Godless West? From this point, a growing number of Mus-
lims would wrestle with these questions, and their attempts
to put Muslim history back on the straight path would some-
times appear desperate and even despairing. The suicide
bomber-an almost unparalleled phenomenon in Islamic
history-shows that some Muslims are convinced that they
are pitted against hopeless odds.
Al-Afghani's political campaigns, which were often either
bizarre or downright immoral, smacked of this new despera-
tion. In 1896, for example, one of his disciples assassinated the
shah of Iran. But his friend and colleague the Egyptian
scholar Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905) was a deeper and
more measured thinker. He believed that education and not
revolution was the answer. Abdu had been devastated by the
British occupation of Egypt, but he loved Europe, felt quite at
ease with Europeans and was widely read in Western science
and philosophy. He greatly respected the political, legal and
educational institutions of the modern West, but did not be-
lieve that they could be transplanted wholesale in a deeply
religious country, such as Egypt, where modernization had
been too rapid and had perforce excluded the vast mass of the
people. It was essential to graft modern legal and constitu-
tional innovations on to traditional Islamic ideas that the peo-
ple could understand; a society in which people cannot
understand the law becomes in effect a country without law.
The Islamic principle of shurah (consultation), for example,
could help Muslims to understand the meaning of democ-
racy. Education also needed reform. Madrasah students
should study modern science, so that they could help Mus-
lims to enter the new world in an Islamic context that would
make it meaningful to them. But the Shariah would need to be
brought up to date, and both Abdu and his younger contem-
porary, the journalist Rashid Rida (1865-1935), knew that this
would be a long and complex process. Rida was alarmed by
brent
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