A student and disciple of Abduh was a Syrian by the name of Rashid Rida who lived from 1865 to 1935. Rida, though born in Syria like many in his time, was active in Egypt. Egypt under the British occupation was a place where intellectual freedom was far more guaranteed than under the Ottomans in the Ottoman empire. Rida was a devoted disciple of Abduh. But, Rida went in a much more Islamic fundamentalist direction. In his later years, Rida was deeply disturbed by what began to look like the overwhelming westernization and secularization of Muslim society. Rida established a movement called the Salafiyya Movement. Salafiyya, named after the prophet, and his close circle in the early years of Islam, known as the Salaf. And therefore the Salafiyya movement, that movement devoted to returning to the Islamic original format of the prophet's period, became known as Salafiyya. Rashid Rida tended to glorify Arab Islam in it's early years. And the emphasis here is on Arab Islam. God's revelation as Rida pointed out was in Arabic. And it was the Arabs who were the vanguard of the Ummah of the Islamic nation of believers. And therefore the revitalization of Islam in the modern era depended on the return of Arab Muslim leadership of the Ummah. And it was the fault of the Turks. People like Rida argued that the Islamic Ummah had entered a period of decline. So this kind of thinking, this kind of emphasis on the Arabic nature of early Islam was an emphasis on the centrality of the Arabs. To this effort of strengthening the Muslim nation, the Ummah, in the present. This is not quite Arab nationalism yet. After all, Rida is speaking about the revival of Islam. It is the importance of the Arab role in this Islamic revival that he is speaking of. Therefore he doesn't speak of breaking away from the empire, or of undermining the Ottomans. Although after the young Turk revolution of 1908 and their growing criticism of religion, Rida's tendency toward Arab nationalism grew. But Rida always emphasized the restoration of the caliphate that would be governed by religious law. So it is at the end. It is still in Rida's mind. The revival of the Islamic community that he is speaking of and not out of nationalism per se. In this line of reformists, after Rida, perhaps the most important of them all is Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi. Kawakibi lived from 1849 to 1902. Like Rida, born in Syria. But he, too, like others, ended up in Cairo because of the relative safety of the British occupation. Kawakibi was more radical than Rida, on the centrality and, indeed, the superiority of the Arabs. The caliphate should return to the Arabs, he argued. The Ottomans are not capable of bringing back the old glory of the caliphate. He had some other rather vague ideas of a spiritual caliphate, something like the papacy. This Christian notion of separation of religion and state was something that Kawakibi also referred to. But his main contribution is in his emphasis on the centrality of the Arabs to any kind of Muslim reform. So in conclusion, we should emphasize the following. All these reformers contributed to the spread of the idea that politics is more about man's will than that of God. The centrality to the will of man, and therefore, ideas like self-determination and the sovereignty of man are those that are either directly or indirectly, promoted by these Islamic reformists. The British historian Ellie Kedourie wrote a book about Afghani and Abduh. And it was called an essay on religious unbelief and political activism in modern Islam. And Kedourie argued that Afghani and Abduh were not dedicated Islamic reformers at all, but were actually engaged in the subversive unbelief under a false, religious cover. After all, their ideas stood in complete contrast with traditional Islam. What they really were doing, however religious they may or may not have been, they were definitely breaking down the walls of Islamic self sufficiency in the realm of ideas. Intentionally or not, they set the stage for the secular and secularizing platform of nationalism. Nationalism, after all, is an idea that believes in the actions of man. Nationalism is based on the collective identity of people, by their language, by the territory they inhabit, and not their religious belief. The disciples of Afghani and Abduh went in very different directions. After all, if there was no contradiction between reason and religion, one could argue two very different things. On the one hand, if Islam was reason, why take the western road to modernity? Alternatively one could say, if Islam was reason, why not westernize completely? So you have ultra seculars on the one hand. And traditionalists on the other, who reasserted a self sufficient Islamic alternative to the West. Rashid Rida was one of those and he became a mentor of the Muslim brethren that was founded in Egypt in the late 1920s. The struggle between modernity and tradition is the connecting theme of this entire course. And the Arab as we will see later on is just the latest chapter in these intriguing saga of the modern Middle East.
