Muhammad Abduh

by Mark Sedgwick

  This highly political understanding of the essentials of Islam was not put in one paragraph as it has been above, but results from a condensation of the Quranic quotations most often used in Al-Urwa al-wuthqa. The point, however, is clear. Muhammad Abduh was not stressing the aspects of Islam that the vast majority of preachers of the time would have stressed: acceptance of the will of God in one’s heart, and compliance with the laws of God in one’s life. Instead, he was stressing the aspects of Islam that fitted, or could be made to fit, his and Afghani’s political program: intellectual and moral reform of the individual, solidarity against European imperialism, and an end to despotic government (with an exemption for Sultan Abd al-Hamid).

  Muhammad Abduh’s interpretations of the meaning of the Quranic verses he selected were novel, as he would have been the first to appreciate, given his Azhari training. Quran 16:90 was generally understood in the ethical sense in which Muhammad Abduh interpreted it, as requiring justice and kindness, and Quran 3:103 could be stretched without too much difficulty to cover political unity. Quran 23:68, however, which Muhammad Abduh interpreted to require thought about the meaning of the Quran, was generally understood to emphasize that many of those who would receive divine punishment would lack the excuse that they had had no opportunity to appreciate the message of the Quran, not to encourage reflection and reason. The prohibition on making friends with unbelievers in Quran 60:1 was generally understood to have applied only to relations between the Muslims at the time of the Prophet and those unbelievers in Mecca who at first opposed the Prophet, not to apply more generally. Quran 3:159 was generally considered to have referred to the need for consultation between the Prophet and certain of his followers, not more generally, and Quran 42:38 was thought to encourage consultation between pious individuals, not between ruler and ruled. That few religious scholars would have agreed with his interpretations did not worry Muhammad Abduh, however. Al-Urwa al-wuthqa attacked the whole class of the ulema, who had failed to maintain unity among Muslims.

  Muhammad Abduh also advanced an unusual understanding of jihad in Al-Urwa al-wuthqa. Islamic jurisprudence makes a distinction between communal and individual duties. The study of classical Arabic grammar, for example, is a communal duty – so long as enough Muslims are engaged in it, knowledge which is essential to proper analysis of the Quran remains current. Prayer, in contrast, is an individual duty – each and every Muslim must pray. Jihad had generally been understood as a communal duty – like the study of Arabic grammar, the main point was that enough Muslims should be engaged in it. This is the view of warfare taken by most societies:what matters is to have enough soldiers, not that every single person should become a soldier. Jihad became an individual duty, just as prayer was, only when the enemy had entered Muslim territory. Muhammad Abduh, however, argued that jihad to keep Muslim lands under Muslim control was always an individual duty. This argument (which was also made by Osama bin Laden in 1998) has major implications, since it takes control of warfare out of the hands of rulers, and makes individuals responsible for it, on their own private initiative. In the event, it was not until many years after Muhammad Abduh’s death that individual jihadism became popular.

  In Al-Urwa al-wuthqa, then, Muhammad Abduh was making use of the Quran to endorse his and Afghani’s political and social positions. Not only were the conclusions drawn different from those usually drawn, but a different methodology was used. The established method of Quran interpretation, as learned by Muhammad Abduh in Tanta and at the Azhar, was the painstaking attempt to discover the original and true meaning of the divinely revealed text, using finely honed tools of etymological and grammatical analysis, and with reference to allied texts such as those hadith which explained the circumstances in which a verse had been revealed. This, for example, was the basis on which the prohibition on making friends with non-Muslims had been understood to be restricted to the time of the Prophet. Muhammad Abduh, however, was not trying to elucidate meaning, but to develop possible meanings – and if this meant that allied texts and existing understandings had to be ignored, so be it.

  Muhammad Abduh also chose to ignore his own interpretation of Quran 60:1, against making friends with unbelievers. Not only had he been on friendly terms with Christians and at least one Jew (Sannua) in Cairo while fighting khedival despotism, but he was in a friendly alliance with Wilfrid Blunt at the very time at which he was promoting the idea that Quran 60:1 prohibited such friendships. If Muhammad Abduh had been engaged in elucidating the meaning of the divine revelation, this would have been hypocrisy. Since Muhammad Abduh was engaged in politics, however, it would have been reasonable to make a distinction between what was the right approach for the Muslim world as a whole, and what was appropriate for individuals in positions such as his own. The unbelievers he was making friends with were not imperialists or despots, but their opponents.

  Al-Urwa al-wuthqa may have been small and short lived, and had a limited distribution, but it was highly innovative. A fuller study of the Ottoman and Indian émigré presses of the period than currently exists would be required to establish to what extent the ideas and perspectives it advanced were truly original, but nothing quite like it had been seen before in Arabic. During the 1870s, Afghani and his circle had invented liberal nationalist political journalism in Egypt;in 1884, Afghani and Abduh invented what would now be called radical Islamist journalism in Arabic, including the use of Islam for political ends.

  BEIRUT

  Al-Urwa al-wuthqa published its final issue in October 1884, either because it had lost its main readership when the British had forbidden its import into Egypt and India, or because it had run out of money, or perhaps for both reasons. In November or December of that year, Muhammad Abduh left Paris for Tunis, which had recently become a French protectorate, on a fundraising trip. On December 24, he reported to Afghani that while he had failed to raise any money, he had established a local branch of Al-urwa al-wuthqa (the group, not the newspaper). He added that people in Tunis were not aware that the newspaper had stopped publishing.

  This letter from Muhammad Abduh to Afghani is the last communication known to have passed between the two men. It marks the end not only of what was without doubt the most important relationship in Muhammad Abduh’s life, but also of Muhammad Abduh’s political activism. In 1885 Muhammad Abduh left Tunis, but for Syria, where he began a second – and very different – phase of his career.

  THE BREAK WITH AFGHANI

  Exactly what happened in Tunis is not known. The cause of the break with Afghani does not seem to have been on the latter’s side, however, since his subsequent career followed on already established lines. He spent part of 1885 in London with Blunt, where he tried to bolster British support for the Ottomans against Russia, at that point the major threat to the Ottoman Empire. The relationship with Blunt ceased after an argument at Blunt’s house between Afghani and “two of his Oriental friends” which grew so heated that they “ended by beating each other over the heads with umbrellas.” Blunt asked all concerned to leave. Afghani proceeded to Tehran, then to Russia, then back to Tehran, and finally – in 1891 – to Ottoman Iraq, from where he resumed his struggle against European power and despotic rule, this time that of Shah Nasr al-Din of Persia. He was partly responsible for one of the most effective political actions of the period, a mass boycott of tobacco in Persia which forced the shah to cancel a concession that had been given to a British firm, and which also demonstrated the potential power of the general public and the weakness of the shah’s regime. He may also have been responsible for the assassination of the shah in 1896. He died in 1897, under house arrest in Istanbul.

  Since Afghani’s political positions and activities remained consistent while Muhammad Abduh’s changed, the implication is that the cause of the break was that Muhammad Abduh came to reject Afghani’s approach. He later said that “the interests of the Muslims have become inextricably interwoven with the interests of the Europeans in every country in the world,” an
d clearly came to the conclusion that cooperation with Europe would produce better results than confrontation. Perhaps he remembered Guizot’s version of the effect of the crusades on Europe: more important than Europe’s initial military victory or her final military defeat was the long-term impact on Europe of the encounter with a superior civilization. At any rate, cooperation rather then confrontation was henceforth to be Muhammad Abduh’s principle.

  Muhammad Abduh was not the only Arab opponent of European imperialism who abandoned the struggle as impossible. The former leader of the Algerian resistance to France, the Amir Abd al-Qadir, was one of the many others who reached similar conclusions. Ahmad Khan in India, whose views on polygamy were echoed by Muhammad Abduh but whose “naturism” had been condemned by Afghani, was another. Although Arab nationalists of the twentieth century would condemn this approach as surrender and collaboration, by 1884 attempts at armed resistance to European states had all been comprehensively defeated, and no significant change in power relations could be foreseen. European dominance then seemed so great, and so well established, that a decision to abandon confrontation is certainly understandable. In the event, European power tottered after the First World War and crumbled after the Second World War; the Persian tobacco boycott and the assassination of 1896 came to be seen by some as part of the story that ended in the humiliation of the West by the Iranian Revolution. Events, then, might be understood as vindicating Afghani, not Muhammad Abduh. Those events, however, lay far in the future.

  Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, who had been with Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in Paris as well as during their attempt to promote the “national plan” in Egypt under Ismail, also broke with Afghani at about this time. However, he broke with Muhammad Abduh too. He suggested that Muhammad Abduh had been more successful in raising cash in Tunis than he had admitted, and had kept it for himself, but this is unlikely. Embezzlement is not unheard of among émigrés, but nothing else that is known of Muhammad Abduh, or even has been alleged about him, suggests dishonesty. Al-Muwaylihi, on the other hand, was becoming known for slandering his enemies.

  The break between Muhammad Abduh and Afghani is a dramatic one, and cannot be explained with certainty. It probably resulted from a reassessment on Muhammad Abduh’s part of what was and what was not possible in the circumstances of the times. There may, however, have been some other cause about which we do not know.

  IN SEARCH OF AN OCCUPATION

  Muhammad Abduh returned to Beirut, where he had friends from his first period in exile, only two years before. His first wife had died, leaving him with a baby daughter, and he married the niece of Muhyi al-Din Bey Humada, the reformist mayor of Beirut with whom he had stayed on first arriving in Beirut from Cairo. His new wife’s father, Saad al-Din, was also a modernist reformer, a founding member of Beirut’s Society of Arts, the origin of the later – and very famous – Muslim Benevolent Society.

  Presumably through these connections, Muhammad Abduh found employment at the Sultaniyya, a modern school that had recently been established (in 1883) to compete with the many European schools that had opened in Beirut. It emphasized both modern sciences and religion – Islam for most, and Christianity for some – and was in some ways the counterpart of Ahmad Khan’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, save that it admitted Christians as well as Muslims. It was attended by the children of the Syrian elite: no fewer than seven members of Jerusalem’s leading family, the Husaynis, went to the Sultaniyya, for example.

  At the Sultaniyya, Muhammad Abduh taught history, which he had also taught in Cairo using the works of Ibn Khaldun and François Guizot, as well as tawhid, theology, a task for which he was qualified by his Azhari training. The turban of the religious shaykh, then, was to replace the fez that he had worn in Paris. His lectures on tawhid were recorded, possibly by the brother of his new father-in-law, and later published. They are discussed below. He also taught some classic literary texts, notably the Diwan al-hamasa of the celebrated ninth-century poet Abu Tammam Habib ibn Aws al-Ta’i, and the Maqamat of the tenth-century author Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, an almost unique example of early Arabic fiction based on the adventures of a likeable rogue, Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari. Finally, he taught – and edited – the Nahj al-balagha (“The peak of eloquence”), traditionally attributed to the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib. He may have taught this work for its literary value, but it was also a religious text – and associated more with Shi’i Islam than with Sunni Islam, suggesting that Muhammad Abduh’s own education at the hands of Afghani continued to exert an influence. The other works suggest a commitment to an Arabic literary renaissance, for which many progressives in Beirut were then also working.

  Two documents from this period suggest an attempt to enter Ottoman public life, one addressed to the Ottoman governor of Beirut, and the other addressed to an education reform commission then sitting in Istanbul under the Shaykh al-Islam, the highest official in the Ottoman religious hierarchy. The latter document starts with the somewhat excessive protestations of devotion to the sultan that were then customary. The topic of both documents was the improvement of Muslim education in the face of competition from foreign schools, a subject about which Muhammad Abduh could write with some authority, given his experience at the Sultaniyya. This was an issue that preoccupied the Ottoman elite, concerned that future Ottoman citizens were being educated to be more loyal to foreign countries than to their own, and were being exposed to dangerous foreign ideas, if not actually led to convert to Christianity – which was, of course, the ultimate objective of many of the schools in question, the majority of which were run by Christian missionaries. Thirty-three unlicensed American Protestant schools in Syria were closed down during 1885, but the Ottomans faced a difficult task. In 1888 (the closest year for which we have figures) the Ottoman budget for education in Beirut was 1,200,000 piasters, half of which was allocated to capital expenditure. The French government budget for subsidizing French-language schools in Beirut was 460,000 piasters, i.e. three quarters of the total Ottoman budget available for current expenditure. In addition to French schools, there were also British, American, Italian, and German schools, not to mention local private Christian schools that were often assisted by foreigners.

  Despite the hostility to foreign Christian schools which is clear in these documents, Muhammad Abduh himself continued to have good relations with Christians. In Cairo he had been on good terms with Christian members of the Afghani group; in Beirut he went beyond personal relations and entered what would today be called inter-religious dialog. It was probably during this period – though possibly during his earlier period in Beirut in 1883 – that he was in contact with an English clergyman, the Reverend Isaac Taylor, who had an interest in Islam. In a private correspondence, Muhammad Abduh told Taylor that in his view Islam and Christianity agreed on far more than they disagreed, and that although both religions had departed from what they were meant to be, “true religion shines through all the religions.” The day would soon come, thought Muhammad Abduh, when “perfect knowledge” would reign among men, and – according to one version – “the two great religions, Christianity and Islam, would respect each other and take each other’s hand.” According to Taylor’s own version, the expectation was not just that Christianity and Islam would come to appreciate each other, but that there would emerge “one pure faith which all will be able to accept.”

  The view that there had once been, and might again be, a single pure and universal religion was not one that Taylor himself shared, but was not unusual in the 1880s. It is to be found, for example, in the writings of Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and this may have been where Muhammad Abduh had taken it from, given that Blunt reported finding two Bengali Theosophists in Muhammad Abduh’s company in Paris. Similar views were held by the Baha’is, a group of Persian origin that finally developed into a new religion, with which Muhammad Abduh was also in contact. Though not unusual in “advanced” circles in Paris, however, such views were then (as
now) highly unusual in the Arab world, and Muhammad Abduh is not known ever to have expressed them in public. He is, however, reported to have attempted to establish in Beirut a society for uniting Muslims, Christians, and Jews, in cooperation with Mirza Muhammad Baqir, the Persian friend of Afghani with whom he had debated the nature of the Quran over dinner at Blunt’s house in London. Nothing seems to have come of this society, with which Taylor may also have been involved.

  A charming story ascribes Muhammad Abduh’s later departure from Beirut to his conversion of Taylor to Islam. According to this story, after Taylor addressed a meeting of clergymen in London, these clergymen complained to Queen Victoria, who asked Sultan Abd al-Hamid about Muhammad Abduh. Sultan Abd al-Hamid was concerned that if Queen Victoria became Muslim, she might replace him as Caliph of all the Muslims, and so – for safety’s sake – ordered Muhammad Abduh expelled from Beirut.

  Taylor did indeed gain some fame for speaking in favor of Islam, but not exactly in complimentary terms. In 1887, he addressed a Church Congress (not in London, but in Wolverhampton, a city in the Midlands) on the subject of “Mohamedanism.” Islam, he argued, was “eminently adapted to be a civilizing and elevating religion for barbarous tribes,” even though it was “quite unfitted for the higher races.” That Taylor’s speech caused outrage (and may even have come to the attention of Queen Victoria, who presumably read the newspapers) was not just because of Taylor’s rather limited praise for Islam, or even for the defense of slavery he delivered in that connection, but also because of his related argument that “the ‘Christian ideal’ [was] unintelligible to savages.” This implied that the Church’s overseas missionary activities were pointless and misguided, and was probably a major cause of the uproar his speech caused.