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| (photo: al-Majalla) |
Muhammad Abduh,1849-1905, was an Egyptian religious reformer who sought to modernize Islam and bring it into line with rational principles. He wrote in a climate of "renaissance" (nahda) in the Islamic world when Muslims were beginning to become restive, worrying about lagging "behind" the Western world materially and wondering what to do about it. Abduh had been exiled from Egypt in 1882 (his forced departure followed Afghani's in 1879) for participating in the Urabi uprising against the British. Later, Abduh taught in Beirut, then returned to Egypt in 1889 to become the Grand Mufti.
Abduh and his Middle Eastern colleague Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, along with Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal in the Indian subcontinent, rejected blind adherence to tradition (taqlid), as Ibn Taymiyya had taught, and called for reopening of the "doors of ijtihad" ("innovation"), which had been considered closed at least since 935, as the chief way to modernize Islam.
About the turn of the twentieth century, Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani founded the Salafiyyah movement (from the phrase, salaf as-salihiin, 'the pious predecessors' -- see), a reform movement which spread rapidly throughout the Islamic world. It called for modernization based on Islamic principles. Included in its ranks were the Islamic world's first feminists, prominent among whom was a man, Qasim Amin (1863-1908), a close associate of Abduh, who wrote two controversial books, The Emancipation of Women, and, The New Woman. In 1897, Abduh published his best known book, The Message (Theology) of Unity ('Risalat at-Tawhid'), trans. by Ishaq Musa'ad and Kenneth Cragg (London: Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1966). The following excerpts are drawn from pp. 29-31 and 44:
"The original meaning of Tawhid is the belief that God is one in inalienable divinity...From Him alone all being derives and in Him alone every purpose comes to its terms...
The Qur'an came and took religion by a new road, untrodden by previous Scriptures, a road appropriate and feasible alike to the contemporaries of the revelation and to their successors...The Book gives us all that God permits us, or is essential for us, to know about His attributes. But, it does not require our acceptance of its contents simply on the ground of its own statement of them. On the contrary, it offers arguments and evidence...It spoke to the rational mind and alerted the intelligence...
The Islamic religion is a religion of unity throughout. It is not a religion of conflicting principles but is built squarely on reason, while Divine revelation is its surest pillar..."
At this point Abduh introduces his principal argument for the existence of God, resembling closely the 'Prime Mover' argument advanced by Aristotle, later Christianized by Thomas Aquinas.
"The principle of the contingent [any object or creature which is found to exist in time and space] is that it is neither existent nor non-existent except by some external cause...It is clear that all contingents in existence taken together constitute a contingent. And all contingence needs a cause to give it being. Thus, the collectivity of contingents in turn requires a creator or originating cause. It is impossible that this should be the sum of the contingencies, since that would involved a thing being antecedent to itself. And it is impossible that the creator should be part of the collectivity, since this would be to constitute a thing its own cause and cause of all that preceded it (if the creating part were not the first and of itself if it were). Both these suggestions are plainly absurd. Clearly the whole range of contingents must have a cause prior to it and the only non-contingent cause is the necessarily existing. For there is nothing prior to the contingent save the impossible and the necessary. The former has no existence. Therefore there remains only the necessary."