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

4 8Islam i n World Cult u r e sdents became teachers in turn, and a number of them worked to establish institutesfor the translation of European works into local Middle Eastern languages.Others among them, including the Egyptian Rif’at al-Tahtawi, also editednewspapers and periodicals and wrote textbooks and new “national”histories. Tahtawi and his intellectual successors advanced the idea that theu l a m a , or scholars of Islamic religious sciences, could advise their rulers wiselyonly if they also understood the rapidly changing conditions of the modernworld. This, of course, would imply yielding some of their authority in thefields of engineering, medicine, agriculture, and other modern arts and sciencesto experts in those areas. At the same time, these reformers proposedthat the general public, girls as well as boys, should be educated in schools sothat they could contribute to national economic and technological progress byappropriating the best of modern Western science and technology to advancethe public welfare of Muslim societies.Similar developments took place in Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria, as educatedmen began to debate the nature of Islam and Arabic culture in the modernworld. These discussions raised such issues as the balance to be struck betweenlocal and national loyalties, the regional and transregional identities oflanguage and religion, and the opportunity to reach outside the boundaries ofthe Islamic tradition to appropriate relevant ideas and developments fromelsewhere. Key to these debates was Jamal al-Din, widely known as “al-Afghani”(“the Afghan”). Jamal al-Din was a gifted teacher who called for pan-Islamicsolidarity in the face of increasing European expansionism in the late nineteenthcentury. Arguing that Islamic civilization was in decline because it hadlost the values of its golden age, he saw the possibility of renaissance throughthe achievement of political and cultural solidarity and through faith in thepower of human reason to mold both individuals and countries. According toJamal al-Din, the revelations of Islam were identical with the truths of philosophyand the findings of modern science, and for him the essence of Islam wasthe active participation of Muslims in applying their reason both to the worldand to sacred scripture.Islamic ModernismJamal al-Din’s travels, from south central Asia to Cairo, India, Istanbul, Persia,Russia, Paris, and London, are a map of the political fault lines he tried to transcend.The reaction of both European and Middle Eastern elites to his internationalcontacts, his founding of secret societies (he formed one in Paris withdisciple Muhammad Abduh, which published an influential but short-livedArabic newspaper), and his anti-imperialist rhetoric appears to have been similarin some ways to suspicions of the charismatic, pan-Islamic organizers in