ABSTRACT
Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and his best known disciple Shaikh Muhammad 'Abduh, enjoy today, East and West, a high reputation as defenders and reformers of modern Islam. The first is known in Arabic literature as hakim al-sharq, the Sage of the East, while the second is scarcely less well known as the Teacher and the Guide-al-ustadh al-imam-titles bestowed upon him by his follower and biographer, Rashid Rida. Leaving aside Oriental literature for the moment who, among western writers, it may be asked, originated the reputation which Afghani and 'Abduh now enjoy? The answer is that Afghani figures among the heroes of Professor Edward G. Browne's Persian Revolution which was published in 1910; that he and more particularly 'Abduh, cut a considerable figure in the voluminous diaries which Wilfrid Scawen Blunt began publishing in the first decade of the twentieth
2 century, in order to denounce the oppressions of the British Government and promote the cause of its victims; and finally that 'Abduh is sympathetically, if ambiguously, presented in Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, which was published in 1908. That these two figures should be presented under such auspices as Islamic reformers must give us pause: Blunt's sympathy with 'Urabi's movement, in which 'Abduh was involved, is well-known, whilst it is notorious that Professor Browne was no mere academic historian, but rather a deeply committed partisan of Persian nationalism-which Afghani was thought to have promoted; he was indeed a believer in the beneficence of any nationalism on the ground that "in this world diversity, not uniformity, is the higher law and the more desirable state";1 as for Cromer, he approved of 'Abduh because he thought that his influence made for a less rigid Islam, one more open to wholesome European influence, and because the Mufti of Egypt was a welcome change from what he considered to be the usual run of obscurantist Muslim divine; it may indeed have been a recommendation in Cromer's eyes that "my friend Abduh"as he put it, "was in reality an agnostic" ;2more pertinent than all this perhaps-though Cromer does not discuss it-was the fact that in his last years of respectability and eminence Shaikh Muhammad 'Abduh was in opposition to Abbas Hilmi and hence an ally in Cromer's unremitting battle against the Khedive.
