In The Shadows of Glories Past by John W. Livingston

Author:John W. Livingston [Livingston, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351589222
Google: TCpKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-01T05:04:34+00:00

11 Abduh’s legacy

Muhammad Abduh is considered by eastern and western historians of Islamic intellectual reform to have been the seminal figure in initiating a reconciliation between the essentials of religion and the exigencies of modernization. During or after his lifetime, however, no religious consensus was clearly established concerning the on-going argument over the agreement between religion and science, certainly nothing that could stand as a general resolution comparable to the particular one that Abdallah Fikri’s treatise established in regard to the question of Copernicanism.

Secular and religious followers of the intellectual lead bequeathed by Abduh continued to argue the same issues of modernization, at the center of which was science, touchstone of modernity, and at the center of that, the question of Darwin. For a century the discourse on science would revolve around evolution and its materialist philosophy, carried on in a number of successful journals and newspapers founded in the 1890s and early 20th century. These new publications presented a broad range of views, from both secular and religious perspectives.

Sarruf and Nimr founded a daily in Cairo, al-Muqattam, named after the plateau at the edge of the city (where Salah al-Din and the Ayybid Dynasty he founded, followed by Mamluks, Ottomans and Muhammad Ali, had garrisoned their troops and built their citadels). But it was their Muqtataf that continued to maintain its lead position among the secular journals, long after the founders were dead. Another duo of Syrian Christian émigrés, the Takla brothers, founded the daily al-Ahram (The Pyramids – a leading and highly respected news organ in the Arab world until after the military seized power in 1952). Jurji Zaydan’s al-Hilal (The Crescent), a literary and historical journal, added richly to the body of modern secular literature arising in Egypt, as did Zaydan’s historical novels. Farah Antun (1874–1922), another Syrian Christian seeking a literary career in Egypt, followed in Zaydan’s footsteps and founded al-Jami’a, a periodical that reviewed contemporary western thought and espoused Shumayyil’s ideas of socialism. The Egyptian Christian Salama Musa’s many books that ardently embraced Shumayyil’s evolutionist materialism, with its progressive socialist spin, found their place on the far left of the shelf. A Muslim counterpart to Salama Musa’s Shumayyilist radicalism was Ismail Mazhar, author of many provocative books and the first to translate the principal chapters of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic.

Contributing on the religious side to the growing and contentious literature on science and evolution, Shaykh Rashid Rida, another Syrian émigré from Tripoli and student of both Jisr and Abduh, founded his al-Manar in Cairo. A journal of theological, political and historical thought, it expressed reformist Muslim views on science in general and evolution and materialism in particular. Shaykh Rida’s biography of Muhammad Abduh, “Our Teacher” (Ustadhina), as he refers to him, is, except of course for Abduh’s own writings, the leading source for the life and thought of one of Arab Islam’s most important religious thinkers in modern times.

Writing caustically on the Catholic side of the issue was the Syro–Lebanese Jesuit historian Louis Chiekho,

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