abduh,
Hassan al-Banna and
Muhammad Rashid Rida created an activist movement that
was falsely presented as Salafiyyah, making false ascriptions to Salafiyyah.
Works by Muhammad 'Abduh
(1903), Tafsir Surat al-`Asr, Cairo.
(1904) Tafsir juz’ `Amma, al-Matb. al-Amiriyya, Cairo.
(1927) Tafsir Manar, 12 volumes
(1954-1961), Tafsir al-Qur’an al-Hakim al-Mustahir bi Tafsir al-Manar, 12
vols. with indices, Cairo.
(1962), Fatihat al-Kitab, Tafsir al-Ustadh al-Imam…, Kitab al-Tahrir,
Cairo.
(no date) Durus min al-Qur’an al-Karim, ed. by Tahir al-Tanakhi, Dar al-Hilal,
Cairo.
(1966) The Theology of Unity, trans. by Ishaq Musa'ad and Kenneth Cragg.
London.
Ami Isseroff
Bibliography
Badawi, M. A. Zaki (1976, 1978), The Reformers of Egypt,
Croom Helm, London.
Baljon, J. M. S. (1961), Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation, E. J. Brill,
Leiden.
Kedourie, Elie (1966), Afghani and `Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and
Political Activism in Modern Islam, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. London.
Kerr, Malcolm H. Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad
Abduh and Rashid Rida. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
December 26, 2008
Synonyms and alternate spellings:
Further Information: See
Muslim Brotherhood
Qutb, Sayyid History of Islam and the Arabs Al-Banna, Hassan
Islamism
Jihad
Islamism Al-Afghani,
Jamal_al-Din
Muhammad Rashid Rida
|