Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

2 8Islam i n World Cult u r e sand anticolonial activist in many ways set a new paradigm for Muslim leadership.Jamal al-Din’s origins remain to a considerable degree obscure, and it appearsthat he deliberately kept them thus. By mid-life, however, he hademerged as a highly visible and globally mobile individual working for the advancementof Islamic political agendas in places like London and Paris as wellas Cairo and Istanbul. During Jamal al-Din’s lifetime, rapid progress in traveland communications technologies were increasingly allowing Muslims to receiveand locally reinterpret ideas originating elsewhere. These exchanges ofideas and innovations fostered the creation of a wide variety of new conceptionsof what it means to be Muslim in the modern world.P r i m a ry among Jamal al-Din’s causes were the unification of Muslims worldwidein a pan-Islamic movement of resistance against European imperialism,and demonstration of the compatibility of Islam with modern science (Keddie1983). Jamal al-Din’s agenda of promoting rationalism in modern Islamicthought was more elaborately developed in the works of the Egyptian reformerMuhammad Abduh (d. 1905). Abduh called for a radical reappraisalof Islam’s religious and intellectual heritages, and he became a proponent of anew wave of religious thought that championed a return to the foundationalsources of the Qur’an and s u n n a , combined with a renewed emphasis on theplace of human reason in their interpretation. As Abduh expressed it in a fragme n t a ry autobiography, he saw his mission as one aimed at understandingreligion as it was understood by the elders of the community before dissensionappeared; to return, in the acquisition of religious knowledge, to its firstsources, and to weigh them in the scales of human reason, which God has createdin order to prevent excesses or adulteration in religion, so that God’s wisdommay be fulfilled and the order of the human world preserved; and toprove that, seen in this light, religion must be accounted a friend to science(Quoted in Hourani 1993, 140–141).His ideas became known throughout the Muslim world through the publicationof influential periodicals under his editorship: U rwa al-Wu t h q a ( w h i c hhe published with Jamal al-Din in exile at Paris in 1884) and later al-Manar,on which he collaborated with his younger Syrian colleague, Rashid Rida(d. 1935).R i d a ’s reformism, however, was somewhat more conservative than that ofAbduh and is often associated with the Salafi movement. During the late nineteenthcentury in Rida’s native Syria, an active group of Salafi u l a m a a t t r a c t e dto the radical reformist thought of the fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar IbnTaymiyya were already developing aspects of his medieval reformist ideas inn e w, more modern directions (Commins 1990). Rida’s own place in the furtherdevelopment of modern Salafism signaled a new turn in which Islamic