Portrait of the intellectual as a young man
Farhat
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Portrait of the intellectual as a young man
Rashid Rida's Muhawarat al-muslih wa'l-muqallid (1906)
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Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen
University of Copenhagen
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Intellectuals are producers or meaning and ideas. The sociological study of
intellectuals will stress that they are a social status group which is
solely or mainly preoccupied with the manipulation of collective symbols. As
such they have been highly influential throughout history, which is in fact
mainly known to us through their efforts. In Max Webers' Sociology of
Religion, the development of the world religions is traced through attention
to the norms and interests of specific intellectual carrier groups such as
the bureaucrats of Confucianism or the monks of Buddhism (Sadri, 1992:
33-68). Studies of intellectuals as a social class tend to stress their
conservative and value-upholding capacities, often in alliance with the
materially dominant classes to whom they provide a cultural legitimation. A
contemporary, somewhat cynical, example would be Bourdieu's homo academicus,
who, certified by the educational system, has accumulated a cultural capital
which he can use to define what will count as socially true and right.
(Garnham, 1995: 360).
There is, however, another more idealistic trend which tends to see
intellectuals as especially reflective and committed men (typically) who are
capable of looking at society from above even while they are engaged in its
reformation and emancipation. Unsurprisingly, this comes closer to many
intellectuals' self-representations, the theme that occupies us here. The
term intellectual turns 100 years this year. It was first used -
depreciatingly - by conservatives during the Dreyfus affair, implying a
charge of lack of patriotism. The accused, however, accepted the term and
produced a manifesto of the intellectuals stressing their duty to be speak
up for the public (Nettl, 1969: 87). They would recognize that they formed a
group, but would deny that they were representing group interests: on the
contrary, they were speaking on behalf of and for the good of the nation.
Their role models were the French philosophers of the 18th century and their
critical writings on social and religious issues. And indeed, it is quite
reasonable to date the birth of this modern intellectual to the age of
enlightenment, the public sphere and the press.
If these are the preconditions, the birth of the intellectual in the Arab
world can be traced to the second half of the 19th century. And all sorts of
questions can be raised about the appearance and role of the intellectuals
until today. As in so many other parts of the world we can raise questions
about the impact of the rise of professionals, the emergence of mass
culture, the contribution of women, the role of media, printed and later
audiovisual. We can also investigate state control and censorship, the
growth of the bureaucracy, the role of intellectuals in formulating state
ideologies, or the more recent brain drain and proletarization of
intellectuals. All these are valid - indeed pertinent - questions. We can
also look at the intellectuals' output, their attitudes to current issues or
perhaps to the cultural heritage. This is also valid, we will insist, even
though some people will think that too much emphasis had already been laid
on this particular aspect of the Middle Eastern intellectual. Especially
when we proceed to state that what we shall concentrate on here is the
relatively minor group of Middle Eastern intellectuals who, from the turn of
the century, have seen themselves as specifically Muslim intellectuals,
seeing in Islam the remedy of the social ills of the age. As in other
societies, being a religious intellectual runs counter to the
above-mentioned overall idea of the intellectual is the heir to the
secularistic criticism of the French enlightenment. The ambition of this
article is to explore these tensions in the cultural identity of the Muslim
intellectual through examples of their self-presentations in the 20th
century.
The rise of the modern Muslim intellectual
The study missions to Europe, the reforms in education in Egypt and the
Ottoman Empire and the spread of printing and publishing around the middle
of the 19th century provide the background for the emergence of the new
intellectuals in the Arab world. The pioneers of translation and publishing
such as Tahtawi, Shidyaq and Bustani are generally seen as the first of a
new kind of intellectual who wrote in a simple and unadorned Arabic for a
new and broader audience. We cannot estimate the number of readers and
active participants in this emerging public sphere with any precision, but
talking of Egypt around the turn of the century, Ami Ayalon assumes a daily
circulation of newspapers around 40,000, each of them read by and to several
people. The intellectuals were reading and contributing to the press, and a
few of them were actually making a living from writing and publishing. Most
of them, however, were members of the new professions such as doctors,
teachers and soon also lawyers.
The new intellectuals themselves were quite aware that they were of a new
kind, and a new term, mufakkir or fikkir was coined to describe them.
Reinhard Schulze has pointed out that this word was adopted by the colonial
cultural elite because it had the active connotation of thinking, compared
to the passive quality of knowing implied in the word 'ulama, the
traditional scholars from whom the new intellectuals wanted to distance
themselves (Schulze 1990: 37, 39, 43). Thinking dynamically and
progressively was the professed ideal of the new intellectuals. Some of them
would probably also have subscribed to Karl Mannheim's and Alfred Weber's
notion of the free-floating intellectual; listen to this quote from 'Abd
Allah Nadim, one of the leading Egyptian publicists and journalists of the
1880s and 90s:
I learned from the ulama, associated with writers, and mixed with princes
and governors. I took up my quarters with notables and men of industry. I
lived with craftsmen and fellaheen. I recognized how each category of people
was steeped in ignorance and came to know what causes them pain and
suffering and became acquainted with their hopes and dreams. I rubbed
shoulders with many of the Europeanized Arabs, and discovered the impact of
occidental ideas upon their characters. I associated with many of the
distinguished educated Arabs who studied in the West and returned to occupy
high and prominent posts. I knew numerous Europeans and explored their ideas
and views, accompanied eminent merchants, and was able to decipher the
rationale of their behaviour in commerce and politics. I mixed with sundry
persons from different walks of life, different races, nations and
religions. I studied the holy books of various religions, the books of
wisdom, history and literature. I became addicted to reading newspapers. I
was appointed a civil servant in the Egyptian government for a considerable
period of time, and practiced commerce and agriculture for other periods. I
served thought and ideas by teaching for a while, and also by speaking in
public and editing papers at other times. (quoted from Hafiz, 1993, p. 114)
In this self-presentation, Nadim stresses not only his extraordinary
capacity to meet and mingle with practically all (male) groups of Egyptian
society, but also that he does not feel that he belongs to any of them. The
focus is the nation as the sum total of all these social groups. The driving
force in him seems to be an insatiable intellectual curiosity combined with
a capacity to identify with other people and an ambition to address them in
speaking and writing.
This is indicative of a highly conscious attitude towards his audience - and
that should be counted as one of the characteristics of the print
intellectual. The madrasa tradition had produced texts mainly for itself,
and the more secular production of texts had typically been written to
gratify patrons. But the people of the press wrote for the public at large
and could not ignore its tastes. For while it is true that hardly any
newspaper could survive from sales alone and publishers were constantly
hunting for political patrons, these patrons did not support a newspaper
because of its flattery or literary standards but only because they believed
in its efficiency in influencing a large audience (Roper 1995, p. 223). It
was, in short, the publisher's skills in addressing and influencing large
publics that were rewarded. And this lead to the development of new kinds of
emotive appeal, argumentation and even intimacy between the writer and his
imagined audience. 'Abd Allah Nadim was one of those who explored the new
medium of fiction and narrative in his writing. Sabry Hafiz has traced the
genesis of Arabic narrative discourse from these fictional experiments of
the press - and the public's enthusiastic response - in the late 19th
century towards the fully developed novel in the 1920s.
Let me briefly briefly sum up some of the characteristics of the new
intellectuals:
they did not have the traditional affiliation to the madrasa.
they were involved in the public sphere as producers and consumers of the
press.
they identified with the nation and proposed solutions for its problems.
they were interested in intellectual representation and developed new kinds
of intellectual venues such as the society, the conference and the public
meeting.
they were often moralistic, appealing to universal values.
they could be critical or negligent of religious tradition.
in their writing they would often appeal to the sentiments and sympathetic
insight - as well as to the considered judgment - of their reader.
An example of the consciously Muslim variety of the new intellectual: Rashid
Rida
The mufakkirun, as noted, defined themselves in contrast to the 'ulama, and
some of them were openly critical of Islam, at least in some of its manifest
ations. There was, however, a group of Islamic scholars who took to the new
media and set up a specifically Islamic press. These men were still
connected to the world of the madrasa, but they wanted to reform it. They
shared much of the universalist and rationalist outlook of the new
intellectuals but did not consider these to be alien to Islam. On the
contrary, in their writings they defended the perfectly rational and
natural - and indeed the dynamic and progressive - quality of the religion
Islam.
These were the Salafiya, or ahl al-islah, and their ideas are well known to
any student of Islam. But until a decade ago it was mainly their ideas that
were known. Only the recent works of Kramer and Schulze on the congress
movement, and works like Tauber's on cultural and political societies, have
turned attention towards their innovative approach to Islamic cultural and
political activism. The Salafiya were not only impressive thinkers, they
were also visionary organizers with a clear perception of the importance of
institutions to keep up sustained reformism. One of their most important
vehicles in this reform work was the impressively well organized
international journal al-Manar.
Like the notion of the intellectual Al-Manar can celebrate its centennary
this year. It was launched in 1898 by Rashid Rida in cooperation with
Muhammaad 'Abduh, both of them great believers in the power of the press
(Skovgaard-Petersen, 1995). Rashid Rida, a young Syrian immigrant to Cairo,
is an eminent example of the consciously Muslim variety of the New
Intellectual. He described himself as "an exception among the people of my
country, especially the Muslims, in whatever concerns independence of
thought, and the free exploration of religious, political and social
matters." (Ta'rikh, p. 1001, quoted from Ayalon, 1995: 170). His house in
Cairo "served as private residence, printing establishment, bookshop and
bookstore" (Ende: EI: 446) and "was built not to live in and be enjoyed but
rather to store printing machines, letter boxes, trash of all kinds, and
books" (Ayalon, 1995: 222) - decriptions which echo Elizabeth Eisenstein's
descrition of the printing-bookshops as the new intellectual centres in
early modern Europe - as well as popular stereotypes of the domestic mess of
the intellectual (Eisenstein, 1983: 26). He was an important figure in the
congress movement and in several religious and national societies, but his
main contribution as an intellectual was in al-Manar which he not only
edited but also wrote a substantial part of for 37 years.
Rashid Rida's ideas and ideals of the intellectual are to be found in two of
his books and in two different genres. The first is his vast biography of
Muhammaad 'Abduh, Ta'rikh al-Ustadh al-Imam Muhammad 'Abduh, a highly
interesting early example of the modern intellectual biography in the Arab
world, which is, however, not going to concern us here. The second is an
early work, serialized in al-Manar in 1901, called "The Debates of the
Reformer and the Traditionalist." This work contains much of Rida's thinking
on religious reform. It has been studied by Malcolm Kerr and Albert Hourani,
among others, but again only for its ideological positions. In fact, none of
them has even remarked that it is a work of fiction, or at least set within
a fictional framework. This is, however, a very interesting aspect of the
work, as it is Rida's only experiment with fiction, and its aim is to
furnish the reader with a portrait of the model Muslim intellectual. What I
am proposing to do here, then, is to analyse "The Debates of the Reformer
and the Traditionalist" as an example of a representation of a decidedly
modernist Muslim intellectual.
The Muhawarat
The story is set in Cairo. To quote from its beginning:
One of the shaykhs of fiqh, one of the greatest preachers and teachers, met
with a young man of the new generation who combine the contemporary and the
religious sciences, just like they combine wealth and fame through their
seriousness and diligence, and if it were not so the shaykh would not have
condescended to discuss with him. The shaykh looked at the young man and
found him grieved and discontented, furrowed with sorrow as if a calamity
had occurred to himself or his family or property, and he said: "what is
worrying you [ma balak?]? I see you in a way that I am not familiar with and
I am surprised to see someone like you as worried about something. May you
get better, praise to God, and be of good health, and may God lead you
towards piety and charity and pious deeds and a generosity that never
harms." "Now, calm down, O professor," said the reformer,"I am a human
being, and the meaning of the word human being is a social creature who
feels that it is a member of an umma. When the umma is happy, he is happy,
and when it is distressed, he is distressed. I see my umma is the most
distressed and miserable of all nations, so how can I be happy and relaxed?"
This is the introduction to the two characters of the book. And our first
impression of the young man, the reformer, is only going to be confirmed
throughout: he is a well-mannered, intelligent, independent, serious and
committed Muslim who engages in this dialogue only by invitation and very
respectfully but also quite determinedly and with conviction. The comparison
of society to a body is well known in Islamic literature, and comparing it
to a sick body was quite common at the turn of the century (Mitchell, 1988:
154-60), but the total identification with the nation is a characteristic of
the modern intellectual, as noted.
It takes the first of the 13 discussions before the shaykh concurs with the
reformer that the umma is in fact ill, and that the cure is a dose of proper
Shari'a. But by then they have also realized that they are in strong
disagreement about how the Shari'a is to be understood, developed and
interpreted today, and this is what the ensuing discussions will be centered
upon. Before they set out, the young man defines the rules of the
discussion: arguments are only to be accepted if they are based on a clear
proof. Dogmatic questions must be documented with unambiguous Koranic
quotations or mutawatir Hadiths. The opinion of 'ulama' or others are not
decisive. (Rida, 1906: 8). The discussions traverse such subjects as popular
piety, varieties of numerology, the mixing of the madhahib of fiqh, and the
bases of religious authority. The central theme is ijtihad versus taqlid and
the book ends with a proposal that the really competent religious scholars -
ahl al-hall wa 'l-'aqd - compose a book on the rules of Islam which responds
to the demands of the age.
To reach this final agreement, the narrative has passed through various
stages which are reflected in the development of the character of the
traditionalist shaykh. As we saw in the quote, he is characterized as a
great preacher and teacher, and it is with total self-assurance he begins
the discussions with a ma balak, what is troubling you? He has a superior
air about him, the authority of an old shaykh unaccustomed to dissent, and
tends to be quite impolite towards the young man. Thus for instance at the
beginning of the second session he states that he finds his interlocutor's
arguments unconvincing, obscure and lacking in clarity. Already by the
fourth discussion, however, the shaykh appears quite tame and regains some
politeness; after being informed about the repulsive hidden agenda of the
Druzes and how Sufis have taken to exploiting the common people in much the
same way with cheap tricks and pseudo-science, he says in wonder:
I never heard what I have heard today, and I can see that the person who
makes thorough studies of history may well be able to make analogies to the
religious sciences. And I realize that those shaykhs who express their
hatred of the reading of history and claim that it weakens the intellect are
clearly wrong. But I do think that anyone who studies history - just like
someone who studies philosophy or logic - must meet the condition that he is
completely at home in dogmatics, for as al-Akhdari has said: practise the
Sunna and the Book to be directed by them towards what is right. (Rida,
1906: 34).
And the reformer answers with a smile:
I praise God the most high that you are now convinced of the benefit of the
science of history. It is indeed a nourishment for the intellect, an
educator of nations and the source of the social science which is the best
and most useful of the universal sciences. If you want to acquaint yourself
with its books then begin with the Muqaddima of ibn Khaldun which I shall
present to you as a gift. Read it carefully, for it is the triumph of the
Islamic umma over the Western nations, whose professor it is in philosophy
of history and sociology and the foundations of politics and paedagogics.
(ibid.)
In the eighth dialogue, the shaykh goes away for days and then returns with
another shaykh, once a fellow student of his and now a qadi in the
provinces. Although this looks suspiciously like a miserable attempt at
turning the tables in a losing battle, the reformer welcomes the new shaykh
in fireworks of light metaphors. The old shaykh, for his part, also gives an
introduction to the young man:
I was in a meeting with the greatest of our shaykhs, and someone mentioned
those who are talking of reform, and I saw that they agreed amongst
themselves that all those who are talking about reform are ignorant of the
faith and have not thoroughly studied its sciences or perform its duties.
But then I came across this young man and found him very devoted to the
faith indeed, performing the prayers completely correctly. (Rida, 1906: 71).
The new shaykh and the reformer are quickly involved in a discussion about
the legitimacy of taqlid in the Hanafi madhhab which is the one he as a
judge is following. In a Catch 22 argumentation which is later to be
extended to the other madhahib, the reformer demonstrates that even Abu
Hanifa himself was against taqlid, so that following him blindly must lead
to not following him blindly any more. No wonder that at the beginning of
the eleventh discussion the traditional shaykh can report that his friend
the judge has left, at a loss. In the last two dialogs, the shaykh humbly
confines himself to asking the reformer to elaborate on various points of
the reform agenda.
Rida's choice of genre
After this summary let us turn to the question of why Rida chose this genre.
A few books entitled Muhawarat are known from the classical period and thus
raise the question of the relationship of the new intellectuals to older
intellectual products. Brockelmann, for instance, quotes a title, Muhawarat
al-layl wa 'n-nahar by the Syrian 16th century Sufi al-Hamawi al-Haythami.
Discussions like this one between donkey and mule, rose and lily, Mecca and
Madina or heart and eye - where each is bragging about its special
qualities - are a genre of their own, the Fada'il in classical literature.
Closer to our Muhawarat is the theological Munazarat genre where two people
discuss a point of dogma or law, or where a Muslim discusses religion with a
member of another faith, ending - like here - with conversion of the weaker
part, invariably the unbeliever. In these works, the fictional framework
seems to be chosen for didactical purposes (Wagner, EI2: Munazara). In the
eigth dialog, our reformer makes a lengthy quote from one such work,
al-Ghazzali's al-Qistas al-Mustaqim, a debate between the Imam and a Batini.
If the "Debates between the Reformer and the Traditionalist" bear
resemblences to this classic genre, there are also differences. First of all
there is the whole graphical layout as a dramatic dialogue, even including a
few stage directions, as we saw. But also the fiction is more developed,
even if it is not terribly elaborated. There is an attempt at characterising
the agony and confusion of the shaykh, especially as he is losing ground in
the discussion. We should remember that this is still some time before the
first Arab novel, and the fiction here is fairly typical of its day. Many of
the early experiments with fiction - such as those of the above mentioned
'Abd Allah Nadim - made use of the dialogue, almost always avoiding giving
their protagonists real names, but stereotyping them as the doctor, the
officer or the young nationalist.
An early example of the new dialogue fiction is Ali Mubarak's 'Alam ad-Din
from 1882. As in most other cases the fictional element is weak and entirely
overshadowed by long didactic and moralistic elaborations. This was not
considered artistically flawed, on the contrary: in the introduction, Ali
Mubarak "admitted that his main goal was a pedagogic one and that he had
resorted to the narrative form because of its popularity" (Hafiz, 1993:
113).
'Alam ad-Din is a massive book describing the journey to France of an Azhari
shaykh and a British Orientalist, who has hired him to teach him Arabic. In
each chapter - called "entertainment" - the two intellectuals discuss an
aspect of Europe they have come across on the way. Here, too, the setting of
the story is primarily a background for some lengthy discussions - or more
monologues - on European issues. The characterization of the two
interlocutors is fairly sketchy, and there is no plot. Rotraut Wielandt has
concluded that fiction has been adopted to make an entertaining and
acceptable presentation of European technical skills and life to the
Egyptian public. The Orientalist serves to give a probable framework, but
also to facilitate the switch between the things observed and reflections
upon them. Finally, he is what she calls a "Bestätiger von Dienst", who
affirms the values and contributions of Muslim civilization. (Wielandt,
1980: 57).
This is clearly also the role of the traditionalist in our Muhawarat. Like
the Orientalist, he is a respectable representative of a scientific
tradition, "one of the greatest preachers and teachers". And we need that to
make him a weighty "Bestätiger von Dienst", who can confirm that the reform
agenda is indeed based on the authoritative religious scriptures, properly
understood. It is not so much his conversion as his confirmation which is
needed here.
If, in 1901, Rashid Rida chose the old genre of Muhawarat, it seems safe to
infer that he did so because within the previous twenty years fictional
dialogues had proven popular and effective in a modernized version in the
Arab press. We should also not forget that al-Kawakibi's Umm al-Qura, a
fictional account of a pan-Islamic meeting in Mecca, the first and arguably
the most successful fictional work of the modern Muslim intellectuals, had
just appeared. Rida was extraordinarily impressed with the book and
serialized it in the following year (1902)
Rida's Muslim intellectual
As our last point, let us take a closer look at Rashid Rida's version of a
Muslim intellectual. As indicated in the title, he is not called a mufakkir
but a muslih, a reformer. And during the discussions his party is referred
to as ahl al-islah. They seem to be one wing of a broader "people of
knowledge and judgment" to whom the whole book is probably directed.
The preface to the book gives a historical outline of Islam which reads like
a history of the Muslim intellectual. It is a story of decay due to inner
schisms between Sunni and Shia and between the various Sunni madhahib which
made the Muslims prey to outsiders, as they are indeed today.
True, there were always and will always be in this umma a group of men who
will point to the truth, as the Hadith has promised. But, due to their tiny
number, they became strangers, as it is stated in another Hadith, and which
estrangement is harder than the one of those to whom are attributed unbelief
and heresy because they insisted on the duty of the Muslims to follow the
Book of their Lord and the Sunna of His prophet, God bless him and grant him
salvation?... It will suffice to mention the two glorious imams Hujjat
al-Islam al-Ghazzali and Shaykh al-Islam ibn Taymiya and those of their
stature, but the sultan always supported the 'ulama' of the establishment
and the people of taqlid because they were political people and supporters
of the leadership. And the voice of the reformers among them became silent
to the point that, if one of their books became famous, it was burnt - as it
happened to Ihya 'Ulum ad-Din - or if a brave man raised his voice with the
call to God, he was met with the obscurity of prison, as it happened to
Shaykh Taqi ad-Din. (Rida, 1906: 7)
Today, Rida goes on, the pressure on the people of religion and knowledge is
even greater. But there is also an awakening taking place, a realization of
the need for reform, in particular in Egypt and India. What some people have
realized now, he says, is that
the religious reform - all the reforms will depend on it - is the key to
success and happiness. But there will be no reform without a call for it, no
call for it without logical proof, and no logical proof if the taqlid
persists. Hence, the closing of the gates of blind taqlid and the opening of
the gate of reflection and reasoning - this is the beginning of any reform.
(Rida, 1906: 8)
Rida, to be sure, also knew how to present his subject to his readers in the
rhetorical fashion of the press. His description of the few men of the
faith, always with reason, argument and courage on their side, is an example
of the classical theme of the pen versus the sword. Closing the gates of
blind imitation could be the credo of intellectuals anywhere. The 'ulama' as
the closed manipulative community providing the dominant classes with their
cultural legitimation is also a theme in the Western intellectual
anti-clerical tradition, and in fact in the writings of Bourdieu on the
academic intellectual, as has been mentioned.
To return to our specific example of the intellectual, we have already in
the quotes seen examples of his politeness and tact. When he takes the word
it is typically with a "I will not deny...but" or a "forgive me". Contrary
to the shaykh, he stays calm and composed throughout. These attitudes are
also recommended in classical adab works, it may be argued, and indeed there
doesn't seem to be much change here. It is, however, used not only as an
ideal but also to expose the traditionalist shaykh
Another feature which is definitely not in accordance with the world view of
the Adab literature is the inversion of age authority. Throughout the book
it is reiterated that the shaykh is an old man, and the reformer very young;
still, it is the reformer who appears to be the more versed in the Islamic
literature. Youth is thus linked to a fresh, uninhibited, individual and
dynamic approach - in short ijtihad, whereas old age is embodied by the
muqallid, that is, taqlid. It is central to the concern of the book that the
reformers are a new and active type of people who have appeared as a
reaction to the humiliation of the Islamic world but who are convinced that
the solution is to look for inspiration in the days when Islam itself was
young and dynamic. Today, as we know, the umma is old and ill. Rida's young
reformer will become the prototype of Muslim activist, for instance in the
writings of Hasan al-Banna. From being technical terms of Islamic usul
al-fiqh, ijtihad and taqlid are employed as wider metaphors for modernity
and tradition. It could be argued that the ijtihad of the Muslim
intellectuals is the equivalent of the tanwir of the mufakkirin.
There is an interesting point in the discussion when the world view and
intellectual approach of the young and the old are contrasted. It occurs in
the first discussion when the traditionalist is still maintaining that the
umma is not sick at all but in fact the best of all nations. The reformer
asks him to look around and he will see that the Muslims are suffering from
ignorance, poverty and suppression. To this, the traditionalist suggests
that there may be some powerful Muslim country which the young man has never
even heard of, but this is rejected out of hand by the reformer:
The science of geography and the newspapers have demonstrated to us what we
we have not witnessed by ourselves from the countries of the Muslims and the
others, as if we were watching them all the time, and nothing of them
remains hidden. But I can see that you are not well versed in this science
in front of you about the wealth of the Muslims and their level of knowledge
here, so I will not discuss that with you now. My aim is to convince you
that the Muslims are in distress, so that this can be the basis for the
talks between us. The Shaykh: How would I be convinced of your words when
they are based on no other arguments than the books of geography and the
twaddle of newspapers. This is all lies with no documentation, all their
sources are of the unbelievers, and "the unbeliever, do no accept what he
tells you". The Reformer: No, do not accept what the unbeliever tells you on
the subject of his unbelief and its foundations and [his attempts at]
disqualifying arguments against it. However, in those issues where he has no
gain from lying, and it is in his interest and useful to him to tell the
truth because he and his people will benefit from it, in those cases reason
will tell us that he speaks the truth in order not deceive himself and his
nation. And in this category belongs the science of geography. There is also
another aspect which tells us that they are intent on the truth in subjects
like this, and this is that every writer knows that his writing will be
printed and published and that the people who know about its subject will
read it and lash it with tongues of sharp criticism. More forceful yet than
these two reasons is the fact that in most of the cases I rely in my
judgment of the Muslims on several sources which [thus] further certainty.
In most of the cases the books of geography and the reports of the famous
newspapers are confirmed by the telegraph agencies and the postal
communication in all the countries of the world. (Rida, 1906: 3-4)
And a bit later he continues:
I am not saying that all that they relate is the truth and trustworthy, they
are not absolutely innocent of passions and tendencies. But do not imagine
that their passions will hide the truth. They can only make their own
additions to a limited degree, like pleading or favoring, as we see it now
in the telegrams from the English agency Reuter in the war of Transvaal,
where it has reported to us all the defeats of the English party. And this
is a case of reliance on one single company, so what do you think of what a
number of companies with varying inclinations and tendencies report if it
concurs with the correspondence of newspapers, also them being of various
inclinations and schools? (Rida, 1906: 22).
What we have here, of course, is the clash of two modes of intellectual
transmission and evaluation of knowledge. The Shaykh is arguing that there
are two sorts of knowledge: that of Muslims and that of unbelievers, and the
latter is not to be trusted. He knowledge is based on the isnad, that is,
certification of knowledge through our knowledge of the religious status and
moral stature of the transmitter. The young man, by contrast, is proponent
of universal knowledge which is to be evaluated - not by judging the status
of the transmitters - but by reflecting on their motives and by searching
for additional sources to check the information. Quite consciously he adopts
the technical term for an absolutely reliable Hadith transmission,
mutawatir, to characterise the reliability of news reported from afar by
numerous agencies and correspondents. Moreover, he has a clear appreciation
of a public sphere of intellectuals who will expose faults and
misunderstandings in each others' writings.
We have seen how the reformer is eagerly studying history and trying to
learn from it. We have seen that he has a long list of heroes ranging from
al-Ghazzali, ibn Qayyim and ibn Taymiya up to Ali Pasha Mubarak. He is well
versed in tradition. But he is also following events all over the world,
trying to understand and make judgments and trying to put his knowledge to
use in service of his own nation. Need I add that one of his favourite
sources of information on the Muslims past and present is al-Manar itself
which, according to him, more than any other newspaper can strengthen the
'ulama "because it puts in their hands this age of the umma and brings forth
the question of its reform and return to former glory "(Rida, 1906: 38).
This is all quite flattering to the readers of al-Manar and probably very
helpful for their identification with our young reformer. Al-Manar, he
states, will achieve its aims through educational reforms, and these are
crucial for - contrary to what the traditionalist shaykh seems to believe -
the bulk of the Egyptian population is entirely ignorant of religion, and
even the wives of the 'ulama' don't know how to pray. (Rida, 1906: 91). The
ignorance of the masses, incidentally, is yet another classical intellectual
theme, and not the most appealing.
Conclusions
Rashid Rida's only exercise in fiction adopts an old genre of confessional
dialogue but spices it up with novel features of the popular dialogues of
his day to make it appealing, entertaining and convincing to his readers. He
may also have found that a treatment of subjects like popular piety could be
easier dealt with by polemizicing with a fictional shaykh who could raise
some of these not very litterary subjects in the right order and make them
especially easy to shoot down. The reader of al-Manar is provided with handy
ammunition against vulgar Sufism, popular practices and taqlid and perhaps
some encouragement to make use of it. For another attraction of the
fictional setting is the possibilities it offers for the reader to identify
himself with the reformer, and a much more complete construction of the
intellectual as the model Muslim.
To give a last example of this quite elaborate construction, when in
discussion no. 6 the shaykh announces that he will spend the 'id in the
countryside and study the Koran and Hadith quotations there, the reformer
says that the right place for a man to spend the 'id is at home with the
family and relatives. "Only if the family is in the provinces, and he is a
civil servant waiting for such an opportunity to visit them should he go
away and return again soon." (Rida, 1906:54).
This incident gives us a glimpse of the author's techniques of relating to
his imagined readers, or one category of them, the civil servants. The
excursus is unrelated to the discussions as such, but it points to Rida's
interest in influencing the morals and norms of his readers faced with new
social activities such as the holiday. The target group is an elite, who may
however still benefit from the dramatisation and the dialogue form.
Finally, in this sketch of the intellectual as a young man, we have seen a
number of classic themes in the self-representations of intellectuals in
Europe and elsewhere. It is striking how easily these themes are
appropriated and applied to the religion which Rida in the introduction
calls "the religion of the argument and the proof".
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