The Reformers

So, basically, there was a group of Muslims, particularly in nineteenth-century Egypt, who begin to say: this is our problem. We abandoned the rationalist model and took this super-rationalist or spiritual model, and we have forgotten the world; whereas the Christians, who for centuries abandoned the world, took this rational model and began to explore the world, to discover the secrets of the world, and ultimately to gain power and ascendancy, in a way that now even the heartland of Islam is threatened and being defeated. And so they created a type of neo-rationalist school. Within that school probably the greatest proponent is an Egyptian reformist named Muhammad ʿAbduh, who becomes Shaykh al-Azhar in 1900^**. He takes the Azharī school, which is really the Harvard of the Muslim world, and begins to introduce modernist ideas: that Islam needs to be reformed. So there are reformers, and there comes a secularisation of Islam.

The Muslims become embarrassed of their spiritual tradition. In the spiritual tradition there was a lot of belief in the miracles of the saints, in the idea of sainthood, what is called wilāyah in the Arabic language; a very strong tradition of not becoming too engaged in the world, of taking only from the world what one needs, and really not being extravagant, and things like that — and of really seeing this as something related to the very core of Islam, using the Prophet (ṣallallāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) as the example, as the model of somebody who was not deeply engaged in the world, although he was a worldly prophet in the sense that he was very concerned with society, with justice in society, with establishing a strong social basis for his teaching. Despite that, his own personal life was one of, in a sense, a deep abandonment of the luxuries of the world.

There is a famous tradition. He slept on a mat on the floor, and they said that the traces of the palm fibres used to show on his face. Once ʿUmar was sitting with him, and he began to weep. And he asked ʿUmar: why are you weeping? He said: because I went to Syria and saw how the Roman rulers live in opulence, and then I look at you, the Prophet of God, living like this, and it makes me sad. And the Prophet smiled at him and said: are you not pleased that this is for them? They have this world, and for us is the next world. This type of thing, within the Islamic tradition, was very, very much the norm until the late nineteenth century. And so there is a change.

And so now there is a book that is really worth recommending — given that anyone who completes even a short course of study on Islam is becoming, certainly in the American framework, something of an expert on Islam. After two weeks of such study a person will be considered, within their school and within their environment, to have a type of expertise about Islam that other people do not have. That is, one, a very important responsibility; and two, a type of absurdity, as everyone knows. Even a person who has done a university degree in comparative religions cannot claim to have explored any one religion — and has not explored Islam to its fullest, anywhere near it. Buddhism is just an incredible tradition, a massive intellectual tradition, a massive spiritual tradition; a person who spent an entire life just studying Buddhism would probably not exhaust even one of the schools of Buddhism. So this is true of any religion that has any substance to it. And certainly Islam is one of the greatest of the religions of man — if not, certainly the Muslims would consider it so; but even many secularist historians would consider it certainly either the first or the second. Christianity will be in there, depending on which historian one is looking at. Michael Hart definitely considered the Prophet Muhammad, of all of them, to be the most successful religious teacher in the history of human societies, for the impact that he has had on cultures and civilisations.