An international Islamic Entrepreneur: Reassessing Rashid Rida (1865-1935)

Rashid Rida (1865-1935)

The latest book of historian of Islam Leor Halevi sheds new light on an Muslim intellectual, who is simultaneously considered as belonging to the triumvirate of 19th and 20th-century Islamic reformism (alongside Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh), and a would-be Wahhabi because of his support for Saudi Arabia in the final years of his life.

Modern  Things on  Trial: Islam's Global and  Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935 offers a critical rereading of that image and presents an alternative interpretation of Rashid Rida (1865-1935). The following excerpts are taken from Muhammad Addakhakhny's review for the Jadaliyya website.

Rida is no longer a sullen fundamentalist who betrayed his sheikh or a Machiavellian who compromised his religion, as we have been told. As a publisher, editor, self-appointed mufti, entrepreneur, Arabic teacher for nonnative speakers, unofficial diplomat, and political dreamer, he led a life of activity and continuous contemplation. For Halevi, the Syrian cleric should not be subsumed into any one stereotype, or viewed as a one-dimensional man, but rather as a multilayered figure. 

Halevi's book is an interesting mix of intellectual and material history-writing.

Modern Things on Trial draws fragments of the daily life of early twentieth-century Muslim subjects who lived a breathtaking and unprecedented entrance of “western” goods to their cities. In this work, we are exposed to a materialist reading of Salafism

Rashid Rida is presented as an 'international Islamic entrepreneur', advocating a kind of 'laissez-faire salafism'. At the same time, Rida's contributions to Islamic reformism are often presented:

as an odd moment in a history of a progressive strain of thinkers or, even, as a failed enlightener. He moved, the story goes, from moderation to extremism. In other words, if one were to exploit Althusserian terms, some kind of epistemological break happened in his project after World War I

His contributions to Islamic reformism have been downplayed on grounds of his associations with Saudi Wahhabism:

Yet there may be another explanation of this underestimation, namely, his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its founder, Hasan al-Banna (1906–49). [...] Various Brotherhood ideologues have expressed their appreciation of Rida’s work and depicted him and Banna as brothers in arms. 

Be that as it may, Islamists gave an exalted status to Rida and it is this exact status that has made him, to some extent, an ill-fated Muslim reformer. 

Click here to read the whole review.

Syrian Muslim intellectual and critic Muhammad Shahrur (Shahrour) (1938-2019)

The Syrian intellectual Muhammad Shahrur (Shahrour) has passed away at the age of eighty in Abu Dhabi. Although he made name as a thinker and writer about Islam, and the interpretation of the Qur'an in particular, Shahrur was neither a traditionally trained 'alim, nor a conventional scholar of religion. Educated as a civil engineer in the Soviet Union and Ireland, he made a living as a foundations expert in the construction industry and only published his first book on Islam in 1990.

His The Book and the Qur'an: A Contemporary Reading was both admired and derided. Not shying away from courting controversy, Shahrur's writings are characterized by a tone that is both anti-clerical and anti-traditional. While reaching hundreds of thousands throughout the Muslim world, the book was criticized and dismissed by both the Islamic religious establishment and other Muslim academic scholars of Islam, including figures such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who considered Shahrur's approach methodologically naive.

Shahrur's interpretation of scripture was part of a broader epistemological concern with reconciling revelation with advances made in the modern sciences. His idiosyncratic approach shows even greater confidence in the modernity project than the nineteenth-century reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) or the Pakistani-American Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988). While his vocabulary is reminiscent of that of the controversial exegesis by fellow engineer Mahmud Muhammad Taha (1909-1985), Shahrur's 'scientific hermeneutics' drew on the neo-Kantian idealism and logical positivism of Western mathematician-philosophers, such as Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

To learn more about Shahrur/Shahrour's work, click on the book cover images below for one of the few translations of his writings in English, Andreas Christmann's edited volume, or the section of the chapter on Scripture  in my Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World (pp. 69-72).

Hasan Hanafi on the Arab Spring and Muslim ambiguities towards Secularism

In a brief interview with Moncef Slimi on the aftermath of the Arab Spring posted on the Qantara Website, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi made some interesting observations on Muslim attitudes towards secularism.

Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi

In response to the question whether it is possible at all to establish a secular order in Muslim countries without religious reforms, he noted that  'in the Arab world that's partically impossible. The concept of secularism is generally rejected by the majority of the population'. The reasons for that are the long-time effects of the defeat of the 1882 uprising of Egyptian officers led by Ahmad Urabi (1841-1911) against British tutelage; the impact of Ataturk's hardcore laicism and abolition of the caliphate in 1924; as well as the continuous and continuing repression of progressive Muslim intellectuals by successive autocratic Arab nationalist regimes.

In effect, Hanafi thinks that Muslims -- and Arabs in particular -- need to start from scratch, returning to the ideas of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformers Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905).

We should remember the reformist legacy of this movement, and realise that back then, the rejection of worldly thought was a reflexive reaction by influential progressive thinkers to the failure of efforts by the Islamic peoples to achieve liberation from European colonialism. 

This also corresponds to the points of departure of Hanafi's own lifelong mission for defining and establishing an Islamic way of progressive thinking. Known as the Heritage and Renewal Project, the evolution of this project is discussed in great detail in my book Cosmopolitans and Heretics. Where al-Afghani and Abduh represent the first and second phases of trailblazing and breaking ground for the development of an Islamic philosophical method, Hanafi sees himself as following in the footsteps of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), taking up and implementing the final and third phase of this reform process which the poet and philosopher from British India had laid out in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

Throughout his career, Hanafi has oscillated between this philosophical project and more engaged writings on current affairs in the Arab world. In the interview, he brings up the hostility of many Arab regimes against religious activism, even if it is strictly intellectual. These state interventions are not helpful in moving the Arab world forward:

The aggressive banning of religion from the public sphere by the state, and the introduction of a kind of "State Islam", is not going to lead us out of this dilemma. The tension between religion and politics would remain even then. 

Religious reforms in the Muslim world will need to take place within their appropriate context and its own terms, because as Hanafi observes:

Islam actually has no structures like the Church. Neither the Sunni Al-Azhar University nor the International Union of Muslim Scholars functions as an authority for the whole of Islam. In my view, the only Islamic authority comes from open, unbiased, scholarly discourse. And this is why is it quite simply structurally impossible for Islam to undergo the same kind of reforms as other faiths. 

To read the full interview click here

For some earlier critical observations on the role of Muslim intellectuals such as Hanafi in the Arab uprisings, read the post of 31 July 2011.