Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) was a Syrian scholar who helped formulate an intellectual response to the problem of reconciling Islamic heritage with the modern world.
Rashid Rida was educated according to traditional forms of Muslim learning—the sciences of the Islamic religion and the Arabic language. He was profoundly influenced in his early years by the writings ofMuhammad Abduh andJamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muslim reformist and nationalist thinkers, and he became Abduh’s biographer and the leading exponent and defender of his ideas. Rashid Rida founded the newspaper al-Manar in 1898 and published it throughout his life. To a limited extent, he also participated in the political affairs of Syria and Egypt.
He was concerned with the backwardness of the Muslim countries, which he believed resulted from a neglect of the true principles of Islam. He believed that these principles could be found in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and in the practices of the first generation of Muslims, before corruptions began to spread among the religious practices of the faithful (c. 655). He was convinced that Islam, as a body of teachings correctly understood, contained all the principles necessary for happiness in this world and the hereafter, and that positive effort to improve the material basis of the community was of the essence of Islam.
Rashid Rida urged Arabs to emulate the scientific and technological progress made by the West. In the political affairs of the Muslim community, he wanted rulers to respect the authority of the men of religion and to consult with them in the formulation of governmental policies. Here he showed his tendency to assimilate practices of traditional Islam into the forms of modern societies. Consultation had never been institutionalized in traditional Islam, but he equated it with modern parliamentary government. He sanctioned the bending of Islam to fit the demands of modern times in other important respects; for example, the Prophet had forbidden the taking of interest, but Rashid Rida believed that, to combat effectively the
Penetration of Western capitalism, Muslims had to accept the policy of taking interest.
To realize a political and cultural revival, Rashid Rida saw the need to unify the Muslim community. He advocated the establishment of a true caliph, who would be the supreme interpreter of Islam and whose prestige would enable him to guide Muslim governments in the directions demanded by an Islam adapted to the needs of modern society;
Arab, and Mediterranean cultures to create a single cultural identity; Similarly, in Egypt liberal intellectuals such as Taha Husayn (1889-1973) viewed their national culture as incorporating Islamic, Arabic, ancient Egyptian, and European elements.
The question of whether Islam should be the foundation of a national culture and politics dominated political discourse in Islamic countries throughout the 20th century and beyond. In particular, the political interpretation of Islam inspired resistance to Western acculturation. Religious scholars and intellectuals such as Abd al-Hamid ben Badis (1899-1940), founder in 1931 of the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, and Muhammad Allal al-Fasi (1910-74) in Morocco reconceived the identity of their countries in Islamic terms and played significant roles in nationalist movements until independence was achieved. Between the two World Wars, these scholars established several Islamic private schools offering Arabic-language instruction for boys and girls. Islamic intellectuals and movements often put their educational endeavours at the centre of their projects to bring Islam into agreement with their times. Thus, the question of the transmission of Islamic knowledge versus secular and Westernized education became crucial. Yet not all Islamic thinkers viewed the two systems of education as incompatible. Some argued that they should be integrated and could complement each other. The Indonesian Nahdatul Ulama, for instance, favoured a system of Islamic schooling along modernized lines that would integrate religious and secular knowledge.
Nationalism: Postcolonial States and Islam
Later in the 20th century, colonized Muslim societies (except Palestine) gradually achieved political independence and built new states. Many of these states adopted a “Muslim” identity that they interpreted in various ways and implemented within such domains as law, education, and moral conduct. Two states, though established in societies that had not been colonized, exemplified contrasting paradigms. In 1924 the Turkish military officer Mustafa Kemal, taking the name Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”), brought a formal end to the Ottoman caliphate. Maintaining that Islam had contributed to the backwardness of Turkish society and that a modern country must be founded upon science and reason rather than religion, Ataturk claimed to relegate Islam to the private sphere. This brand of secularist government also controlled the public expression of Islam and did not separate state and religion. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, the state regulated public life according to Islamic norms, using a rigorous interpretation of Shari‘ah.
In Egypt, which became a constitutional monarchy after 1922 (though it was under colonial control until 1952), the question of the relation between state and Islam generated fierce political controversies between secularists and those who interpreted Islam as a system of government. Among the latter, the Muslim Brotherhood grew from a grassroots organization into a mass movement that provided key popular support for the 1952 Revolution of
The Free Officers, a military coup led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser that ousted the monarchy. Similar movements in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and North Africa, the politicized heirs of earlier reformist intellectual trends, later emerged as significant actors in their respective political scenes. It was not until the end of the 1960s, however, that they became strong enough to pose a serious political challenge to their countries’ authoritarian regimes.
World History
