Background
Abduh, Muhammad was born in 1849 in Egyptian Delta.
Abduh, Muhammad was born in 1849 in Egyptian Delta.
The Ahmadi mosque, Tanta and later al-Azhar.
Exiled by the British and moved to Beirut and Tripoli, then Paris, later returning to Egypt eventually to become the Mufti. At various times a teacher, writer and judge.
Although Muhammad Abduh started off his philosophical work with a study of Avicenna, he soon came to concentrate upon political and religious issues. He was very much under the influence of al-Afghani and of the latter’s call to the Islamic world to unite in order to resist the West. Part of this policy was to be achieved by returning to a purer form of Islam which is cleansed of the influence of Western thought, and which none the less is based upon an argument for the rational basis of religious thought. Scientific findings will, on close examination. be shown to be similar to the doctrines of Islam, and it is important to defend the role of reason in the understanding of Islam. One should accept the teachings of Islam through the free use of reason and not because they are traditional. Islam is the most rational of religious doctrines and should be applied to the whole of life. Fighting against the pernicious influence of the West is not only a physical struggle but also, and much more importantly, an effort to reform the practice of Islam itself to restore it to its original purity. Like so many of his contemporaries, Abduh was obsessed with finding a solution to the apparent decline of the Islamic world, and he sought an answer in the construction of a form of Islam which could encompass progress and at the same time control it. The basis of Islam consists of beliefs about the nature of the world and the rules of human morality. For those beliefs to be attained we must employ both reason and revelation, which lead us in exactly the same direction. Reason will inform us that God exists, is omniscient, omnipotent, one; that there is an other life after this one, that some things arc good and others evil. We can also know rationally of the need for prophets and the nature which prophecy takes. Revelation is important because it fills in those aspects of religion which we cannot grasp entirely rationally. But revelation can only work properly if it is in agreement with rationality. When there is doubt about the direction in which the laws of religion actually go, it is important to use reason to work out how one is to act or what one is to believe. Reason and revelation have to work together iflslam is to be properly embodied in the life of the believer. Islam is in retreat because the corrupt Muslim governments have encouraged a blind reliance on tradition. They have confused the accidental features of Islam with the essential, demanding, unthinking adherence to a particular version of Islamic law. The way forward to a more Islamic and successful state is by adapting Islam to changing circumstances through examining rationally those aspects of the religion which appear to contradict modernity and seeing whether they might be altered to replicate more faithfully the sort of society which Muhammad created at Medina. The notion that modernity should not be rejected outright but could be partially incorporated into Islam had great influence upon Abduh’s followers in this century. Although many of those in the Islamic world came to reject his views, he set the agenda for much of the contemporary discussion concerning the nature of the Islamic state and the role of reason and revelation in religion.