Islamic Reform and the Global Public Sphere

Abstract

In 1866, the 17-year-old Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) from the provincial town Tanta arrived in the Egyptian capital Cairo. There he took up his studies at the Al-Azhar mosque, the center of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world. To his disappointment, Muhammad Abduh met an institution in deep crisis. The Azhar was overcrowded, faced severe financial problems, and provided only poor conditions in teaching and hygiene. In particular, the traditional form of teaching in which the students slavishly had to repeat their teacher’s lectures and the limited selection of available literature frustrated the young student (Sedgwick 2009; Goldziher 1973). Later, Abduh described the intellectual horizon of the Azhar as far too narrow for him who was looking for knowledge beyond the traditionally taught Islamic sciences. This knowledge Abduh found in Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), who was one of the most extraordinary Islamic reformers of his time. Afghani not only reinvigorated Abduh’s faith in Islam and its chain of prophets but also opened for him a new world of ideas and social activism. As this chapter aims to show, these new ideas cannot be understood without taking a comprehensive perspective of globalization into account. By doing so, this chapter analyzes Muhammad Abduh’s world of thoughts as inherently connected to a world society in the sense of constituting an encompassing horizon of the social, including the Middle East, as far back as the late nineteenth century (see also Stetter in this volume).KeywordsMiddle EastPublic SphereAnalytical DeviceWorld SocietyReform AgendaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.