Voices of renewal: al-Afghani, Abduh and Iqbal (late 19th to early 20th century)

Part oneJamal al-Din al-Afghani

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was a teacher, writer and agitator who seemed to be everywhere in the Muslim world of the late nineteenth century. His early life is unclear, and many historians think he was born in Iran despite his name. He lived and taught in India, Afghanistan, Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, London and Tehran.

His message had two parts. First, the Muslims must unite against European domination. He saw British rule in India and Egypt as plunder, and he distrusted Muslim rulers who sold concessions to Europeans. Second, the Muslims must take up science and reason again. He mocked scholars who divided knowledge into "Muslim science" and "European science", and said that science belongs to no nation. Muslims, he complained, studied Aristotle as one of their own but called Galileo and Newton unbelievers.

In Paris in 1884 he and his student Muhammad Abduh published a journal, al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, "The Firmest Bond", calling on Muslims everywhere to unite. It ran for only a few months but was read from Morocco to India. Al-Afghani died in Istanbul in 1897.

Part twoMuhammad Abduh and his heirs

Muhammad Abduh was born in the Nile Delta in 1849 and studied at al-Azhar, where he met al-Afghani. He supported the Urabi revolt against foreign control of Egypt in 1882, and when the British occupied the country he was sent into exile. He later returned, became a judge, and in 1899 was appointed Grand Mufti of Egypt.

Abduh believed that Islam, rightly understood, was a religion of reason, and that the decline of the Muslims came from blind imitation, taqlid, and from ignorance, not from the faith itself. In his book The Theology of Unity he argued that Islam forbids people to be slavishly credulous. He worked to reform the teaching at al-Azhar, the Sharia courts and the Arabic language, and he supported schools for girls. He died in 1905.

His student Rashid Rida carried his ideas forward in the journal al-Manar, published in Cairo for almost forty years. In Algeria, the scholar Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, influenced by the same movement, founded the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama in 1931. He set up schools to teach Arabic and Islam under French rule and gave Algerians a motto that is still remembered: "Islam is our religion, Arabic is our language, Algeria is our homeland."

Part threeMuhammad Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal was born in Sialkot, in the Punjab, in 1877. He studied philosophy at Cambridge and in Germany and became a lawyer, but he is remembered above all as a poet, in Urdu and Persian. His poems called Muslims to wake up, to recover their self-respect and to act. He wrote of khudi, the self, which grows strong through faith and effort and weak through imitation and despair.

In his lectures, published as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he argued that Islam has a principle of movement within it, ijtihad, and that Muslims must use it to meet a changing world. In 1930, addressing the Muslim League at Allahabad, he proposed that the Muslim-majority provinces of north-west India should form a state of their own within or outside the British Empire. He died in 1938, nine years before Pakistan was founded, and he is honoured there as its national poet.

These thinkers did not agree on everything, and later Muslims have argued over each of them. But together they gave the Muslim world a language for renewal: return to the Quran and the Sunnah, use reason, seek knowledge from every source, unite, and refuse to accept humiliation.

From the Quran

لَهُۥ مُعَقِّبَـٰتٌ مِّنۢ بَيْنِ يَدَيْهِ وَمِنْ خَلْفِهِۦ يَحْفَظُونَهُۥ مِنْ أَمْرِ ٱللَّهِ ۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يُغَيِّرُ مَا بِقَوْمٍ حَتَّىٰ يُغَيِّرُوا۟ مَا بِأَنفُسِهِمْ ۗ وَإِذَآ أَرَادَ ٱللَّهُ بِقَوْمٍ سُوٓءًا فَلَا مَرَدَّ لَهُۥ ۚ وَمَا لَهُم مِّن دُونِهِۦ مِن وَالٍ ۝١١

For each one there are successive angels before and behind, protecting them by Allah’s command. Indeed, Allah would never change a people’s state ˹of favour˺ until they change their own state ˹of faith˺. And if it is Allah’s Will to torment a people, it can never be averted, nor can they find a protector other than Him.

"Science belongs to no nation," al-Afghani told his students.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Cairo
• Istanbul
• Paris
• Tehran
• Constantine
• Sialkot
• Lahore
• Allahabad

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

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