Muhammad Abduh

Muhammad Abduh was an Egyptian Islamic scholar and jurist, born in 1849 in Shubra Khit, Egypt, to a father of Turkish ancestry and an Egyptian mother, and died on July 11, 1905, in Alexandria. He is remembered chiefly as a central architect of the Arab Nahda, the nineteenth century Arab cultural renaissance, and of the broader movement known as Islamic Modernism, which argued for applying reasoned interpretation to Islamic law and theology rather than following medieval precedent without question, a position he developed most fully in his major work, Risalat al-Tawhid, The Theology of Unity. His career combined scholarship, journalism and formal legal office: he began teaching advanced Islamic texts at Al-Azhar University while still a student there, later taught logic, theology, ethics and politics at Al-Azhar from 1877, and also held academic posts as professor of history at Dar al-Ulum from 1878 and as an Arabic language instructor at the Khedivial School of Languages, while editing the official newspaper Al-Waqa'i al-Misriyya from 1880 and writing widely for the journals Al-Manar and Al-Ahram. Abduh's formal judicial career began with his appointment as a judge in Egypt's Courts of First Instance in 1888, and in 1899 he was named both a consultative member of the Court of Appeal and Grand Mufti of Egypt, the country's highest official position in Islamic law, a post he held until his death and used to issue reform-minded legal rulings applying Islamic jurisprudence to the conditions of modern Egyptian life.