Muslim backwardness and justifying European political, cultural, and
economic hegemony. The challenge was thus to sever the association of
science and Western power, to draw upon Islamic history to demonstrate
that, in Afghani’s words, science is a ‘‘noble thing that has no connection with
any nation... everything that is known is known by science, and every
nation that becomes renowned becomes renowned through science. Men
must be related to science, not science to men’’ (al-Afghani 1968 , 107 ).
Given these presumptions, al-Afghani and ‘Abduh view the survival of the
Muslimummaand the truths upon which it is founded as dependent upon
the compatibility, or more accurately, identity, of Islam and reason. They thus
reject the division of the world into Islamic science and European science, a
classiWcation endorsed, for diVerent reasons, by both Muslim traditionalists
and European rationalists such as Ernest Renan ( 1883 ). For al-Afghani and
‘Abduh, this bifurcation essentially entails the claim that Islam is incompat-
ible with self-evident knowledge. They contend that those who infer an
essential enmity between Islam and the exercise of critical reason from the
history of Islamic practice have in fact mistaken a debased Islam for
the true faith: the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad
encourage the pursuit of knowledge of the material world as the means
necessary for survival and well-being, and already either contain or preWgure
truths about the world that are now associated with modern scientiWc
discoveries. Islam properly understood is thus the ‘‘rational religion,’’ the
‘‘Wrst religion to address human reason, prompting it to examine the entire
universe, and giving it free rein to delve into its innermost secrets as far as it is
able. It did not impose any conditions upon reason other than that of
maintaining the faith’’ (‘Abduh 1966 , 176 ). But as both revelation and reason
are divine creations, a contradiction between the laws of God expressed in the
Qur’an and traditions and those of God embodied in the natural world is an
impossibility (‘Abduh 1966 , 83 ).
al-Afghani and ‘Abduh’s rereading of the ‘‘authentic’’ Islam as rational must
be seen within a long tradition oftajdid(renewal) andislah(reform) in Islamic
intellectual history, one that has been ongoing from the ninth century to the
present (Voll 1983 ). In particular, their arguments must be situated amongst
long-standing Islamic debates about reasoning (‘aql), transmission (naql),
revealed truth, philosophy, and independent judgment/interpretation (ijti-
had). They are thus engaged in a ‘‘great conversation’’ about what can be
known and how in Islamic thought. At the same time, however, the course
and substance of their arguments are shaped and inXuenced by the ways in
modern and contemporary islamic political theory 301