Reforming trends were not new in Islam. In the 14th century, Ibn Taymiyya, a legal scholar, condemned the "innovations" and exaggerations disfiguring Islam. In the 18th century, his writings inspired Abd al-Wahhāb (1703-1792), a theologian who preached a return to the plain doctrine of the strict unity of God, and to the Quran and the Sunnah as the only sources of guidance.
At the heart of their commitment to reform Muslim thought, we find the concepts of corruption and disorder designated by the Quranic word fasād. In traditional thinking, corruption led to the decline of the world and of societies. Muslim thinkers showed the pressing need to curb the "decline" quickened by contacts with the West because of the intense colonization in the second half of the 19th century. How to give back its prestige to the Muslim civilization against the Western arrogance, and regenerate Muslim societies? The modernist Salafi trend preached a spiritual and moral reform by going back to the sources - Quran and Sunnah - and to the practices of elders (salaf), in order to live in accordance with the Islamic legal and social norms.
Contacts between Western liberal thought and Eastern thought (identified to Islam) also had its fruitful aspects. The reformists were able to disseminate their thoughts through the new means of communication (press, etc.) and reach a wide audience. Intellectual contacts were important too; al-Aghānī and 'Abduh for example were able to discover Stuart Mill, Spencer, Darwin, Guizot, etc. These reformers were interested in the link between civilization and progress explained by Guizot in his General History of Civilization in Europe (1828), in particular by the place given to religion alongside the "civilizing" institutions.
During forty years, al-Manār, the Egyptian monthly journal founded in 1898 by 'Abduh and Ridā and written in Arabic, presented the principles of religious reform. Only a return to the sources would be able to bring an extensive religious, moral, political and civil renovation of the Muslim world. The journal had a great influence on the intellectual life of contemporary Muslim elites.
The first generations of reformers did not seek to reinterpret the Law in the light of intellectual methods or notions borrowed from the West. They revisited the principles of Islamic law in order to develop theories compatible with the needs of society and to strenghten Islam in its resistance to European hegemony. They brought back legal categories marginalized in the previous centuries, in particular the ijtihād and the maslaha. Most reformers rejected new legal practices (taqlīd) that were only a mere imitation of older ones.
These reformers studied the question of the "fence". In response, they wanted to revive Muslim thought with the practice of ijtihād (personal reasoning and effort to understand religious law guided by reason). This "new" ijtihād was supposed to help Muslims in answering the questions of the time. Iqbāl (1877-1938), a poet and reformer of Indian origin, also defended the principle of ijtihād in his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934, chapter 6), as a reinterpreted ijtihād. Contemporary radicalism [see Islam module I page 9] was also based on ijtihād.
Another legal concept in the reformist thought was the maslaha. For 'Abduh, this concept was close to the modern notion of public interest. (The speeches of present Muslim political leaders still refer to the maslaha.) Sunni legal schools differed on its definition. All schools referred to the idea of the Common Good and the general interest. The reformers also reclaimed this legal reasoning, for Islamic law to meet the aspirations of society in the name of public interest.
The Arab caliphate - from the Rightly Guided to the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties - survived during four more centuries with the Ottomans renaming their own political power a caliphate. The caliphate was abolished by Atatürk in 1924. The Islamic Congresses between the two World Wars - in 1926 and 1931 - were not able to restore it. In the political context of Egypt in the 1920s, the bold, modernist and liberal position of Abd al-Rāziq isolated him from other scholars.
Ridā refused to reduce Islam to its spiritual aspect: "Islam is a religion of politics, of sovereignty, of legislature, and encompasses all human interests" (al-Manār, volume 31). The model of the Rightly Guided remained an ideal. To adapt it to the modern world, he wanted a "replacement" system led by a supreme guide, a scholar elected by his peers. In India, Iqbāl, author of the book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), supported the republican system and reduced the caliphate to a “mere symbol of power”.
It is important to know the situation in the 1920s to understand the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, the English political power was trying to break nationalist claims and there were again political tensions between "secularists" and Salafists. The young Hassan al-Bannā' (born in 1906) [see module 1 page 9] deplored the Westernization of the ways of living and thinking, and the disintegration of the caliphate model, that both weakened Islam. With this in mind, he seeked other forms of political action and an ideology that - without denying the legacy of Salafi reformers – could rally the lower middle-class population in a project reconciling Islam and modernity after the "trauma" of the abolition of the caliphate.
Nowadays the ideology of the caliphate is used in the rhetoric of some Islamist and jihadist groups: in a mosque in Mosul, an Iraqi proclaimed himself in June 2014 the caliph of an "Islamic State" situated in territories conquered by jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria.