Rashid Rida

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Muhammad Rashid Rida (September 23, 1865, Syria - August 22, 1935, Egypt) is said to have been "one of the most influential scholars and jurists of his generation" and the "most prominent disciple of Muhammad Abduh" ^[1]

Rida was born near Tripoli and his early education consisted of training in "traditional Islamic subjects". In 1884-5 he was first exposed to al-`Urwa al-wuthqa, the journal of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. In 1897 he left Syria for Cairo to collaborate with Abduh and the following year they launched al-Manar, a weekly and then monthly journal comprising Quranic commentary,^[2] at which Rida worked until his death in 1935.

Like his predecessors, Rida focused on the relative weakness of Muslim societies vis-à-vis Western colonialism, blaming Sufi excesses, the blind imitation of the past (taqlid), the stagnation of the ulama, and the resulting failure to achieve progress in science and technology. He held that these flaws could be alleviated by a return to what he saw as the true principles of Islam, albeit interpreted (ijtihad) to suit modern realities.

Politically Rida promoted a restoration or rejuvenation of the Caliphate for Islamic unity, and "democratic consultation on the part of the government which he called shura."^[3] In theology, his reformist ideas, like those of Abduh, were "based on the argument that

shari'a consists of `ibadat (worship) and mu'amalat (social relations). Human reason has little scope in the former and Muslims should adhere to the dictates of the Qur'an and hadith. The laws governing mu'amalat should conform to Islamic ethics but on specific points may be continually reassessed according to changing conditions of different generations and societies ^[4]