The Sufi-trained reformer who tried to marry Islam with reason
Muhammad Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt, helped found Islamic Modernism, a movement sometimes called Neo-Muʿtazilism after a medieval school of rationalist theology. He believed religious and scientific schooling together could reform Egyptian society, and his articles attacked corruption, superstition and the luxurious lives of the rich.
Born in 1849 in the Nile Delta to a father of Turkish descent and an Egyptian mother, both from the local elite, Abduh was sent at thirteen to the Ahmadi mosque, one of Egypt's biggest places of learning. He ran away and married, then returned to his studies in Tanta. His Sufi uncle Darwish, of the reformist Madaniyya order, pulled him through a spiritual crisis; asked what his path was, the uncle replied that Islam itself was his path. From him Abduh took a lasting hostility to taqlid, the blind imitation of earlier authorities.
In 1866 he entered al-Azhar in Cairo, where he found the rote teaching stale. At about 22 he chose the pan-Islamist reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani as his spiritual guide, a bond lasting eight years. Al-Afghani gave his mysticism a philosophical grounding, pushed him toward a rationalist reading of Islam, and taught him about Egypt's troubles and the West's technology. Together they briefly published the anti-colonial paper al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, and both belonged to Masonic lodges for a time.
Granted the rank of alim in 1877, he taught logic, theology and ethics at al-Azhar and, from 1878, history at Dar al-Ulum. He edited the official gazette al-Waqa'i al-Misriyya, using it to argue for social and religious reform. His activism brought exile to his home village in 1879, and the British later expelled him from Egypt.
Back in public life, he became a judge in 1888, joined the Court of Appeal as a consultative member in 1899 and in the same year took charge of Egypt's fatwa office as Grand Mufti. He wrote a treatise on the oneness of God and a Quranic commentary, contributed widely to the press, including Al-Ahram, and died on 11 July 1905.
Source: Muhammad Abduh
