Religion, the Secular, and Language

Chapter 5 examines the impact of processes of secularization on Bakhīt’s thought. Despite being strongly opposed to the encroaching influence of secularist arguments such as that of ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq, this chapter seeks to outline how Bakhīt comes to reformulate the category of religion in a peculiarly modern way indicative of a certain type of secularity. This question emerges from the problematic with which I opened in the introduction: namely, the fiqhī validity of “religious reports” transmitted by new telegraphic technology. Whereas the prevailing Ḥanafī tradition was interested in regulating, constraining, and guiding human sociality through the maintenance of procedural parameters within which knowledge reports became “actionable” because they were circulated through the proper judicial authorities, Bakhīt is interested in emphasizing “religious matters” as intellectual entities, independent of the materiality of judicial institutions and new technologies. This stands in contrast to the integrated worldview which informed premodern shariʿa in which sociality and proceduralism were constitutive features of what it meant to do law.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the central themes, arguments, and problematics of the book. It introduces both Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī, the figure at the center of our investigation, as well as the Irshād Ahl al-Milla ilā Ithbāt al-Ahilla, the treatise on which much of the book’s analysis focuses. A relatively unheralded text ostensibly written by Bakhīt as a response to questions forwarded to him on the ritual fasting of Ramadan in an age of increased communication, the Irshād serves as a signal example of a modern text written by a seemingly traditional scholar in conventional language that nonetheless adopts key premises of modernity. This text, I argue, raises qualms about the use of the category of “tradition” to explain the Islamic law of this period, which is instead conditioned by a colonial modernity and responsive to the demands of Egyptian modernists.

Colonialism, Translation, and Seduction

Chapter 3 considers what precisely it means to say that Bakhīt is a colonial figure. Given that this book places his ideas within the context of a modernity conditioned by the specter of colonialism, this chapter uncovers how colonialism figures in his writings. Examining his contributions to a new genre of literature that attempted to harmonize Islam and modern science, I argue that Bakhīt fits squarely within a colonial discourse premised on what Homi Bhabha has called mimicry. For Bhabha, mimicry does not mean a complete capitulation, but rather is indicative of an ambivalence and partiality characteristic of the native subject whose difference from the European always looms over the encounter. Bakhīt’s writings, then, constitute a partial discourse in which he at once reaffirms the modern scientism of the colonizing power and asserts an independent Arab-Islamic civilization with an illustrious past that is available for reactivation.

Partisanship, Territorialism, and Transregional Networks of Belonging

Chapter 1 sketches the historical and transregional context of the project, examining two acrimonious episodes local to twentieth-century Egypt to lay bare the ever-present background contexts of Muslim history and the greater Muslim world. Paying close attention to the social and political developments that dominated Egyptian intellectual life at the turn of the century, I examine two exchanges between Bakhīt and Rashīd Riḍā to lay out the terrain of partisanship and territorialism that so heavily structured Cairo’s intellectual scene in the early twentieth century. As a result of what Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen has termed the “Salafi Press,” the previous monopoly on Islamic interpretation held by the Azharī ulama began to loosen, and the latter began to sense their authority being threatened. These resulted in bitter polemics but also, I argue, a substantial reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape simply by virtue of the indefatigable onslaught of the Modernists, especially Riḍā. This state of affairs motivated the ulama to draw on resources that exceeded their specific context both historically and geographically, resulting in a certain rearrangement of authority that relied on older structural features of the madhhab to create new networks of belonging and allegiance.

Conclusion

The Conclusion considers the Egyptian intellectual landscape from the perspective of the last Shaykh al-Islām of the Ottoman Empire, Muṣṭafā Ṣabrī. Upon his exile from Istanbul, Ṣabrī spent a short time living in Egypt, concluding that the country had become thoroughly Europeanized. Relying especially on the theological question of free will and predestination, Sabri argued that Egyptian writers’ inclination toward a free will position was an indicator of European dominance. European thinkers had indeed criticized Muslims for being too deterministic in their evaluation of the question; the remainder of the Conclusion examines Egyptian responses to these critiques. Among them was a lecture given by Muḥammad Bakhīt which stressed human agency in the world, an analysis of which once more lays bare Bakhīt’s domestic rivalry with Reformist figures, his reliance on the transregional “social madhhab” in crafting modern solutions, his mode of responding to the challenges posed by colonialism, and his subjection of Ḥanafī tradition to transformation.

Science, Perception, and Objectivity

Chapter 4 takes as a case study Bakhīt’s discussion of the validity of relying on astronomical calculations to determine the month of Ramadan to discuss his remarkable openness to the modern scientific enterprise. In particular, I examine his shift from a procedural approach to this question that stressed the importance of methods and norms that were internal to the fiqh tradition, to an epistemological approach that stressed the importance of knowledge as determined by science. The introduction of certain technologies to Egypt was accompanied by a new salience being given to science and particular notions of scientific truth. Here we examine the impact of the telescope in facilitating a view of knowledge, including fiqhī knowledge, as scientistic and representationalist, itself dependent upon a notion of reality best understood by what Timothy Mitchell has called the colonial conception of the “world-as-picture”—namely, the idea that the world is composed of the two distinct realms of representation and reality, the second of which can be achieved through specifically scientific precision.

Authority, Ijtihād, and Temporality

Chapter 2 traces changes in Ḥanafī conceptions of history by examining the manner in which authority is conceptualized within the school by both colonial-era writers and their predecessors. It locates self-representations of the school’s history as embedded within formal hierarchies of the relative standing (and authoritativeness) of Ḥanafī jurists. By examining Bakhīt’s ranking of Ḥanafī jurists, I reveal his refashioning of ijtihād within the school and its implications for a new conception of legal authority mirrored in Reformism’s insistence on an increasingly democratized and direct access to the primary texts of the Qurʾan and sunna, unmediated by the historical corpus of the fiqh tradition. I argue that this reworking of authority structures, in turn, relies on a new temporality, moving from one which sees ulama-subjects as inheritors of a tradition expressed through a continuous and organic history to one which displays a “historical consciousness,” privileging the Prophetic generation so as to be able to downgrade the “accretions” of the medieval interlude.