In all there were well over fifty major thinkers of the Islamic world who emerged at this time to campaign for the modernisation of Islam – people such as Qasim Amin of Egypt, Mahmud Tarzi of Afghanistan, Sayyid Khan of India, Achmad Dachlan of Java and Wang Jingshai of China. But the three most influential Islamic modernists, whose names deserve to be more widely known in the West, were: Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, of Iran (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh, of Egypt (1849–1905), and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who was born in Lebanon but spent most of his adult life in Egypt.
Al-Afghani’s main message was that European success was basically due to two things, to its science and to its laws, and he said that these were derived from ancient Greece and India. ‘There is no end or limit to science,’ he said, ‘science rules the world.’ (This was in 1882.) ‘There was, is, and will be no ruler in the world but science.’ ‘The English have reached Afghanistan; the French have seized Tunisia. In reality, this usurpation, aggression and conquest have not come from the French or the English. Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power.’ Al-Afghani wanted the whole Islamic position to be reconsidered. He argued that ‘mind is the motor of historical change’ and he said that Islam needed a Reformation. He pilloried the ulama or religious scholars of the day who read the old texts but didn’t know the causes of electricity, or the principles of the steam engine. How, he asked, could these people call themselves ‘sages’? He likened the ulama to a light with a narrow wick ‘that neither lights its surroundings nor gives light to others’. Al-Afghani studied in France and Russia and while he was in Paris he became friendly with Ernest Renan. Al-Afghani specifically said that the religious person was like an ox yoked to a plough, ‘yoked to the dogma whose slave he is’, and he must walk eternally in the furrow that has been traced for him in advance. He blamed Islam for the ending of Baghdad’s golden age, admitting that the theological schools stifled science, and he pleaded for a non-dogmatic philosophy that would encourage scientific inquiry.
Muhammad Abduh also studied in Paris, where he produced a famous journal called The Strongest Link, which agitated against imperialism but also called for religious reform.79 Returning to Egypt he became a leading judge and served on the governing body of the al-Azhar mosque-college, one of the most influential bodies of learning in the Arab world. He campaigned for the education of girls and for secular laws, beyond the sharia. He was especially interested in law and politics. Here are some of the things he wrote: ‘Human knowledge is in effect a collection of rules about useful benefits, by which people organise the methods of work that lead to those benefits . . . laws are the basis of activities organised . . . to produce manifest benefits . . . the law of each nation corresponds to its level in understanding . . . It is not possible therefore to apply the law of one group of people to another group who surpass the first in level of understanding . . . order among the second group will be disturbed . . .’ Politics, he insisted on another occasion, should be determined by circumstances, not by doctrine. Abduh went on to make the case for legal reform in Egypt, for clear simple laws, avoiding what he called the ‘ambiguities’ of the Qurʾan. He referred Egypt to France after the Revolution, which he said went from an absolute monarchy, to a restricted monarchy, to a free republic. He wanted a civil law to govern most of life, agreed by all in a logical manner. In his legal system, there was no mention of the prophet, Islam, the mosque, or religion.
Muhammad Rashid Rida attended a school in Lebanon which combined modern and religious education. He spoke several European languages and studied widely among the sciences.80 He was close to Abduh and became his biographer. He too had his own journal, al-Manar (The Beacon), which disseminated ideas about reform until his death. Rida’s view was that social, political, civic and religious renewal was necessary and ongoing, so that societies could ‘ascend the paths of science and knowledge’. ‘Humans at all times need the old and the new,’ he said. He noted that while the British, French and Germans mostly preferred their own ways of doing things, and thinking, they were open to foreign influences as well. He admitted to being helped by, and liking, men who he deemed heretics. He sounds here a bit like Erasmus but he also recalls Owen Chadwick’s point, mentioned earlier, where he said that it was only from about 1860 that Europeans who regarded themselves as Christian could be friendly with non-believers. Most importantly, Rida said that the sharia has little or nothing to say about agriculture, industry and trade – ‘it is left to the experience of the people’. The state, he says, consists of precisely this – the sciences, arts and industries, financial, administrative and military systems. They are a collective duty in Islam and it is a sin to neglect them. The one rule to remember is ‘Necessity permits the impermissible.’
The collective achievement of modernism in the Islamic world consisted of the following elements. (1) Cultural revival. This was an attempt to revive Islamic arts and culture, mainly by referral to what had happened in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Here are a few examples: the practice of hagiography was changed and became much more like modern biography; there developed a tradition of travelogues in the Arab world, which openly marvelled at the prosperity of Europe and America – the gas lamps, the railways and the steamships. The first plays began to appear, in Lebanon in 1847, with an adaptation of a French drama; the first Urdu play was produced in India in 1853 and the first Turkish play was performed in 1859. A new periodical press appeared in the Arab world, with the development of the rotary press (as in Europe). Titles: Liberty, Warning, Interpreter. Algeria even had a reformist newspaper, The Critic. The critic al-Tahtawi wrote a book about Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and about Western laws; Namik Kemal, in Turkey, translated Bacon, Condillac, Rousseau and Montesquieu. (2) Constitutionalism. Constitutionalism in this context meant government restricted by law, what we would today call the separation of powers, with elected parliaments rather than government by kings, sheikhs, or tribal leaders. The constitutionalists specifically took a decision to ignore the concept of paradise, and argued that what mattered was equality in this life, here on earth. Constitutionalist proposals were produced, or passed, in Egypt in 1866, in Tunisia in 1861, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and 1908, in Iran in 1906 and again in 1909. In Afghanistan a modernist movement was suppressed in 1909.81 People even started to talk of ‘the constitutional countries’. (3) Science and education was the third aspect of modernism. There was a great worry about Darwin, because many Islamic scholars were persuaded by Herbert Spencer’s ideas on social Darwinism and they thought that Muslim societies were old-fashioned and would go under. They therefore urged the adoption of the Western sciences, in particular, which were to be taught in the new schools. There was a new school movement at this time, usul-I jaded, meaning ‘new principles’, which taught religious and secular subjects side-by-side but where the aim, quite clearly, was to replace traditional religious scholars with more modern ones. Sociology became popular among the Islamic modernists; they followed Comte in particular and his view that societies could be divided into three progressive stages: natural, social and political. Afghani took the view that man does not differ from the animals and could be studied like them, arguing that the fittest would survive. Like Marx and like Nietzsche, he thought that, in the end, life was about power. Abduh visited Herbert Spencer, whose book he translated. Most important of all, the modernists argued that laws came from human nature, from the study of the regularities of nature, that that was how God revealed himself, not through the Qurʾan. (4) As was happening in the West in the nineteenth century, with the deconstruction of the Bible (as we would say), so the text of the Qurʾan and hadith came under criticism. Rida was a relentless critic of the hadith, as a set of texts introduced by later figures which he felt was most to blame for keeping Islam back. So far as the Qurʾan itself was concerned, he argued that its text was only a guidance, not a command. Al-Saykh Tartawi Jawhari (1870–1940) made an exegesis of the Qurʾan in twenty-six volumes, based on modern science. (5) Women. The nineteenth century saw the promotion of girls’ schooling in several Islamic countries, if not everywhere. It saw women’s organisations in Bengal and in Russia. It saw an end to polygamy in India. It saw women’s suffrage in Azerbaijan in 1918 (before France in 1947, and Switzerland even later). In the Lebanon in 1896 and in Tunisia in 1920 there were campaigns for women to be given free access to the professions.