Rashid Rida

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1865 - 1935

Disciple and biographer of Egyptian religious reformer Muhammad Abduh; editor of the Islamic modernist magazine al-Manar.

Rashid Rida was born in the village of Qalamun, near Tripoli, in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now Lebanon. Rida came from a family of local prominence and piety. He attended the local Qurʾan school and continued his education in Tripoli at an Ottoman state school and an Islamic school run by Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr. Although exposed to the Turkish and French languages, as well as to mathematics and Western science, Rida considered languages other than Arabic unnecessary for a scholar of Islam like himself. Inspired by the classic Revival of the Religious Sciences by Ahmad Abdullah alGhazali, Rida joined the Naqshbandi Sufi order. An encounter with the dance of Mevlevi dervishes, however, shocked him into publicly denouncing what he took to be the excesses of Sufism.

Al-Urwa al-Wuthqa (The indissoluble bond), the magazine that Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his disciple Muhammad Abduh issued from Parisian exile in the 1880s, awakened Rida to his life mission of reviving Islam. He hoped to join al-Afghani, who was then residing in Istanbul under Sultan Abdülhamit II's surveillance and never received Rida's letter. Afghani died in 1897; Rida went instead to Cairo to join Afghani's erstwhile disciple Muhammad Abduh - whom he had met twice before. Rida became Abduh's inseparable disciple, founding the magazine al-Manar in 1898 to spread Abduh's reformist Islamic, or Salafiyya, message.

For thirty-seven years, until his death, Rida wrote much of al-Manar himself and published other religious works on the al-Manar press. His books in Arabic, usually serialized in al-Manar first, include the Biography of the Master Imam Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (3 vols.), The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate, The Muhammadan Revelation, biographies of the Prophet Muhammad and the caliphs Umar and Ali; with Abduh, an unfinished twelve-volume Commentary on the Qurʾan.

Like Afghani and Abduh, Rida made the Islamic umma (community) his central concern, asking why it had declined relative to the modern West and blaming the decline on medieval additions to Islam - such as the reverence for Sufi saints - which had obscured the pure religion of the ancestors (salaf, from which comes the name for the Salafiyya movement). He urged reformist ulama (Islamic leaders) to follow Abduh and himself in returning to the Qurʾan and the sunna (body of customs) and interpreting them afresh for the modern age. At first al-Manar concentrated its fire on the conservative ulama entrenched in the mosque-university of al-Azhar in Cairo. Rida blamed them for succumbing to the blandishments of the state, tolerating folk superstitions, and failing to mount a vigorous defense of Islam; by the 1920s, however, Rida had grown more conservative and came to see Western-inspired secularism and liberal nationalism as greater dangers. He drew nearer to the strict literalism of the Hanbali Law School, its fourteenth-century juridical theologian Ibn Taymiya, and their Muwahhidun proponents in Arabia. King Ibn Saʿud of Arabia responded with financial support for Rida's activities.

After his early years with Afghani, Abduh had retreated from overt politics, but Rida made frequent forays into Ottoman, Syrian, Arab, and caliphal politics. He saw Sultan Abdülhamit II's rule in Syria as repressive, and al-Manar published the attack of Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi on Abdülhamit II and his call for restoring the caliphate (held by the Ottoman Turks) to the Arabs. Hoping that changed circumstances after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 would allow him to open a school for Islamic propaganda and guidance, Rida spent a year in Istanbul. The authorities changed their minds, however, and Rida opened his school in Cairo in 1912, only to have it fall victim to World War I. Meanwhile, as a member of the Ottoman Decentralization Society, he protested the Young Turks' tightening grip on the Arab provinces. After the war, when Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) abolished first the Ottoman sultanate and then the caliphate, al-Manar published a series of studies on the caliphate and the possibility of its revival by an Arab ruler. Rida had a hand in the rival caliphal congresses in Mecca and Cairo in 1926, which unsuccessfully advanced the claims of King Ibn Saʿud of Arabia and King Fuʾad of Egypt for the office. In the mid-1920s, when Ali Abd al-Raziq denied the caliphate's Islamic legitimacy and Taha Husayn declared pre-Islamic Arabic poetry a later forgery, Rida found himself agreeing with the Azhari ulama in defending revered traditions. Rida had a final try at congress politics as a participant in the 1931 Islamic Congress in Jerusalem.

As a Syrian, Rida felt the tug of emerging Arab nationalism more than Iranian-born Afghani or Abduh, an Egyptian. Al-Manar's publication of Kawakibi and Rida's Decentralization Society activities had Arabist implications, and he was even chosen president of the Syrian Congress, which in 1920 declared the independence of the short-lived Syrian Arab kingdom under Faisal I ibn Hussein. After the French mandate over Syria was effected in 1921, Rida went to Geneva as vice president of a delegation to the League of Nations protesting the mandates granted to Britain and France in the Middle East as part of the peace settlements of World War I.

Rida's influence waned in the later years, and his death in 1935 attracted little notice. His most direct heir was Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928/29 and admired Rida's Islamic activism and his strict interpretation of the shariʿa (Islamic law). Banna put out a few issues of al-Manar after Rida's death, but it disappeared in 1940.

Rida displayed an unusual blend of timidity and combativeness. He lacked the charisma of Afghani and Abduh before him and Hasan al-Banna after him. Rida's works are not widely read today; nevertheless, he was an essential link in the chain of Islamic activism running from Afghani and Abduh to Banna and Sayyid Qutb - and the present-day Muslim Brethren and their more radical Islamist off-shoots.

Bibliography

Adams, C. C. Islam and Modernism in Egypt. London: Oxford University Press, 1933; reprint, New York: Rout-ledge, 2000.

Haim, Sylvia, ed. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798 - 1939. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Kerr, Malcolm H. Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

Kramer, Martin. Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Safran, Nadav. Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804 - 1952. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

— DONALD MALCOLM REID

Muhammad Rashid Rida (September 23, 1865, Ottoman Syria - August 22, 1935, Egypt) is said to have been "one of the most influential scholars and jurists of his generation" and the "most prominent disciple of Muhammad Abduh" ^[1]

Rida was born near Tripoli in Al-Qalamoun, now in Lebanon but then part of Ottoman Syria within the Ottoman Empire). His early education consisted of training in "traditional Islamic subjects". In 1884-5 he was first exposed to al-`Urwa al-wuthqa, the journal of the Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. In 1897 he left Syria for Cairo to collaborate with Abduh and the following year they launched al-Manar, a weekly and then monthly journal comprising Quranic commentary^[1] at which Rida worked until his death in 1935.

Rida was an early Islamic reformer, whose ideas would later influence 20th-century Islamist thinkers in developing a political philosophy of an "Islamic state".

Contents 1 Reformist ideas 2 Contributions to Islamist political thought 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Reformist ideas

Like his predecessors, Rida focused on the relative weakness of Muslim societies vis-à-vis Western colonialism, blaming Sufi excesses, the blind imitation of the past (taqlid), the stagnation of the ulama, and the resulting failure to achieve progress in science and technology. He held that these flaws could be alleviated by a return to what he saw as the true principles of Islam - salafiyya Islam which was purged of impurities and Western influences — albeit interpreted (ijtihad) to suit modern realities.^[2] This alone could he believed save Muslims from subordination to the colonial powers.^[3]

The corruption and tyranny of Muslim rulers ("caliphs") throughout history was a central theme in Rida's criticisms. Rida, however, celebrated the rule of Mohammad and the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and leveled his attacks at subsequent rulers who could not maintain Mohammad's example. He also criticized the clergy ("ulama") for compromising their integrity - and the integrity of the Islamic law ("sharia") they were meant to uphold - by associating with worldly corrupt powers.^[4]

Towards the end of his life, Rida became a staunch defender of the Saudi regime and an advocate of Wahhabism, saluting 'Abd al-Wahhab as the "renewer of the XII century (of the Hijra)". In fact, he died on his way back to Cairo from Suez, where he had gone to see Ibn Sa'ud off. ^[5]

Contributions to Islamist political thought

Rida's ideas were foundational to the development of the modern "Islamic state". He "was an important link between classical theories of the caliphate, such as al-Mawardi's, and 20th-century notions of the Islamic state".^[6]

Rida promoted a restoration or rejuvenation of the Caliphate for Islamic unity, and "democratic consultation on the part of the government, which he called "shura"."^[2] In theology, his reformist ideas, like those of Abduh, were "based on the argument that

shari'a consists of `ibadat (worship) and mu'amalat (social relations). Human reason has little scope in the former and Muslims should adhere to the dictates of the Qur'an and hadith. The laws governing mu'amalat should conform to Islamic ethics but on specific points may be continually reassessed according to changing conditions of different generations and societies.^[1]

Although he did not call for the revolutionary establishment of an "Islamic state" itself, rather advocating only gradual reform of the existing Ottoman government, Rida preceded Abul Ala Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, and later Islamists in declaring adherence to Sharia law as essential for Islam and Muslims, saying

`those Muslim [rulers] who introduce novel laws today and forsake the Shari'a enjoined upon them by God ... They thus abolish supposed distasteful penalties such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers and prostitutes. They replace them with man-made laws and penalties. He who does that has undeniably become an infidel.`^[3]

See also

• List of Islamic scholars

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, Thompson Gale (2004), p.597
2. ^ ^{a b} Glasse, Cyril, The New Encyclopedia of Islam, Altamira Press, 2001, p.384
3. ^ ^{a b} Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, enl. Ed. (New Have: Yale University Press, 1990), p.101
4. ^ Rida, Muhammad Rashid. 1934. Al-Khilafa aw al-Imama al-Uzma [The caliphate or the great imamate]. Cairo: Matba'at al-Manar bi-Misr, p. 57-65.
5. ^ Soage, Ana Belén. 2008. "Rashid Rida's Legacy". The Muslim World 98/1, p. 57-65.
6. ^ Eickelman, D. F., & Piscatori, J. (1996). Muslim politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 31.

External links

Arabic Wikisource has original text related to this article: Rashid Rida

• Short biography
• Rashid Rida Hometown Website

Persondata
Name	Rida, Rashid
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 23, 1865
Place of birth
Date of death	August 22, 1935
Place of death

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