Islamic Modernism

Tahtawi and Khayr al-Din

Reformers like Tahtawi and Khayr al-Din framed their political and social projects as necessary to answering emergent Western colonial authority and economic dominance. For Tahtawi and Khayr al-Din, Western political authority, which threatened the Islamic umma—a religious concept denoting the universal, global, community of Muslims—presented an opportunity for reconciling Islamic law, the Shari'a, with the exercise of human reason. Tahtawi offered the concept of human welfare as a fundamental concern of both a successful political state and the Islamic tradition and therefore felt that it offered a useful means of reconciling an individual's identity as a Muslim with that of a citizen possessing rights within the legal frameworks of the state. For Khayr al-Din, the umma, not the state, was the central element of political authority, and the upholding of the Shari'a was essential to preserving an Islamic society. Unlike Tahtawi, Khayr al-Din demanded a reform of legal institutions to maintain a just society predicated on Islamic law.

By the midpoint of the 19th century, Muslim intellectuals proposed various responses to address the emergent and overwhelming European political and economic interference. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 demonstrated the necessity of an urgent response to increasing European technological and military superiority. Though this superiority was predicated on controversial economic measures, intellectuals of Islamic modernism turned their critiques toward perceived internal causes to explain the failure of their societies to answer European challenges. Turning to the history of Islamic thought, the intellectuals divided contemporary Islamic societies into those confined to the blind and irrational imitation of past precedent—taqlid—and those liberated by the exercise of ijtihād—a term derived from the same Arabic root as jihad, signifying the usage of independent human reason in legal affairs. Ijtihād was used both as a challenge to traditional political authorities and as a basis for new reforming educational institutions. Traditional authorities were displaced by a generation of intellectuals who gained the ability to converse with traditional sources of thought—the Qur'an, the Hadith, and political tradition—without the need of those authorities who had for so long delineated their interpretation and usage.

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