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“By virtue of your knowledge”: Scientific materialism and the fatwās of Rashīd Riḍā*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2012

Daniel A. Stolz
Daniel A. Stolz*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
*
dstolz@princeton.edu
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Abstract

This article examines several fatwās by the important Muslim reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā. It treats these fatwās as part of a broader Arabic debate on “materialism” at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In this context, Riḍā's fatwās on materialism illustrate the changing nature of Islamic religious authority in this period, as new kinds of knowledge became available to new kinds of readers.

Keywords

Rashīd RiḍāfatwāmaterialismscienceauthorityIslam
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 223 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 2012

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Muhammad Qasim Zaman, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, and the anonymous reviewers, for many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 “Wujūd allah wa-waḥdāniyyatuhu wa'l-qaḍā' wa'l-qadar”, Al-Manār 16, 1913, 741–2Google Scholar. For the second question's references to al-Muqtaṭaf, see “Bāb al-masā'il: taʿaddud al-āliha”, Al-Muqtaṭaf 42, 1913, 93Google Scholar; and “Bāb al-masā'il: al-istidlāl ʿalā waḥdat al-khāliq”, Al-Muqtaṭaf 42, 1913, 199–200Google Scholar. The Al-Manār questioner's summary is accurate, except that the two questions in Al-Muqtaṭaf appear to have come from two different readers, not the same one.

2 A Delta town north-east of Zagazig. In another istiftā', Aḥmad al-Alfī is said to hail from Ṭūkh al-Qarāmūṣ, between Fāqūs and Zagazig (see below, note 4). It is likely that he belonged to the family of Shaykh ʿAlī al-Alfī (b. 1227 ah), also from Ṭūkh al-Qarāmūṣ, who studied with some of the pre-eminent scholars of al-Azhar in the early nineteenth century. One of the shaykh's sons, Muḥammad al-Alfī, was an editor at the Būlāq Press. See ʿAlī Mubārak, al-Khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqiyya al-jadīda (Būlāq: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kubrā, 1305 ah), v. 13, 62. Aḥmad probably belonged to the next generation.

3 “Al-Dhikr bi'l-asmā' al-mufrada”, in al-Munajjid, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and Khūrī, Yūsuf (eds), Fatāwā al-Imām Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1970), 964 (fatwā 358, originally published in 1911)Google Scholar.

4 The classic monograph on Al-Muqtaṭaf is Nadia Farag, “Al-Muqtaṭaf 1876–1900: A study of the influence of Victorian thought on modern Arabic thought” (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1969). A more recent discussion, emphasizing the journal's political and trans-confessional context, appears in Marwa S. Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy in the Arab East” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2003).

5 The last article attributed to him appeared in volume 83, 1933, 237. For all but one of the mustaftīs whom I discuss below, I have been able to find additional material published in their name. I cite such material when introducing a mustaftī in part to shed more light on the person's life and interests, but also to dispense with the problem of the “fictitious fatwā”. On the problem of authenticating historical fatwā questions, see the introduction to Masud, Khalid, Messick, Brinkley and Powers, David S. (eds), Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

6 A good deal has been written on Rashīd Riḍā and his journal. Adams, C.C., Islam and Modernism in Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1933)Google Scholar was among the first studies to treat Riḍā as the prime heir to Muḥammad ʿAbduh's legacy. Most scholarship has focused on Riḍā's political and legal thought, on which the classic study remains Kerr, Malcolm, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad ʿAbduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley: UC Press, 1966)Google Scholar. Cf. Dallal, Ahmad, “Appropriating the past: twentieth-century reconstruction of pre-modern Islamic thought”, Islamic Law and Society 7/1, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an important critique of Kerr's approach. More pertinent to my study, however, is Mahmoud Haddad's argument that Kerr's philosophical critique of Riḍā misses the pragmatism of Riḍā's politics, which had to respond to the evolving circumstances of a thirty-year period; Haddad, Mahmoud, “Arab religious nationalism in the colonial era: rereading Rashīd Riḍā's ideas on the caliphate”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 117/2, 1997, 253–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a sense, I follow Haddad's lead by reading each fatwā as a response to a specific question within a particular debate, not necessarily the component of a consistent, overarching philosophy.

7 Relatively little Anglophone scholarship has focused on Riḍā's engagement with the modern sciences. Two recent Arabic studies do so. ʿAbidīn, Sāmī, Aṣl al-insān ʿinda al-Afghānī wa-Muḥammad ʿAbduh wa-Rashīd Riḍā (Beirut: Dār al-ḥarf al-ʿarabī, 2005)Google Scholar, includes a brief discussion of Riḍā's views on Darwinism and the origin of man. Mutawallī's, Tāmir Muḥammad MaḥmūdManhaj al-Shaykh Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā fī al-ʿaqīda (Jadda: Dār Majīd ʿAsiray, 2004), is an encyclopaedic but hagiographic studyGoogle Scholar.

8 See Gregory, Frederick, Scientific Materialism in 19th Century Germany (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a helpful introduction to the origins of this group and its thought.

9 Gregory, Scientific Materialism, 120. Darwinism and scientific materialism should not be confused. Büchner, for example, did much of his work before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Nevertheless, in the intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, the ideas became intertwined. Materialists argued that natural selection and descent by modification confirmed the ultimately material causality behind nature.

10 Gregory, Scientific Materialism, 208. He was not, in fact, a socialist, as Shumayyil would become.

11 The most accessible overview of Shumayyil appears in Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1789–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 245 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, the most comprehensive account of Shumayyil's life and thought is Haroun, Georges, Šiblī Šumayyil: une pensée évolutionniste arabe à l'époque d'an-nahḍa (Beirut: l'Université libanaise, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Susan Ziadeh, “A radical in his time: the thought of Shibli Shumayyil and Arab intellectual discourse (1882–1917)”, (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1991). The latter study fills certain lacunae in Haroun's account (for example, Shumayyil's family was Roman Catholic, rather than Greek Catholic).

12 Haroun, Šiblī Šumayyil, 52.

13 Shumayyil was among a number of Syrian intellectuals who moved to Egypt during the 1880s, when the economic and political climate afforded by the British occupation (which began in 1882) compared favourably with the opportunities under Ottoman administration in Syria (Hourani, Arabic Thought, 246).

14 Most notable are Shumayyil's lifelong colleagues Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf and Fāris Nimr, publishers of al-Muqtaṭaf. On Darwinism at the Syrian Protestant College, see Elshakry, Marwa, “The Gospel of Science and American evangelism in late Ottoman Beirut”, Past and Present no. 196, 2007, 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Haroun, Šiblī Šumayyil, 53. This account is credible enough, in that no other member of Shumayyil's generation from the Syrian Protestant College became such a radical materialist.

16 Haroun has shown that the text is based on Auguste Jacquot's French edition of Büchner's Die Darwinische Theorie von der Entstehung und Umwandlung der Lebenswelt, but that it is more summary and interpretation than direct translation. Haroun, Šiblī Šumayyil, 91.

17 For a detailed review of Shumayyil's thought, see Haroun, Šiblī Šumayyil, 125. For a specific discussion of the link between Darwinism and socialism in Shumayyil, see also Ziadeh, A Radical, 226.

18 Scholarship on the Arab reading of Darwinism is growing. See: Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, Meier, Olivier, Al-Muqtaṭaf et le débat sur le Darwinisme: Beyrouth, 1876–1885 (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1996)Google Scholar; and Ziadat, Adel A., Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism, 1860–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 A comparison could be made with the development of materialist thought at the Turkish-speaking centres of the late Ottoman Empire. Figures such as Büchner were important to a certain radical circle, and scientific materialism made its way into the ideology of the CUP. See M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Blueprint for a future society: late Ottoman materialists on science, religion, and art”, in Özdalga, Elisabeth (ed.), Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar. However, while men such as Shumayyil, Riḍā and al-Afghānī were certainly aware of the Turkish debates, their Arabic writings made little direct reference to them. Since I am primarily concerned with Riḍā in this article, I do not give the work of men such as Abdullah Cevdet the treatment it would be due in a broader discussion. One could also argue that the Turkish scene, in so far as it included a significant set of people explicitly committed to materialism, differed categorically from a milieu wherein the idea was discussed predominantly through critique.

20 For my discussion of al-Afghānī and al-Jisr on materialism, I am particularly indebted to Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 168 ff.

21 Al-Afghānī's role as a religious reformer has been the subject of revision. Most radically, Elie Kedourie argued that al-Afghānī (and to a lesser degree ʿAbduh) was a religious sceptic who used religiosity as a cover for political ambition. Kedourie, Elie, Afghani and ʿAbduh: an Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London: Frank Cass, 1966)Google Scholar. Kedourie's approach, including his sharp demarcation between “politics” and “religion” proper, has been subject to powerful critique, e.g. Asad, Talal, “Politics and religion in Islamic reform: a review of Kedourie's Afghani and ʿAbduh”, Review of Middle East Studies 2, 1976Google Scholar. In my view, the best approach is to understand the importance of political context to al-Afghānī's undeniably evolving views, but without concluding that these views were necessarily irreligious or hypocritical. See Keddie, Nikki, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley: UC Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

22 Al-Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, , Al-Radd ʿalā al-dahriyyin, trans. ʿAbduh, Muḥammad (Miṣr: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Maḥmūdiyya al-Tijāriyya, 1935)Google Scholar.

23 Keddie argues persuasively that the Refutation represents the beginning of al-Afghānī's attempt to position himself as a “defender of orthodoxy” during this period. Keddie, Nikkie R., An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn “al-Afghānī” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 53Google Scholar.

24 Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 169. As Elshakry notes, al-Afghānī's “manservant” Abu Turāb assisted with the translation. This collaboration is noted in early editions of the Refutation but has often been forgotten. We have no indictation that ʿAbduh ever learned Persian, however, so Abu Turāb probably played an important role in the project.

25 Al-Afghānī, al-Radd, 21.

26 Riḍā, we will see, used māddī to describe the idea – arguably a sign of his greater familiarity with the modern idiom, or perhaps just his greater desire to display such familiarity. That said, the term may have simply become more established by Riḍā's day.

27 Davidson, Herbert, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2Google Scholar. Such, at least, was the Neoplatonic form in which Aristotle's idea (which originally concerned motion and the necessity of an “unmoved mover”, rather than existence and the necessity of a creator) entered Islamic philosophy. See McGinnis, Jon and Reisman, David C. (eds), Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), xxiiGoogle Scholar.

28 Leaman, Oliver, A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 7Google Scholar.

29 Kogan, Barry, “Eternity and origination: Averroes' discourse on the manner of the world's existence”, in Marmura, Michael (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1984), 206Google Scholar. See also Leaman, Introduction, 7.

30 Given the seemingly ex nihilo cosmogony of the Quran itself, this development might appear too obvious for explanation. In fact, Quranic cosmogony has historically been open to interpretation, and was only one element of the complex relationship between falsafa and kalām. McGinnis and Reisman, Arabic Philosophy, xxviii.

31 For a full discussion of modern Arab reinterpretation of falsafa and the problem of causality, see Kügelgen, Anke von, Averroes und die arabische Moderne: Ansätze zu einer Neubegründung des Rationalismus im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 360 ffGoogle Scholar. Also relevant is von Kügelgen's analysis of the famous debate between Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Faraḥ Anṭūn on Islam, science, and philosophy, although the book does not discuss Rashīd Riḍā in any detail.

32 Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, 3.

33 Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, 1.

34 Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 175–6.

35 A good biography, placing al-Jisr in the context of late Ottoman Tripoli, is Ebert, Johannes, Religion und Reform in der arabischen Provinz: Ḥusayn al-Ǧisr aṭ-Ṭarâbulusῖ (1845–1909) – Ein islamischer Gelehrter zwischen Tradition und Reform (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991)Google Scholar.

36 Among the disagreements between al-Jisr and his former pupil was a debate over Riḍā's critique of his contemporary ʿulamā'. Al-Jisr felt that Riḍā's criticisms were unduly harsh, while Riḍā thought that al-Jisr was too quick to excuse his colleagues from their duty to guide the community. Ebert, Religion und Reform, 158–9.

37 Al-Jisr, al-Risāla, 131. See Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 213. The watchmaker analogy has classical roots, perhaps, but eighteenth-century European origins in its modern usage; see LeMahieu, D.L., The Mind of William Paley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 60Google Scholar.

38 Ebert, Religion und Reform, 141.

39 Ebert, Religion und Reform, 139.

40 Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 227.

41 Elshakry, “Darwin's legacy”, 203.

42 Farag, al-Muqtaṭaf, 268.

43 Dagmar Glass has thoroughly investigated the relationship between al-Muqtaṭaf and its readership, with particular attention to the question and answer section. See Glass, Dagmar, Der Muqtaṭaf und seine Öffentlichkeit (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 260Google Scholar. Glass also chronicles al-Muqtaṭaf's history of debating religion and science specifically. Of special interest is the author's argument that these debates helped to shape a culture of “logical–rational reasoning and respect for the differing opinion of the opponent”. Glass, Der Muqtaṭaf, 404. This argument, like the book as a whole, persuasively treats the periodical not as a single mouthpiece, but as a venue in which a diverse community of voices shaped the ideas of the day. The materialism exchanges I analyse here are but one example of this.

44 “Al-Masā'il: al-māddiyya wa-wujūd allah”, al-Muqtaṭaf, 1909, 812Google Scholar.

45 “Al-Masā'il: al-māddiyyūn wa munājāt al-arwāḥ”, al-Muqtaṭaf, 41, 1912, 200Google Scholar.

46 “Al-Masā'il: al-farq bayn al-māddiyyīn waʾl-lā-adriyyīn”, al-Muqtaṭaf 41, 1912, 606–07Google Scholar.

47 On Muslim authorship in al-Muqtaṭaf in this period, see Glass, Der Muqtaṭaf, 342.

48 See “Qidam al-mādda”, al-Mawsūʿāt, 1901, 228–9Google Scholar; and, “Baqā' al-mādda”, al-Mawsūʿāt, 1901, 265–9.

49 “Qidam al-mādda”, 266.

50 “Ilā al-Mawsūʿāt”, al-Mawsūʿāt, 1901, 425–6Google Scholar.

51 Leaman, Introduction, 7.

52 Al-Mawsūʿāt, 1901, 426–7.

53 Or did not appear, as was the case with one submission that failed to observe “the principles of debate and the opposition of evidence with evidence, the falsification of proof with proof”. The author and “activists of his kind” (amthālihi al-nāshiṭīn) were requested kindly to submit less impassioned, more beneficial criticisms. “Su'āl ilā ṣāḥib maqālat al-mawjūd”, al-Mawsūʿāt, 1901, 451–3.

54 Among the intriguing episodes that Ryad highlights from Riḍā's diary is an encounter between Riḍā and Ṣarrūf shortly after the former's arrival in Egypt: “Riḍā made it clear that his intended journal was … an attempt to remove the idea in the minds of the majority of Muslims that philosophy contradicts religion”. Ryad, Umar, Islamic Reformism and Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Ryad's main concern here is to explore the relationship between Riḍā and his Christian contemporaries, not to untangle Riḍā's understanding of philosophy or science.

55 Al-Ḥusaynī is the only mustaftī for whom I have been unable to find evidence outside of his istiftā' in al-Manār. We must imagine Riḍā to have been quite audacious, however, to worry that he would not only fabricate a question, but then attribute it to a specific person supposedly at a specific school that had an entering class that year of only 88 students. On the size of the Law School, see Donald Reid, “Educational and career choices of Egyptian students, 1882–1922”, IJMES 8/3, 1977, 360.

56 For the text of the istiftā' and fatwā, see “Al-Baʿth al-juthmānī”, in al-Munajjid and Khūrī, Fatāwā, 86–9 (fatwā 34).

57 Riḍā cited Sūrat Ibrāhīm 14.48, Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa 56.4–7, and Sūrat al-Infiṭār 82.1. Each evokes a time of cosmic upheaval, which Riḍā understood to solve the scientific problem presented in this istiftā'.

58 “Fanā' al-ajsād waʾl-ḥashr: ishkāl”, in al-Munajjid and Khūrī, Fatāwā, 174–5 (fatwā 70, originally published in 1904). The author requested two other, unrelated, fatāwā from al-Manār. See “Al-Talfīq waʾl-taqlīd”, in al-Munajjid and Khūrī, Fatāwā, 67–70 (fatwā 27, originally published in 1903), and “Ṣundūq al-tawfīr fī idārat al-barīd wa-bayān ḥikmat taḥrīm al-ribā”, in al-Munajjid and Khūrī, Fatāwā, 84–6 (fatwā 33, originally published in 1904). While the later istiftā'āt are methodological and practical questions in Islamic jurisprudence, Muṣṭafā Rushdī's interest in science surfaces in other published writings. See Muṣṭafā Rushdī, “ʿIlāj li-ḍuʿf al-maʿida”, al-Hilāl 15 September 1900, 725–6; and “Bāb al-masā'il: al-wilāda min ghayr tazawwuj”, al-Muqtaṭaf 30, 1905, 487Google Scholar. (The latter concerns the potential for asexual reproduction in humans.)

59 Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen has explored this idea further, arguing that al-Manār's pioneering role in printing fatwās was part of a modern reinvention of the genre (Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State. Leiden: Brill, 1997, 68).

60 The same year, an Abu Hāshim Qurayṭ asked al-Muqtaṭaf whether Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Gustave Le Bon's La Civilisation des Arabes had been translated into Arabic. (They had not.) “Aṣl al-anwāʿ wa-madaniyyat al-ʿarab”, al-Muqtaṭaf 40, 1912, 95Google Scholar.

61 “Wazn al-rūḥ”, in al-Munajjid and Khūrī, Fatāwā, 1147 (fatwā #442, originally published in 1912).

62 Established in 1873, this Dār al-ʿUlūm was an effort to incorporate a teacher's college into al-Azhar. See Reid, “Educational and career choices”, 353.

63 Ibrāhīm Effendi ʿAlī, Asrār al-sharīʿa al-islāmiyya ([Egypt:] Maṭbaʿat al-Wāʿiẓ, 1328). The biographical information also appears in the front matter of the book.

64 ʿAlī, Asrār, 47 n. 1. The author contrasts this notion of a material, organ-like soul with the view of the muʿtazila, for example. The reference to MacDougall vividly illustrates the diversity of sources which made their way into these fatwās. According to the New York Times, Dr Duncan MacDougall, “a reputable physician of Haverhill”, carried out a series of experiments in which a patient's deathbed was rigged to work as half of a very large, delicately calibrated balance, on the other half of which was placed a weight equal to that of the bed with the living patient in it. “In every case after death the platform opposite the one in which lay the subject of the test fell suddenly, Dr. MacDougall says. The figures on the dial index indicated the diminishment in weight.” “Soul has weight, physician thinks”, New York Times, 11 March 1907, 5.

65 Al-Qāḍī Abu Bakr Muḥammad b. al-Ṭayyib “al-Bāqillānī” (d. 1013 ad), traditionally reckoned one of the key figures in the development of Ashʿarī kalām. McCarthy, R.J., “Al-Bāḳillānī (i.e. the greengrocer), the ḳāḍī Abu Bakr Muḥammad b. al-Ṭayyib b. Muḥammad b. Djaʿfar b. al-Ḳāsim”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Bearman, P. et al. (Leiden: Brill Online, 2009)Google Scholar.

66 Hourani, Arabic Thought, 149 and 230.

67 McCarthy, “al-Bāḳillānī”.

68 See al-Manār 1, 1898, 812.

69 Indira Falk Gesink, “Beyond modernisms” (PhD dissertation, Washington University, 2000), 168.

70 Kerr, Islamic Reform, 207.

71 The authorship of the tafsīr that Riḍā published in the pages of al-Manār (actually entitled Tafsīr al-Qur'ān al-Ḥakīm) is complex. Riḍā attributes much of the early material to Muḥammad ʿAbduh, whose lessons in tafsīr he attended at al-Azhar between 1899 and 1905. The section I analyse here, however, is late enough that it should simply be attributed to Riḍā. For Riḍā's own discussion of the relevant textual history, see Riḍā, Al-Sayyid al-Imām Muḥammad Rashīd, Tafsīr al-qur'ān al-ḥakīm al-mashhūr bi-tafsīr al-manār, ed. Shams al-Dīn, Ibrāhīm, v. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999), 19–20Google Scholar.

72 Riḍā, Tafsīr, v. 11, 199.

73 Riḍā, Tafsīr, v. 11, 200.

74 Riḍā, Tafsīr, v. 11, 200.

75 Riḍā, Tafsīr, v. 11, 201.

76 Literally, “scholar or rational person” (ʿālim aw ʿāqil), which idiomatically means something like “no one with a brain”. Given the context, however, I understand Riḍā to be invoking the specific categories of ʿilm and ʿaql (science and reason) at the same time.

77 Note that this appeal came in Riḍā's answer to the part of the question not related to al-Muqtaṭaf. Nor did Riḍā quote al-Muqtaṭaf only to a mustaftī known to read it. See, for example, the fatwā on “natural age”, in which Riḍā cited an article from al-Muqtaṭaf in order to defend the ḥadīth position that a person may live as long as 250 years. “Al-ʿUmr al-ṭabīʿī”, al-Manār 7, 1904, 266Google Scholar.

78 “Āyātuhu fī khalqihi”, al-Muqtaṭaf 37, 1910, 1135–7Google Scholar.

79 Ryad refers to this article as evidence of Riḍā's growing respect for al-Muqtaṭaf's editors (Ryad, Islamic Reformism, 85.)

80 The article originally appeared in response to a provocative letter from Salamah Musa, a young Egyptian who had become a disciple of Bernard Shaw while in London, and who was translating into Arabic Shaw's eclectic brand of moderate socialism and eugenics. See Egger, Vernon, A Fabian in Egypt (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986)Google Scholar. As I suggested earlier, the response to materialism could vary in relation to the political context in which it appeared.

81 One notes here the emergence of a certain kind of autonomy for the mustaftī, who receives not a definitive, self-contained ruling, but a general guide to some reading he should do.

82 McGinnis and Reisman, Arabic Philosophy, xxix.

83 Translation, Arberry, Arthur J., The Koran Interpreted (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955)Google Scholar. Riḍā must mean that the “they” who would go to ruin (la-fasadatā, in the dual form) are heaven and earth; hence the idea that the existence of more than one god would produce some kind of cosmic disharmony.

84 “Al-ʿAql al-bāṭin”, al-Muqtaṭaf 43, 1913, 153–6Google Scholar. Riḍā did not elucidate his purpose in citing this article, but he could have understood from it that the existence of a universal, animating intelligence was a hypothesis of contemporary science.

85 Paradigmatically, herein lies the difference between Kerr's critique and Haddad's re-reading of Riḍā's views on the caliphate. More recently, Dyalah Hamzah has argued strongly for understanding Riḍā as a journalist. Cited in Ryad, Umar, “A printed Muslim ‘lighthouse’ in Cairo: al-Manar's early years, religious aspiration and reception (1898–1903)”, Arabica 56, 2009, 27–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Cf. Masud, Muhammad Khalid, Messick, Brinkley and Powers, David S., “Muftis, fatwas, and Islamic legal interpretation”, in Masud, Khalid et al. (eds), Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 21Google Scholar.

87 Dallal, “Appropriating the past”, 355.

88 Dallal, “Appropriating the past”, 357.

89 Dallal, Ahmad, “Science and the Qur'ān”, in McAuliffe, Jane Dammen (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān (Washington, DC: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar. The parallelism of these two arguments is my characterization, not Dallal's, so far as I am aware.