The Salafiyya and Sufism: Muhammad ‘Abduh and his Risālat al-Wāridāt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations)

2007 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Scharbrodt
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
Intellectual Crisis

This article questions certain assumptions on the intellectual history of modern Islam and on one of the most influential modern reform movements, the Salafiyya. By looking at the Sufi origins of one of the main Salafī reformers, it relativizes the notion of an inherent anti-Sufism of this reform movement. The article examines how Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the famous Egyptian reformer, converted to Sufism in his youth after experiencing a spiritual and intellectual crisis. The influence of his paternal great-uncle Shaykh Darwīsh al-Khādir and of Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1837–1897) on ‘Abduh's spiritual and intellectual formation will be investigated. In his youth, Sufism provided him with an alternative form of religiosity with which he could express his dissatisfaction with the representatives of mainstream Islam in his time. ‘Abduh's mystical inclinations found its literary expression in his first major work, the Risālat al-Wāridāt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations), whose contents will be discussed in detail.

scholarly journals Tradition and Islamic Philosophy: Some Recent Urdu Publications on Mullā Ṣadrā

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Sajjad Rizvi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Mulla Sadra ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

Abstract The reception of Mullā Ṣadrā in South Asia began soon after his death through the dissemination and commentary culture on his Sharḥ al-Hidāyah that was adopted into the Dars-e Niz̤āmī pedagogy in the eighteenth century. However, the modern reception of his thought in Urdu has been somewhat removed from that initial scholastic engagement. I examine four modalities of this reception: translation of his major work the Asfār; analytic engagement by a philosophy doctorate; triumphalism in the literary sphere; and responses to the intellectual challenge of the West by a Shiʿi seminary student. I attempt to show that these varied receptions are indicative of trends and developments in the modern intellectual history of Pakistan.

Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages: With a New Introduction

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Lasker
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
The Core ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
History Of

This book is based on a comprehensive reading of philosophical arguments drawn from all the major Jewish sources, published and unpublished, from the Geonic period in the ninth century until the dawn of the Haskalah in the late eighteenth century. The core of the book is a detailed discussion of the four doctrines of Christianity whose rationality Jews thought they could definitively refute: trinity, incarnation, transubstantiation, and virgin birth. In each case, the book presents a succinct history of the Christian doctrine and then proceeds to a careful examination of the Jewish efforts to demonstrate its impossibility. The main text is written in a non-technical manner, with the Christian doctrines and the Jewish responses both carefully explained; the notes include long quotations, in Hebrew and Arabic as well as in English, from sources that are not readily available in English. At the time of its original publication in 1977, this book was regarded as a major contribution to a relatively neglected area of medieval Jewish intellectual history; the new, wide-ranging introduction surveys and summarizes subsequent scholarship, and re-establishes its position as a major work.

What Do We Mean By “Salafī”? Connecting Muḥammad ʿAbduh with Egypt’s Nūr Party in Islam’s Contemporary Intellectual History

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Griffel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
Sunni Islam ◽  
The 19Th Century

In contemporary academic literature, the word “Salafī” has a variety of meanings. Most importantly, Western academic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries applies the word to (1) an Islamic reform movement founded by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897) and Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) in the last decades of the 19th century and (2) to contemporary Sunni reform movements that criticize manifestations of Sunni Islam which are based on Sufism, Ashʿarism, and traditional madhhab-affiliations to the Shāfiʿī, Ḥanafī, and Mālikī schools. In a 2010-article Henri Lauzière argued that the use of the word “Salafī” to describe these two movements is an equivocation based on a mistake. While the movement of contemporary Salafīs may be rightfully called by that name, al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh never used the term. Only Western scholars of the 1920s and 30s, most importantly Louis Massignon (1883–1962), called this latter movement “salafī”. This paper reevaluates the evidence presented by Lauzière and argues that Massignon did not make a mistake. The paper describes analytically both reform movements and draws the conclusion that there is a historic continuity that justifies calling them both “salafī”. The paper draws an analogy from the use of the word “socialist” in European political history, which first applied to a wider movement of the late 19th century before its use was contested and narrowed down in the course of the 20th.


Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Roshdi Rashed

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 279-295
Author(s):  
Mohammed Aref
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Mathematical Language ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Galileo Galilei ◽  
Elementary Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe

This review essay introduces the work of the Egyptian scientific historian and philosopher Roshdi Rashed, a pioneer in the field of the history of Arab sciences. The article is based on the five volumes he originally wrote in French and later translated into Arabic, which were published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies and which are now widely acclaimed as a unique effort to unveil the achievements of Arab scientists. The essay reviews this major work, which seems, like Plato’s Republic to have “No Entry for Those Who Have No Knowledge of Mathematics” written on its gate. If you force your way in, even with elementary knowledge of computation, a philosophy will unfold before your eyes, described by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei as “written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” The essay is a journey through this labyrinth where the history of world mathematics got lost and was chronicled by Rashed in five volumes translated from the French into Arabic. It took him fifteen years to complete.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Rashid Rida’s Struggle to Establish A Modern Islamic State

1984 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Assad N. Busool
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Presence

Reform movements are important religious phenomena which haveoccurred throughout Islamic history. Medieval times saw theappearance of religious reformers, such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Taimiyah,Ibn Qayim al-Jawziyah and others; however, these reform activitiesdiffered significantly from the modern reform movement. The medievalreformers worked within Muslim society; it was not necessary to dealwith the external challenge presented by Europe as it was for themodern Muslim reformers after the world of Islam lost its independenceand fell under European rule. The powers of Europe believed that Islamwas the only force that impeded them in their quest for world dominanceand, relying on the strength of their physical presence in Muslimcountries, tried to convince the Muslim peoples tgat Islam was ahindrance to their progress and development.Another problem, no less serious than the first, faced by the modernMuslim reformers was the shocking ignorance of the Muslim peoples oftheir religion and their history. For more than four centuries,scholarship in all areas had been in an unabated state of decline. Thosereligious studies which were produced veered far from the spirit ofIslam, and they were so blurred and burdened with myths and legends,that they served only to confuse the masses.The ‘Ulama were worst of all: strictly rejecting change, they still hadthe mentality of their medieval forebearers against whom al-Ghazali,Ibn Taimiyah and others had fought. Hundreds of years behind thetimes, their central concern was tuqlid (the imitation of that which hadpreceeded them through the ages). For centuries, no one had dared toquestion this heritage or point out the religious innovations it impaired.In conjunction with their questioning of the tuqlid, the modernreformers strove to revive the concept of ijtihad (indmendentjudgement) in religious matters, an idea which had been disallowedsince the tenth century. The first to raiseanew the banner of $tihad inthe Arab Muslim world was Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani; after himSheikh Muhammad ‘Abduh in Egypt, and after him, his friend and ...

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