Shared questions, diverging answers: Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his interlocutors on ‘religion’ in a globalizing world

This study presents a new and innovative approach for analysing the reinterpretation of Islam of the Egyptian Islamic reformer Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905) within a globalized and at the same time locally diversified world.
It argues that the study of the ideas of this famous Egyptian Islamic reformer benefits from firmly locating his ideas within their particular historical milieu, situating them in his conversations with a variety of interlocutors and in the plurality of contexts to which these conversations responded.
ʿAbduh’s connections and interactions with contemporaries around the world were part of a more general increase in intellectual interconnections around the world since the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, his intellectual universe cannot be reduced to its global dimension. ʿAbduh formulated his ideas in the newspapers of Cairo and a school in Beirut; his ideas responded to domestic politics, engaged with Islamic tradition, and reflected his friendships and animosities.
For studying ʿAbduh in interaction with his contemporaries in a globalized yet locally diversified world, this study proposes to focus on the questions that he shared with his interlocutors and that they answered differently. By focusing on shared questions and diverging answers, this study seeks to capture the way ʿAbduh’s texts reflected the coherence of the global discussions of which they were part, while gaining insight into his texts’ particularity within these conversations.