Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Overlapping with Namik Kemal in Iran was Malkom Khan (1844–1908), who had been educated in Paris, much influenced by Auguste Comte, and who wrote a Book of Reform, in which he advocated the separation of powers, a secular law and a Bill of Rights. He edited a newspaper

Qanun or ‘Law’ in which he proposed two assemblies, a popular assembly and an assembly of the ulama

or learned. Again overlapping with both of these was Khayr al-din al-Tunisi (1822–1890), a Tunisian who also studied in Paris, who made a survey of twenty-one European states and their political systems, much as Aristotle did in classical Greece. He argued that it was a mistake for Muslims to reject what others had achieved, simply because they weren’t Muslims, and he recommended the Islamic world should ‘steal the best’ of what Europe had to offer.⁷⁸

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.