Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World by Ammeke Kateman

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 44, 4, 2019 © The Maghreb Review 2019 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com AMMEKE KATEMAN, MUḤAMMAD ʿABDUH AND HIS INTERLOCUTORS: CONCEPTUALIZING RELIGION IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD, LEIDEN, BRILL, 2019, 288 PAGES Ammeke Kateman’s book investigates the concept of religion of the leading late 19th century Muslim Reformist, Muḥammad ʿAbduh. Its approach is to situate ʿAbduh’s concept of religion in the global conversations about religion and comparisons between religions that took place between him and a diverse set of interlocutors. It contributes to two principal literatures, which Kateman surveys in chapters 1 and 2 (part 1): a literature on the life and thought of Muḥammad ʿAbduh, and a wider literature on the formation of the global concept of religion in modern times. This combination of literatures is part of Kateman’s method of seeking to capture both ʿAbduh’s place within a wider context of conceptual formation at the same time as his own agency in authoring his concept of religion – a dynamic that she helpfully characterises in terms of shared global questions, on the one hand, and diverging local answers, on the other (pp. 37–41). Her book shows how ʿAbduh’s concept of religion is a local configuration of a global concept that was shared by diverse interlocutors from different traditions and backgrounds. The clarity with which she sets out and then applies this sophisticated approach will make this book methodologically significant for the different fields that it bridges, such as intellectual history and religious studies. Kateman’s interest in the simultaneity of the global and the local is a welcome addition to the literature on ʿAbduh’s life and thought. ʿAbduh is the protagonist of the book, whose intellectual agency is the unifying locus of the book’s foray into a diverse ‘global intellectual field’. The body of the argument in parts 2 and 3 consists of a contextual analysis of two texts by ʿAbduh in which his articulation of the concept of religion is particularly central: part 2 looks at ʿAbduh’s theological treatise, Riṣālat al-Tawḥīd (The Theology of Unity), and the context of Beirut in the 1880s; and part 3 looks at ʿAbduh’s Reply to Hanotaux, and its context of ʿAbduh’s response in 1900 to the criticism of Islam as inimical to civilisation in a way that Christianity was not by Gabriel Hanotaux, a former French foreign minister. Kateman’s homing in on just two texts for this study, far from being a sign of Orientalist textcentredness , is indicative of her fresh approach to ʿAbduh. It underpins an effort 554 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS to engage with ʿAbduh’s discourse on religion on its own terms – textual and contextual; as we will see, for Kateman, this means reckoning with the discursively and socially ‘kaleidoscopic’1 and multi-layered nature of ʿAbduh’s social world in a way that has not been done before. Previous studies, as Kateman puts it, drawing on the work of Dyala Hamzah and John Buessow, have largely taken either a ‘genealogical’ or ‘taxonomical’ approach to ʿAbduh; they either situated him in a longer-term diachronic history of Islamic tradition or they have argued for his place outside of tradition as a Westerniser and liberal (pp. 33–37). Kateman points out that these arguments can go too far in measuring ʿAbduh by an external standard – either Islam or the West – and reductively understanding his thought in terms of what it lacks. She counters this reduction by using the close attention she gives to a particular text to capitalise on its richness as a historical source and indicator of its context. This helps her recover ʿAbduh’s concept of religion within the particular historical experience and practice that drove its positive constitution. In other words, as Kateman characterises it, she engages with ʿAbduh’s concept of religion as a series of specific historical and relational ‘acts’. A combination of methods of intellectual history serves this purpose. Kateman...