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Modernity in the Thought of Muḥammad Bakhīt Al-Muṭīʿī

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Modernity in the Thought of Muḥammad Bakhīt Al-Muṭīʿī TRANSFORMATIONS OF TRADITION: MODERNITY IN THE THOUGHT OF MUḤAMMAD BAKHĪT AL-MUṬĪʿĪ Syed Junaid A. Quadri Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal May 2013 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Syed Junaid A. Quadri 2013 To my parents, for unending sacrifice ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv Résumé v Note on Conventions vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Authority, Ijtihād and Temporality 25 Chapter 2: Science, Representationalism and the Law 58 Chapter 3: “Religion”, “The Secular” and Language 139 Conclusion 190 Bibliography 196 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the life and work of Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī (d. 1935), a prominent Azharī ‘ālim, who is relatively unknown to Western scholarship except as an inflexibly conservative figure opposed to the Modernist reforms being proposed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Egypt. I engage in a close reading of one of his works, the Irshād Ahl al- Milla ilā Ithbāt al-Ahilla, to demonstrate, in opposition to the received characterization, the degree to which Bakhīt, as a representative leader of the ‘ulama, had imbibed epistemological commitments associated with central Modernist ideals. In particular, I show how Bakhīt’s conception of ijtihād and legal authority relies on a modern notion of history; how his commitment to the findings of science assumes a representationalist epistemology; and how his understanding of the concept of “religion” is indebted to a secularist logic. All of these, I argue, constitute departures from the prevailing tradition as embodied in the pre-modern Ḥanafī madhhab (juristic school). iv RÉSUMÉ Cette thèse examine la vie et l’œuvre de Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī (mort en 1935). ‘Ālim Azharite célèbre, ce penseur est relativement inconnu par les chercheurs occidentaux sauf en tant que personnage rigide et conservateur, farouchement opposé aux reformes modernistes qui ont vu le jour en Égypte vers la fin du dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècles. Dans ce travail, j’ai entrepris une lecture systématique de l’une de ses œuvres, l’Irshād Ahl al-Milla ilā Ithbāt al-Ahilla, afin de démontrer, à l’encontre de la caractérisation généralement admise, à quel point Bakhīt avait assimilé les présupposés épistémologiques associés aux idéaux centraux des modernistes. En particulier, j’ai pu montrer comment les conceptions qu’avait Bakhīt de l’ijtihād et de l’autorité juridique reposent sur une notion moderne de l’histoire; comment son adhésion aux découvertes scientifiques suppose une épistémologie représentationaliste; et comment sa conception de la notion de « religion » dépend d’une logique séculariste. Je défends donc l’idée que l’ensemble de ces positions constituent un éloignement notable par rapport à la tradition prédominante incarnée par le madhhab Hanafite prémoderne. v NOTE ON CONVENTIONS I use the system of transliteration outlined by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), with one exception: I have decided to retain diacritics on certain words of Arabic origin that have come to be commonly used in English (e.g., sharī‘a, qāḍī, ḥadīth, fatwa). All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been aided and abetted by so many people throughout the research and writing of this dissertation that I am unable to give them all their due in what follows. I consider myself fortunate to have studied at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill with some of the most supportive and encouraging faculty members one could ask for. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Setrag Manoukian, whose broad-mindedness and perspicacity are equalled only by his kindness and generosity. Wael Hallaq’s intellectual presence has been a constant in my thinking, and it is hard to imagine that this thesis could exist without his many comments, discussions, lectures and interventions. I thank also for their ongoing interest in, and support for, my work Rula Abisaab, Malek Abisaab, Sajida Alvi, Laila Parsons, Jamil Ragep, and Robert Wisnovsky. I am very grateful to Dyala Hamzah for serving as a careful and demanding external reader. A special note of thanks to Adina Sigartau for her administrative expertise, and to the staff of the Islamic Studies Library for all sorts of support. I would like to express my gratitude to the following organizations for financial support that made this research possible: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Research Center in Egypt, the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, McGill University’s Faculty of Arts and the Institute of Islamic Studies This is perhaps an appropriate venue to acknowledge the intellectual companionship that only true friends can provide. Thank you to Emann vii Allebban, Aun Hasan Ali, Alexandre Caeiro, Sarah Eltantawi, Ellen Etchingham, Bilal Ibrahim, Rizwan Mohammad, Nermeen Mouftah, Michael Nafi and Emmanuelle Stefanidis. In Cairo, I was fortunate to have the company, experience and assistance of Omar Cheta, Matt Ellis, Khaled Fahmy, Gregory Hoadley, Nathaniel Heisler, Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim, Aaron Jakes, Sara Nimis and Patrick Sharfe. In Amman, the fellows of ACOR, in particular the Andersons, made the place feel like home. Thank you to Jonathan Brown, Garrett Davidson, Daniel Stolz and Leonard Wood for being sharp interlocutors and pointing me to all sorts of new leads and materials. The staff at the following libraries and archives deserve my appreciation: the British National Archives and the British Library in the U.K.; the Süleymaniyye Library and İSAM in Istanbul; Maktabat al-Azhar, Dār al-Iftā’ al- Miṣriyya, Dār al-Kutub al-Qawmiyya, and Dār al-Wathā’iq al-Qawmiyya in Cairo. I would also like to thank Dr. Ibrahim Negm of the Dār al-Iftā’ al-Miṣriyya for his ongoing support and assistance. It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the immeasurable help provided by Dr. Ṣalaḥ Abū al-Ḥāj in navigating the problems of this thesis. Nermeen Mouftah likely endured more stress and worry watching me write my dissertation than she will feel writing her own. For her companionship, patience and good nature, I am ever grateful. Omair Quadri is always a phone call away when things need to get done. For my parents, words will never do. viii INTRODUCTION In the last chapter of his Formations of the Secular, the anthropologist Talal Asad offers his readers a particularly rich and nuanced discussion of sharīʿa reform in colonial Egypt.1 Redirecting our attention from the conventional tendency to either evaluate the Islamic authenticity of reformist arguments and personalities, or to determine relative agency among the various political actors involved in the process, Asad invites us to consider instead the “new moral landscape” being constituted by the totality of social forces then converging to produce the phenomenon we call reform. “The basic question,” for Asad, is not the determination of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” of whether the elites or the popular masses were the agents in the history of reform ... It is the determination of that new landscape, and the degree to which the languages, behaviors, and institutions it makes possible come to resemble those that obtain in the West European nation-states.2 For his part, Asad focuses on three key, and interrelated, developments he thinks to be fundamental to the reformulation of Islamic discursive tradition: a new salience given to the family unit, a strict demarcation between law and morality, and the production of new sorts of subjectivities which privilege the notion of an autonomous, self-governing conscience over that of an embodied 1 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003), 205–256. 2 Ibid., 216–17. 1 moral agent. These “social and cultural changes,” argues Asad, “created some of the basic preconditions for secular modernity.”3 In a similar fashion, this dissertation takes seriously the profound impact of the colonial experience, and the deep inroads made by “secular modernity” into Egyptian society and Islamic tradition as a result.4 It does so by tracing the extensive penetration of what scholars have tended to see as “modern” or “Modernist”5 intellectual commitments into the discursive tradition of the ʿulama, the class of Islamic jurist-scholars that has often been identified as traditional, conservative, and at times obscurantist. In centring my investigation on the ʿulama, my findings do not simply affirm Asad’s observations about the widespread influence of colonial modernity, but extend them to a domain of society that he and others have left relatively untouched. That is to say, detection of Modernist commitments in the writings of ʿulama 3 Ibid., 235. 4 An impressive work that shows in detail how the colonial presence in Egypt restructured not only the political and social order of the country, but also some foundational epistemological and metaphysical commitments of the Egyptian public, is Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, Mitchell identifies the colonial-modern device of “representation” as being at work in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. By “representation,” he explains elsewhere, is meant “the forms of social practice that set up in the social architecture of the world what seems an absolute distinction between image (or meaning, or structure) and reality, and thus a distinctive imagination of the real.” See Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity, Contradictions of Modernity v. 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17. The spread of this way of viewing one’s surroundings, Mitchell argues, gives rise to “a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.” Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, ix. 5 The secondary literature often calls the Reform movement “Modernist”. This is a vague term, and it is not often clear what parallels are to be drawn to other Modernist movements in other fields.
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