Shihab ad-Din Mardjani,
Muhammad Rashid Rida,
ibn Khaldun,
Islamic Reform
Abstract
The paper looks at the perception of history in the discourse of two modern Islamic reformers - Shihab ad-Din Mardjani and Muhammad Rashid Rida - through an analysis of how both authors used the ideas and texts of the first Muslim history theorist Ibn Khaldun. The author concludes that the historical argument is deeply rooted in Islamic thought as a self-renewing tradition (tadjdid), which in different periods of time refreshes an authentic Islamic spirit liberating it from “illegal innovations” (bid’a) and thus preserving its purity. The appeal to rational and critical historical knowledge enabled reformers to deconstruct a history of Muslims and revise historical memory, which is similar to the revision of Islamic law through idjtihad. The logic of the historical argument provided Muslim authors with a general conceptual base and a common language for discussions with European Orientalists. Islamic modernists defended historical subjectivity of Islam and its progressive role in the history of human civilization. The language of academic history enabled them to criticize the real history of Muslim peoples and Islam as a religious system. Hence comes the argument of in favor of reforms - literally “corrections” (islah) based on the primordial historical essence of Islam as they viewed it. Appeal to Ibn Khaldun allows Muslim reformers to discover an authentic source of historical rationalism that helped them adapt Western scientific ideas in the Islamic context. Yet, in interaction with these ideas, they developed their own new conceptual apparatus. The historical and sociological theory of Ibn Khaldun was the link with which European science could be connected to the Islamic historical tradition. A new understanding of history was based on the same idjtihad method. In this light, the categories of “progress” and “development” were naturally described as a return to the initial tradition, and thus modernism inevitably worked as a discursive form of fundamentalism.
