Two men shaped the debate on Islam and modernity at the end of the nineteenth century: al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), and Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). The two men were partners in an Islamic reform agenda that would shape Islam and nationalism well into the twentieth century. Al-Afghani was a restless thinker who traveled widely across the Islamic world and Europe, inspiring followers and alarming rulers wherever he went. He spent eight years in Egypt, 1871 to 1879, where he taught at the influential mosque university of al-Azhar. Al-Afghani was a religious scholar by training but a political agitator by inclination. His travels through India, Afghanistan, and Istanbul had impressed on him the magnitude of the threat Europe posed to the Islamic world, and the impotence of the heads of Muslim states in addressing the threat. The central focus of al-Afghani’s political philosophy was not that of how to make Muslim countries politically strong and successful, as was the case with Tanzimat reformers in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Ottoman Empire. Rather, he argued that if modern Muslims lived according to the principles of their religion, their countries would regain their former strength and overcome external threats from Europe.³³ Although al-Afghani was convinced that Islam was fully compatible with the modern world, he believed that Muslims needed to update their religion to face the issues of the day. Like all observant Muslims, al-Afghani believed the message of the Qur’an was eternal and equally valid for all times. The part that had grown outdated was the interpretation of the Qur’an, a science that had been deliberately frozen by Islamic scholars in the eleventh century to prevent dissent and schism. Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century were taught theology by the same books as scholars of the twelfth century. Clearly a new interpretation of the Qur’an was called for, to bring Islamic strictures up to date and address the challenges of the nineteenth century—challenges that medieval theologians could never have foreseen. Al-Afghani hoped to constrain Muslim rulers with constitutions based on updated Islamic principles that would put clear limits on their powers, and to stimulate pan-Islamic unity of action among the global community of Muslims. These radical new ideas enflamed a talented generation of young scholars at al-Azhar, including nationalists Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Saad Zaghlul, and the great Islamic modernist, Shaykh Muhammad Abduh. Born in a village of the Nile Delta, Abduh proved one of the greatest thinkers of his age. Islamic scholar, journalist, and judge, he ended his career as the grand mufti of Egypt, the country’s highest religious functionary. He wrote for the famous Al-Ahram newspaper, and like al-Tahtawi he served as editor of the Egyptian government’s official gazette. He was one of Ahmad Urabi’s supporters in 1882 and was exiled by the British to Beirut for his pains. While in exile, Abduh traveled to Western Europe and met up with al-Afghani in Paris, where they launched a reformist journal that called for an Islamic response to Western imperialism. Abduh built on Afghani’s principles to pronounce a more rigorous course of action upon his return to Egypt later in the 1880s. Abduh’s call for a more progressive Islam, paradoxically, took the first community of Muslims—the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, known in Arabic as the salaf, or forefathers—as a role model. Abduh was thus one of the founders of a new line of reformist thought that came to be called Salafism, a term now associated with Osama bin Ladin and the most radical wing of Muslim anti-Western activism. It was not so in Abduh’s time. By invoking the forefathers of Islam, Abduh was hearkening back to a golden age when Muslims observed their religion “correctly” and, as a consequence, emerged as the dominant world power. This period of Muslim dominance throughout the Mediterranean and extending deep into South Asia, lasted for the first four centuries of Islam. Thereafter, he argued, Islamic thought ossified. Mysticism crept in, rationalism waned, and the community fell into a blind observance of the law. Only by stripping Islam of these accretions could the umma return to the pure and rational practices of the forefathers and recover the dynamism that once made Islam the dominant world civilization. As a student at al-Azhar, Ahmad Amin had to overcome his diffidence to attend classes given by the great Muhammad Abduh. His recollections of Abduh’s teaching give a vivid sense of the Islamic reformers impact on his students. “I attended two lessons, heard his beautiful voice, saw his venerable appearance, and understood from him what I had not understood from my Azharite shaykhs.” Muhammad Abduh’s reformist agenda was never far from his teaching. “From time to time,” Amin recalled, Abduh “digressed to discuss the conditions of Muslims, their crookedness, and the way to cure them.”³⁴ Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh made Islam an integral part of national identity as Egypt moved into the age of nationalism. In their concern for the state of Muslim society, Abduh and his followers began to debate social reforms along with the national struggle.

In their debates on “the conditions of Muslims,” Muhammad Abduh’s followers began to argue for changes in the position of women in Muslim society. Since their first encounter with Europeans at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Egyptian intellectuals had been confronted by a very different model of gender relations—and disapproved of what they saw. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti was appalled by the impact Napoleon’s men had on Egyptian women. “French local administrators, together with their Muslim wives dressed like French women, would walk in the streets, take interest in public affairs and current regulations,” he noted disapprovingly. “Women commanded and forbade.”³⁵ This was nothing short of an inversion of the natural order, as al-Jabarti understood it, of a world in which men commanded and forbade. Al-Tahtawi, observing relations between the sexes in Paris thirty years later, also complained about this inversion of the “natural order.” “The men are slaves to the women here and under their command,” he wrote, “irrespective of whether they are pretty or not.”³⁶ Al-Jabarti and al-Tahtawi came from a society where respectable women were confined to separate quarters at home and glided anonymously through public places under layers of clothes and veils. This was still the case in the Cairo of Ahmad Amin’s childhood. Amin described his mother and sisters as “veiled, never seeing people or being seen by them except from behind veils.”³⁷ In the 1890s Egyptian reformers were beginning to articulate a different role for women, none more forcefully than the lawyer Qasim Amin (1863–1908), who argued that the foundation of the national struggle for independence had to begin with improving the position of women in society. Qasim Amin (no relation to Ahmad Amin) was born into privilege. His Turkish father had served as an Ottoman governor and attained the rank of pasha before moving to Egypt. Qasim was sent to the best private schools in Egypt and went on to study law in Cairo and Montpelier. He returned to Egypt in 1885 and was soon caught up in the reformist circles around Muhammad Abduh. While his colleagues debated the role of Islam and of the British occupation in Egypt’s national revival, Qasim Amin focused on the status of women. In 1899 he wrote his pioneering work, The Liberation of Women. Writing as a Muslim reformer to a Muslim audience, Qasim Amin connected his arguments to a secular nationalist agenda of liberation from imperialism. Denied access to education, let alone to the workplace, only 1 percent of women could read and write in Egypt in 1900.³⁸ As Qasim Amin argued then, and as the authors of the Arab Human Development Report still argue today, the failure to empower women disempowers the Arab world as a whole. In Qasim Amin’s words, “Women comprise at least half the total population of the world. Perpetuating their ignorance denies a country the benefits of the abilities of half its population, with obvious negative consequences.”³⁹ His critique, written in classical Arabic, was biting:Throughout the generations our women have continued to be subordinate to the rule of the strong and are overcome by the powerful tyranny of men. On the other hand, men have not wished to consider women other than as beings fit only to serve men and be led by men’s will! Men have slammed shut the doors of opportunity in women’s faces, thus hindering them from earning a living. As a consequence, the only recourse left to a woman was to be a wife or a whore.⁴⁰