Rashid Rida
Muhammad Rashid Rida (Arabic: محمد رشيد رضا, romanized: Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā; 1865–1935) was an Islamic scholar, reformer, theologian and revivalist. An early Salafist, Rida called for the revival of hadith studies[14] and a theoretician of an Islamic state,[24] Rida condemned the rising currents of secularism and nationalism across the Islamic world following the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate and championed a global pan-Islamist program aimed at re-establishing an Islamic caliphate.[25][26][24]
As a young hadith student who studied al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya, Rida believed reform was necessary to save the Muslim communities, eliminate Sufist practices he considered heretical, and initiate an Islamic renewal.[27] He left Syria to work with Abduh in Cairo, where he was influenced by Abduh's Islamic Modernist movement[28][29][30][31] and began publishing al-Manar in 1898. Through al-Manar's popularity across the Islamic World, Rida became one of the most influential Sunni jurists of his generation, leading the Arab Salafi movement and championing its cause.[32][33][34]
He was Abduh's de facto successor and was responsible for a split in Abduh's disciples into one group rooted in modernism and secularism and the other in the revival of Islam. Salafism, also known as Salafiyya, which sought the "Islamization of modernity," emerged from the latter.[35][36][32]
During the 1900s, Rida abandoned his initial rationalist leanings and began espousing Salafi-oriented methodologies such as that of Ahl-i Hadith. He later supported the Wahhabi movement,[36][31][37][38][39] revived works by ibn Taymiyyah, and shifted the Salafism movement into a more conservative and strict Scripturalist approach. He is regarded by a number of historians as "pivotal in leading Salafism's retreat" from the rationalist school of Abduh.[40][41][42][27][43] He strongly opposed liberalism, Western ideas, freemasonry, Zionism, and European imperialism, and supported armed Jihad to expel European influences from the Islamic World.[44] He also laid the foundations for anti-Western, pan-Islamist struggle during the early 20th century.[45]
Early life and education[edit]
Muhammad Rashid Rida was born in al-Qalamoun, Beirut Vilayet, present-day Lebanon, in 1865 into a distinguished Sunni Shafi'i clerical family. His family relied on money earned from their limited olive tree holdings and fees earned by family members who served as scholars. The Rida ulama had been in charge of the al-Qalamoun mosque for several generations. Rida's father was an Imam in the masjid. The family, who were Sayyids, claimed descent from the Ahl al-Bayt, specifically Husayn ibn Ali.[23][46][27]
Rida received a traditional religious education, attending elementary school at the local kuttab in Qalamūn before moving to the Ottoman government school in Tripoli. He then enrolled in Shaykh Ḥusayn al-Jisr's National Islamic School, where he learned hadith and fiqh.[47] He also earned a diploma of ulema in 1897. During his education, he studied scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Qayyim, Ibn Qudama, Ghazzali, Mawardi, Razi, Taftasani, and Ibn Rajab.[48][49] Rida began preaching at the communal level and taught tafsir and other religious sciences at the village's central mosque. He also taught separate ibadah classes for women. Around this time, he first read al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, a periodical that was highly influential to him.[46][50][51] It was published by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. According to Lebanese-British historian Albert Hourani, Rida belonged to the last generation of traditionally trained Islamic scholars who could be "fully educated and yet alive in a self-sufficient Islamic world of thought."[52]
Views[edit]
Tawhid[edit]
Rida's vision of tawhid formed the central theme of his reformist teachings, as he believed it was supported by rationality and opposed all forms of superstitious beliefs, oppression, and ignorance. Later Muslims' deviation from pure tawhid as practiced by the Salaf, Rida argued, led to their decline and subjugation.[139] Echoing ibn Taymiyyah, Riḍā also condemned the practice of tawassul as religious innovation.[140] Riḍā called for the destruction of tombs and structures built above graves and banning practices associated with grave veneration, which he condemned as polytheism.[141] Among these acts were worshipping creatures as deities besides God; believing God granted part of his divine powers or shares aspects of his dominion with the humans; and believing in the lordship of God, but worshipping worldly beings, such as seeking aid from the dead during sorrow.[142]
Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida's early mentor, had adopted an Ash'ari methodology of metaphorical and interpretive view of what he viewed as potentially anthropomorphic descriptions of attributes of God. Rashid Riḍā, who was advocating Salafi theology after the First World War, began writing lengthy refutations of his teachers views. In his commentary to Risalah al Tawhid, he criticized Abduh for straying away from the literalist Salafi approach. In response to Abduh's statement that the most important aspect of tawhid was belief in "God's oneness in His essence and the creation of the universes"; Riḍā remarked that Abduh failed to mention tawḥīd al-ʾulūhiyyah, the view of Allah as the only god, and disagreed with Abduh's stance on divine attributes. As a Salafi, Riḍā pushed back against the Ash'ari and Maturidite schools and advocated the traditionalist doctrine of Qur'anic letters, recitation, and voice being uncreated (ghayr Makhluq) word of God, a belief based on the works of ibn Taymiyyah. In Riḍā's editions of Abduh's works, his views that contradicted traditionalist creed were either deleted or critiqued in commentaries to conform to Salafi doctrines.[143][144]
Tajdid and taqlid[edit]
Riḍā believed that the early Muslims' upholding of tawhid and sunnah were the primary reasons for their spiritual and material success. He praised their independence, free from blind adherence and motivated by Quaranic teachings. He believed Muslim decline began after the end of the Islamic caliphates in the 13th century, when the Arab rule, and the influence of their adherence to sunnah, ended. Riḍā also believed that non-Arab rulers engaged in religiously-harmful innovation and superstition. Based on his reading of hadith, he believed that a second Islamic victory was prophesised and undertook initiatives for global revivalism as a result.[139] He thought the Muslim world faced crises in spiritual, educational, and legislative affairs, and identified Islamic religious reform as a "triple unification of doctrine, law, and ethics." His adoption of Wahhabism's puritanical tenets after 1918 symbolised his adoption of a Hanbalite reformist framework. To achieve this comprehensive Islamic system, Riḍā sought to revive the classical Islamic theory of life. To him, the reconstitution of the Islamic system was only possible by directly returning to the original sources. In this, he also defended the superiority of naql (textual sources) over aql (rational sources), and condemned philosophy and Sufism.[66][145]
Riḍā travelled to Europe only once, on political grounds; he did not speak English or other European languages. He disliked the social life and was critical of Christianity. Despite this, he had a robust sensitivity to challenges faced by Muslims in the modern world. He believed that the inner decay of Muslims, as well as the efforts by the Catholic Church, prevented Europeans from embracing Islam. He wanted Muslims to accept aspects of modernity only to the extent to which it was essential for the recovery of Islamic strength. He considered it a duty for Muslims to study modern science and technology. He repeatedly urged legal experts and the scholars to come together and produce modernised legal works based directly from the Qur'an and hadith in a way that was accessible for all believers.[52]
Riḍā was a leading exponent of Salafism[146] and was especially critical of what he considered taqlid (blind following) of excessive Sufism, which he believed to have distorted the original message of Islam. He encouraged both laymen and scholars to read and study directly the primary sources of Islam by themselves.[147][148] This principle enabled Riḍā to examine contemporary subjects through a modern lens. He believed that the "fragmentation of Muslims into sects and parties" resulting from taqlid was particularly harmful and would lead to worship of someone other than God, which was in direct contradiction of tawhid.[149]
Theologically, Riḍā argued that rigid adherence to madhabs prevented Muslims from thinking independently and prohibited their right to access the Scriptures directly. This enabled tyrants, supported by corrupt scholars, to justify oppression and preserve their rule. He also believed that hadiths regarding the Saved Sect referred to the ahl al-Ittiba, the people who followed proof-texts. He considered those who were pro-mad'hab to be innovators and thus dangerous to Islam. Despite this, he did not ignore the legacy of the four mad'habs and viewed their legal literature as a resource from which he derived rulings, adapting to changing circumstances. Although he placed The Four Imams at the peak of juristic excellence, he claimed that ibn Taymiyyah was more relevant for contemporary Muslims in practice.[150][148] Riḍā believed that the Saved Sect was indisputably Sunni Islam.[151]
Riḍā's criticism of taqlid extended beyond sharia and Islamic theology to include socio-political developments. He believed these associations and the consequent partisanship influenced mad'hab affiliations and fanaticism. He was more critical of al-Mutafarnijun, Europeanised emulators who he regarded as guilty of taqlid for abandoning the path of the Salaf. While the madhab partisans are influenced by administrative positions of power and promote governmental interests, the Mutafarijun divided the Muslim community based on differences in language, nationality, and geography, and conceived new identities within the nation-states, which Riḍā considered significantly more harmful.[152]
Secularism and modernism[edit]
Riḍā believed that the management of state affairs and its principles were an integral part of Islamic faith. Accordingly, he called for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and waged fierce battles against secularist trends that emerged during the 20th century. He considered calls for separation of religion and state to be the most dangerous threat to Islam.[153][154] By the 1920s, Riḍā had discovered that his most formidable opponents were not the tradition-bound Sufi-Ash'arite scholars of al-Azhar but the Western-educated secularists who pushed Abduh's utilitarian principles what he considered to be too far. Riḍā made vehement denunciations and attacks against modernists such as Ali Abdel Raziq and Ahmed Safwat. By this point, his main priority had shifted to repeal what he considered the "Western invasion of Islamic culture." This shift was also evident in his promotion of Wahhabism, Salafism, and the works of ibn Taymiyyah, ibn Qayyim, and ibn Qudamah.[155] Riḍā admired ibn Taymiyyah and ibn Abd al-Wahhab in particular and was inspired to adopt a more conservative and orthodox outlook.[156]
Riḍā called upon Muslims to reject Westernisation and labelled Islamic modernists as "false renewers" and "heretics" whose efforts were harming Muslim societies. He accused Westernised modernizers of corruption, immorality, and treason. He was a fierce believer that any reforms going against Scripture is heresy and should be censured. His campaigns were instrumental in putting modernists like Ali Abd al-Raziq to trial for what Riḍā viewed as attacks on sharia. Riḍā was a strong literalist[157] opposed the trend of rejecting hadith in Egypt. Prominent in this movement was the Egyptian physician Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi who grew out of Abduh's modernist traditions.[158] Riḍā disagreed with Sidqi's beliefs that hadith was prone to corruption due to flawed transmission and that Muslims should rely solely on the Qur'an, which Riḍā took as a minimisation of Muhammad's importance.[159] He believed modernists had gone too far into Westernism in their reformist attempts, leading Muslims to lose their faith. He used the Qur'anic term Jahiliyya to refer to ignorance of pre-Islamic Arabia and the conditions of contemporary Muslims, and believed that governance not adhering to sharia was apostasy. This idea would become a major rationale behind the armed Jihad of future militant organisations.[156][58]
He strongly criticised scholars who issued fatwas aligning with modernist ideals.[160] Riḍā believed that a society that properly obeyed sharia would be successfully resistant to both capitalism and class-based socialism, since this ideal society would be immune to temptations.[161] He dismissed modernist advocacy of cultural synthesis, emphasizing the self-sufficiency and comprehensiveness of Islamic faith.[162] He believed that the rising individualism, irreligion, materialism, rationalisation, and scientism in Europe following World War I would lead to their downfall.[44] In his treatise Yusr al-Islam wa Usül at-Tashri' al-'Ämm (The Accommodating Spirit of Islam and the Sources of General Jurisprudence), Riḍā explained that reform advocates who fall between mad'han partisanship and modernist Westernisation are "those who affirm that it is possible to resuscitate Islam and renew its true guidance."[163] His aggressive rejection of Westernisation eventually led to the formation of transnational Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami.[162]
Published works by Riḍā include:[201]