Summary
125 Rida accused secularists of immorality and treason;126 al-Qaradawi portrays them as an elite rejected by the people and wonders who is behind them.127 For Rida, Christian Ethiopia's independence proved that the western colonial powers targeted Muslim lands;128 for al-Qaradawi, western support for Ethiopia against Eritrea was one of the examples that proved the fallacy of claims that the west is interest-driven, not anti-Islam.129 Despite his criticisms of Mu'awiya, Rida idealized the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates;130 al-Qaradawi consecrated his book Our Calumniated History to defend them against their detractors.131 Both attributed the end of the caliphate to a Jewish conspiracy,132 and contrasted the tolerance of the Qur'an with the bloodthirstiness of the Torah,133 and so on. Rida's change of direction was reinforced by the traumatic experience of colonialism and post-colonialism, the military defeats that led to the loss of Palestine and the invasion of other Arab territories, repression in the hands of autocratic regimes that claimed to stand for "foreign" ideologies like socialism or liberalism, a hasty and unequal modernization that has not fulfilled its promises but has led to disenchantment and alienation.
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Extract
Rashid Rida's Legacy
Shaykh Rashid Rida was born in a small village near Tripoli, in present-day Lebanon, in 1865. His family, who claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad, was reputed for its piety and religious learning, and his father officiated as imam.1 He received a traditional education, first in the local kuttab, then in Tripoli under Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr, a scholar of some renown. He soon felt the urge to put his knowledge and energies at the service of his community and started preaching at the local mosque. Rida also went to the coffeehouses where the men gathered to talk about religion and organized lessons for the women at the family home. However, the accidental discovery of several copies of al-'Urwa al-umthqà among his father's papers was to change the course of Rida's life. The periodical, edited from Paris by Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani2 and his collaborator Muhammad 'Abduh between March and October 1884, circulated widely throughout the Muslim world and in spite of its short life, was hugely influential. Rida avidly read his father's issues, then looked for the others (it turned out that Shaykh al-Jisr had them all) and copied them down. He felt that new horizons had opened before him, and wrote to al-Afghani, who at the time resided in Istanbul as a virtual prisoner of Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid, asking to become his disciple. But the Sayyid died in 1897, possibly poisoned, and the young man never had a chance to meet him.
Rida had more luck with Imam Muhammad Abduh. He met him when the older man, temporarily exiled in Beirut due to his involvement in the "Urabi revolt, visited Tripoli in the mid-1880s. He went back in 1894 and Rida was able to establish a relationship with him. After obtaining his diploma of ulema in 1897, Rida decided to join 'Abduh in Cairo. He suggested to 'Abduh the publication of a periodical fashioned after al-'Urwa al-wuthqà to spread his reformist ideas; a few weeks later, the first issue of al-Manar saw the light. Rida continued editing it - initially weekly, later monthly - until his death in 1935, and became known as sahib al-Manar (al-Manar's proprietor). The Shaykh wrote most of its contents, which included pieces on religious and social issues, attacks on the traditional ulema and the westernized elite, analyses of the international situation,...See the full content of this document
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