154. Karen Armstrongthe growing secularism of Arab intellectuals and pundits,
who sometimes poured scorn upon Islam in the belief that it
was holding their people back. This, Rida believed, could
only weaken the ummah and make it even more prey to West-
ern imperialism. Rida was one of the first Muslims to advo-
cate the establishment of a fully modernized but fully Islamic
state, based on the reformed Shariah. He wanted to establish
a college where students could be introduced to the study of
international law, sociology, world history, the scientific study
of religion, and modern science, at the same time as they
studied fiqh. This would ensure that Islamic jurisprudence
would develop in a truly modern context that would wed the
traditions of East and West, and make the Shariah, an agrar-
ian law code, compatible with the new type of society that the
West had evolved.
The reformers constantly felt that they had to answer the
European criticisms of Islam. In religious as in political af-
fairs, the West was now setting the Muslim agenda. In India,
the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) in-
sisted that Islam was just as rational as any Western system.
Indeed, it was the most rational and advanced of all the con-
fessional faiths. Its strict monotheism had liberated humanity
from mythology, and the Quran had urged Muslims to ob-
serve nature closely, reflect upon their observations and sub-
ject their actions to constant scrutiny. Thus the empirical
spirit that had given birth to modernity had in fact originated
in Islam. This was a partial and inaccurate interpretation of
history, but no more biased than the Western tendency at this
time to see Christianity as the superior faith and Europe as
always having been in the vanguard of progress. Iqbal's em-
phasis on the rational spirit of Islam led him to denigrate Su-
fism. He represented the new trend away from mysticism that
would become increasingly prevalent in the Muslim world, as
modern rationalism came to seem the only way forward. Iqbal