Religious Responses to Modernity

Yohanan Friedmann, Christoph Markschies

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110724066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

The dawn of the modern age posed challenges to all of the world's religions – and since then, religions have countered with challenges to modernity. In Religious Responses to Modernity, seven leading scholars from Germany and Israel explore specific instances of the face-off between religious thought and modernity, in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
As co-editor Christoph Markschies remarks in his Foreword, it may seem almost trivial to say that different religions, and the various currents within them, have reacted in very different ways to the "multiple modernities" described by S.N. Eisenstadt. However, things become more interesting when the comparative perspective leads us to discover surprising similarities. Disparate encounters are connected by their transnational or national perspectives, with the one side criticizing in the interest of rationality as a model of authorization, and the other presenting revelation as a critique of a depraved form of rationality. The thoughtful essays presented herein, by Simon Gerber, Johannes Zachhuber, Jonathan Garb, Rivka Feldhay, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Israel Gershoni and Christoph Schmidt, provide a counterweight to the popularity of some all-too-simplified models of modernization.

Depoliticization and Denationalization of Religion: Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid and the Relocation of Islam in Modern Life

Israel Gershoni

It is a most striking feature of Kant’s philosophy that although he is deeply-versed in mathematical physics, and strides forward in the central tradition of science-and-mathematics-based philosophy exemplified by Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume, and sticks strictly to its rules – that is to say, he relies solely on argument, appeals only to rational criteria, rejects any appeal to faith or revelation – he arrives at conclusions which are in line not just with religion but with the more mystical forms of religious belief, Eastern as well as Western.

Brian Magee on Immanuel Kant¹

Introduction: Visiting the Tomb of the Prophet in Medina

In the spring of 1911, Abū ʿAlī al-Sayyid asked his son Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid² (January 1872 – March 1963) to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Medina. It was the father’s intention to fulfill his dream of visiting the tomb of the prophet Muḥammad. The son, Luṭfī, was skeptical and uncertain. His father’s request did not necessarily accord with Luṭfī’s plans, or his worldview. Most likely, he did not attach particular importance to the idea of the pilgrimage. In his many writings leading up to this event, Luṭfī had not expressed a wish to make the journey to the tomb of the Prophet, or to make the Ḥajj. But his father urged him, and he accepted.

When Luṭfī attempted to explain, both to himself and to his readers, the meaning of his decision, he did not rely on religious or legal sharʿī substantiation in the execution of this fundamental Islamic commandment. He justified his choice, rather, as the fulfillment of another commandment, that of “honor thy father.” It was Luṭfī’s great respect and love for his father that tipped the scales and influenced his decision. He was convinced of his responsibility to honor his loving and devoted father’s request, just as he would expect similar devotion and love from his own children. As he honestly depicted, the strongest feelings “that stirred [his] soul on the eve of this journey” were derived from the anxiety of the “separation from his children.”³ From his office in downtown Cairo in June 1911, Luṭfī said goodbye to his two sons and his young daughter as they embraced him with tears of worry and love before he set off on his journey. Luṭfī took advantage of this opportunity to describe in detail the “feelings of love between fathers and sons in the pain of separation, longing for reunion.” He admitted frankly: “I am one of the people who gives top priority to the emotional proximity between fathers and sons.” Thus, on the eve of their departure, it was not the resting place of the prophet that inspired him, but rather his strong feelings of familial affection and the experience of separation, which ensured at its conclusion a renewed connection of love with his children, his spouse and his family, and with his home and his homeland.

At the time of the journey, the differences between Luṭfī and his father were unbridgeable. Abū ʿAlī was an unknown ʿumda of the village of Barqayn (shaykh al-balad, the village shaykh) in the province (mudīriyya) of Daqahliyya, where Luṭfī was born and spent his childhood.⁴ Luṭfī, by contrast, was already a recognized public and political figure – the ideologue of the Party of the Nation (Ḥizb al-Umma) and the editor of its daily journal, Al-Jarīda. He had moved to the capital, Cairo, where he became a prominent public intellectual whose opinions and perspectives were heard and were read daily by tens of thousands of readers. Later referred to by his disciples with great admiration as “the teacher of the generation” (ustādh al-jīl), Luṭfī, whose remarkable career spanned six decades of the twentieth century, is rightly identified as one of the most original and brightest intellectuals to emerge in Egypt in the early 1900s.⁵

Luṭfī’s father, who was very proud of his son, may have thought it fitting that Luṭfī, who had by that time already visited Europe, the Middle East and Turkey and had mastered English and French, should accompany him on this journey. Despite his Western education, which had given him a strong European orientation, Luṭfī never repudiated his traditional religious background. His primary education was in a traditional village kuttāb, where he excelled in the study of Islam, culminating in his ability, as a child, to recite the entire Qurʾān by heart. Naturally, his father wanted him to pursue further education at al-Azhar. He believed that his son would be a worthy ʿālim. But a turning point in the boy’s life, under the influence of family friend Ibrahim Adham Pasha, governor of Daqahliyya, led to his decision to continue his education at the al-Mansura government school. He then enrolled in the Khedivial secondary school in Cairo. From there, his path as an outstanding student led directly to higher study at the prestigious Khedivial school of law in Cairo and to a respectable position as a public prosecutor in the Colonial British Egyptian Ministry of Justice.⁶ From the beginning of 1907, with his resignation from this post and his decision to act as the editor of Al-Jarīda, Luṭfī began to see his life’s mission as a large-scale project of translating and domesticating the Enlightenment and modernity into Egyptian politics, society and culture. This would be a vehicle for freeing Egypt from British colonial rule, preparing it for independence and sovereignty, and reshaping its imagined national community as exclusively Egyptian.⁷

Strange though it seems, given that, at the time, transport to the Hijaz and back to Cairo would have taken several long weeks, father and son decided to settle for a pilgrimage to the tomb of the prophet in “the holy city of Medina,” and they never reached Mecca to fulfill the Ḥajj. It appears to have been Luṭfī who determined the route. As he describes in his travel diaries, they journeyed to Palestine via Jaffa and then to Damascus, and then, via the Hijaz railway, they traveled south to Tabūk on the way to Medina. The father, a traditional religious man on what would have been his first journey outside of Egypt, must surely have expected to reach Mecca and carry out his religious obligation. And so it appears that Luṭfī must specifically have refused, and the father was forced to acquiesce. Luṭfī’s records, however, do not provide clear evidence for this conclusion, and he does not explain the decision. In any case, it is clear that they visited the tomb of the prophet, spent nearly a week in Medina and then returned directly to Cairo.⁸

Luṭfī documented his journey in real time and again in his memoirs. He published a “thick description” in Al-Jarīda in the summer of 1911, in a series of six articles entitled “A Week in Illuminated Medina” (Usbūʿ fī al-Madīna al-Munawwara).⁹ As Luṭfī colorfully described, when the train from Tabūk was approaching Medina, he felt a surge of awe and transcendence as they entered the city. His soul “stormed and stirred,” inspired by “the memory of ancient Arab glory.” The aura and rays of “light flowing from Medina” determinedly steered him and the other travelers into the special holy atmosphere. The next day, when he and his father entered the sanctuary in the tomb of the prophet, Luṭfī was thrilled and excited. Feelings of reverence and awe flooded through him. The silence that surrounded the holy place accentuated the splendor and glory of “the burial place of the prophet, the place of death of the great man, the powerful prophet, and the noble apostle.” Standing before the holy sanctuary, Luṭfī felt “submissive” and “lowly” as he beheld “the tomb whose splendor and glory has no limits,” a place “incomparable” to any other in the history of humankind.

Muḥammad’s historical greatness is reflected in the restrained but impressive description. “Those who believe in Muḥammad, and myself included, rightly see him as the greatest human being. Even those who do not believe in him cannot deny that he was the noblest and most enlightened among men.” Luṭfī recalls the greatness of Muḥammad, who “made the hijra alone with a few Companions” to the desert of Medina, convinced of God’s revelation to him, with new faith and tidings for humanity. He stuck to God’s mission and accomplished it against all odds. The respected elite of Medina, “men of wealth and prestige and military might,” did not trust him, nor did they help him. On the contrary, they shut him out and rejected his faith. Yet, despite this brutal denial, “Allah gave him knowledge, wisdom, prophecy and a mission, and he was victorious. After all, there is no victory but by the might of Allah.” The extraordinary power of Muḥammad was embodied ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Rise and Decline of Protestant Rationalism
• Individual and Community in Modern Debates about Religion and Secularism
• The Conversion of the Jews: Identity as Ontology in Modern Kabbalah
• Catholic Europe and Sixteenth-Century Science: A Path to Modernity?
• Jewish Intellectuals on the Chimera of Progress: Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber and Leo Strauss
• Depoliticization and Denationalization of Religion: Aḥmad Luṭfī al-Sayyid and the Relocation of Islam in Modern Life
• Socrates against Christ? A Theological Critique of Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Parrhesia
• Contributors to This Volume
• Index
• Names