Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [182]
Nor has progress always had an easy passage even in Europe or the United States.17 Resistance to a godless and secular society existed in rural areas everywhere. Throughout the nineteenth century many conservative Europeans, completely unreconciled to the alien ideals of progress, abhorred every aspect of modernity.18 For the vast rural majority, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe, in France, Spain, and the mezzogiorno of Italy, these new political and social ideas had no meaning: the faithful usually believed what their priests told them.19 The resistance to change was not very different in the regions under Islamic rule.
But the challenge of new political and social ideas, new technologies, also produced a particularly ardent response among many Easterners, from rural as well as from educated urban backgrounds.20 This challenge from Western modernity stimulated an intellectual revival unparalleled for centuries. In the towns and cities of Mediterranean Islam, there was the same range of attitudes toward change and modernity as in the cities of western Europe. Some educated Muslims, local Christians, and Jews opted for a secular style of life, living with Western rather than traditional furnishings, reading books in French and English, debating and discussing ideas with all the verve of Parisians or Viennese.21 Others remained believers but engaged with the issues thrown up by contact with the West. Marshall Hodgson’s brief pen portrait of the Egyptian savant Mohammad Abduh could stand for a whole class of similar Muslim thinkers:
[He] liked to visit Europe to restore his faith in mankind. But he accepted nothing from the West unless it passed his own rigorous standards. When he rejected taqlid (adherence to established interpretation) and tradition, he rejected them not in favour of Westernisation ad libitum but of Muslim ijtijad (freedom to question and interpret ideas)… He was influenced by many modern European thinkers and by none more than Comte, whose positivism had exalted scientific objectivism … yet who called for a new religious system to meet a persisting human need, provided it could be consistent with science. But Abduh was convinced that it was Islam which could provide that religious system.22
The Islamic thinkers of the late nineteenth century were very much aware of Western modernity in its physical and political manifestations.23 Some, like Abduh, knew the European intellectual revolution from which it emerged; but their thinking developed in opposition to what they saw as the negative character of the West. This grew out of a long tradition. At Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest university in the world, scholars had debated the shape and structures of the faith since the late tenth century. This tradition of criticism and scholarship in Cairo outlasted its competitors in Damascus and Baghdad, and from the early nineteenth century the city became a pioneer in the printing and publication of secular, nationalist, and also religious material. In the years after World War I, as Egypt remained in thrall to Britain, much of the political debate in Cairo began to focus anew on the Holy Qur’an and the hadith for guidance. This had to be done carefully. Islam was opposed to the idea of innovation (bid’ah), which would undermine the concept of a perfect revelation of the ideal society.24 Change had to be presented, rhetorically, as “no change,” or better, as a reversion to an earlier and purer state of society. A new practice had to be embedded within an unchanging paradigm. Nevertheless there was a tradition of speculation, for unobtrusive reexamination and reinterpretation of questions that had been closed centuries