ABSTRACT

For Max Weber, charismatic authority exhibits several features. It is dissident questioning traditional and institutionalised holders of authority. It is revolutionary and creative and thereby becomes a force of cultural change. Finally, it is unstable and precarious, because it becomes manifest in an individual and lacks the backing of an authoritative tradition or an efficient bureaucratic apparatus. In their own association with holders of charismatic authority, Abdul-Baha and Muhammad Abduh exhibited all the aforementioned features. They were religious dissidents attracted to mystical and millenarian expressions of Muslim religiosity and made use of the creative output of charismatic authority in order to develop alternative readings of the Islamic tradition which would accommodate Western modernity without blindly imitating it.